Part of the TouchDesigner POPtober challenge. Today's POP: random POP. I used random to add noise to a line. Then recursively I replace each segment of the line with a noisy line again.

I made a thing that grows your bookshelf like a petri dish culture. Every book is a patch of cells, sized by its page count (one cell = 14 pages), and each genre is a colony.

How it grows:

• Square lattice inside a round plate, sized so the clster fills about half
• Each cluster grows from a seed by stochastic Eden growth, round-robin, so the colonies compete and pack into one blob if you will.
• Growth is weighted at the end of the tips of arms, with a value noise on top, so thin fingers race out first and then the gaps fill in after. You can see it on regrowth seeds.
• Each colony claims about 30% more cells than it needs. The spare cells stay black, and that’s where books you don’t have show up.
• Two quadtrees: one per book sets the pattern depth of each cell, and one across the whole plate splits wherever filled and empty cells meet.
• One ink family per colony, and each book is a slight hue shift of it.
• Then there's some sound on top to. When you click books it give a tone, each category has different tones and each book a different timbre.

It’s all drawn on a plain HTML canvas with code, no libraries. The book titles come from photos of my shelves, read by an AI vision model. Everything you see is the code above. Book titles can also be derived from OCR scanned screen shots of audible/Kindle libraries or CSV uploads from good reads or similar.

I honestly would love if people tried it and tell me what their shelves look like: readshift.co.uk

There was a bit of AI usage with this as I'm not much of a creative coder. I'm an animator/UX guy buy trade and Ai helped bridge the skill gaps here. If it's not allowed I'm sure the mods will tell me off.

It's a stamp. In the second image, you can see the full catalogue of stamps; I couldn't decide which one to pick.

This piece uses some unnecessarily complex code, but that's where the exploration took me. I was experimenting with Gaussian integers and Gaussian primes.

The drawing is generated by a walker moving through the Gaussian integer lattice. Whenever it lands on a Gaussian prime, its heading is multiplied by i, causing it to turn n*90 degrees.

I kept only the paths that form loops, as they resemble strange little characters.

This is a chess variant, where the rules are the same as standard chess, but the board is an irregular grid. This makes rook lines bend and bishop lines fork.

So just like a standard board, every tile is still a quad. And every tile still has only 1 neighbour for every side. But it can have more than 1 neighbour sharing a corner, which is what makes bishop lines fork. Or it can have none, which is what make lines bend.

The steps to build this: - start with a plane made of triangles - pair some random triangles with their neighbour and fuse them into a quad. You end up with gaps between those quads where triangles cannot be paired - subdivide everything. Quads become 4 smaller quads. Triangles become 3 quads. This is the playable grid. - Then it's just a matter of smoothing it (in this case the points on the edges remain static, only the inside points are smoothed) and ensuring neighbours don't share the same color.

Then the tricky part is to give intuitive controls for players to configure boards how they want.

• Web version: https://polyreplay.com/chesstwist/demo
• if you prefer Steam (windows/mac/linux): https://store.steampowered.com/app/2775560/Chess_Twist/

"Frame inverse" or... Rectangular Packing.

An old algorithm that resurfaced today. Git src says circa 2018, but I believe it was much earlier.

!= rocket science.

https://raurir.github.io/?frame_inverse

Part of the TouchDesigner POPtober series. Today: group POP

Dusted off a project from a few months ago because I wanted to make it mobile friendly - it’s a generative art synthesizer that is seeded with a handful of algorithms I created. Each algorithm has a handful of params that are manipulated with sliders.

https://emh.io/gas/

Stack of layers, bent by a few big folds. each layer has one ink. the layer is cut into rows of short brush dashes, like the teeth of a comb. its ok.

Image 8k x 8k,zoom in.

This is a real-time NCA running in TouchDesigner I used in a music video

A work from 2025, made in Processing. More on my ig: https://www.instagram.com/p.lenarte?obrf=Z2JnYWNhcGlsdGxm

I've been exploring the idea of using live weather data as a musical input.

Three Cities is a generative instrument where Boston, Copenhagen and London each play their own evolving Euclidean rhythms, influenced by temperature, wind, clouds and the time of day.

The cities are places I've lived, so there's a personal side to the project too.

I love the tension between randomness and musical structure — building a system that has rules, but still manages to surprise you.

You can try it with your own three cities here:
https://threecities.forrestjamesmusic.com/

Generative effect created with my feedback/reaction diffusion plugin.

This is something I am currently working on, it is still a bit rough and this rendering is not hi res, but I have not really shared anything public before so I just want to see what you guys think of this specific piece and this type of music and visualization in general.

Anyway, I hope you like it and here is how it is made:

Hollow Bloom combines generative music with procedural animation. A programmable score defines the notes, synthesis, effects and control data used to build the audiovisual piece.

Algorithms generate arpeggios, counter-melodies, percussion variations and modulation curves within a composed harmonic progression and arrangement. Seeded randomness adds repeatable variation to selected details. Density and intensity change by section, giving the generated material a clear musical direction.

The track is in A minor at 103.125 BPM. That tempo was chosen because its beat frequency, 1.71875 Hz, is exactly eight octaves below A at 440 Hz. Multiples of the beat can therefore connect rhythmic subdivisions with frequencies related to the tuning.

Filter modulation is composed in phrases, with rests, sustained rates and smooth glides. Four synth voices take turns leading. Their LFOs move between slow filter motion, rhythmic pulses and audible modulation frequencies. Generated ratchets, accents and percussion flourishes add detail, while long, filtered stereo delays let patterns overlap and answer each other.

The animation uses notes, envelopes and automation from the same score as the soundtrack. Musical events drive movement, light and colour, so visual changes follow the structure of the composition.

Much of the musical and visual detail is generated through rules rather than placed individually by hand.