For my generative
art I chose to draw a Koch snowflake. I implemented it
as an iPad app,
so I wanted to make it animated and interactive. I
designed a touch interaction that
allows a user to grow a snowflake from the base triangle
simply by touching the
screen. As soon as the user releases the touch, the
snowflake begins to decay
back to a triangle. I quickly got bored of the
repetition of this interaction,
so I added a second mode, triggered by a two-finger
double-tap, which
adds a stochastic element to the snowflake growth, where
each new
triangle grows at a random rate. Although this made the
snowflake
growth far more interesting, the app as a whole was
still fairly
boring. So I added another interaction – touching the
screen
with two fingers – which makes the snowflake spin as it
grows. This enables the user to create interesting
geometrical patterns temporal aliasing at high
rates of rotation. Lastly, in order to satisfy
the multiple geometric primitives
requirement of the assignment,
I added another tap-triggered
mode that draws only the
vertices of the triangles
as points.
