Benjamin Van Citters

I have a few things to say about this little app. While I have had a keen interest in interference patterns and moire patterns of all sorts for a long time there is a story behind the genesis of this particular example. On vacation in Florence, Oregon last weekend I stumbled into a local gallery and saw something similar to what I have created here. It was a kinetic sculpture made of wood that moved via pulleys and gears I assume (I couldn’t tell exactly what made it move the way it did). I thought to myself that I should share this artwork with some friends back home and so I got my camera out but was immediately accosted by one of the staff at the gallery who insisted that this particular artist did not want their work filmed or photographed. As a result, I have no record of what the artist’s name or what the name of the piece was and I must say that I was very jarred by the whole experience.

So here is my humble attempt to recreate in a digital medium the unknown kinetic sculpture. Moving the mouse up and down changes the speed of the motion. Enjoy!

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Each line is an approximate half of a circle and there are two sets of lines, evenly spaced, that move against one another.

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I’ve been pretty busy lately working a new job with Amazon.com and doing some audio-visual stuff for a concert tour with Christian Peterson from the design studio Dumb Eyes and I haven’t had much time to update my site. Today, however, I finally got around to making my hairdryer sim. It’s an idea that I had when I first got started working on my “Grass” program last year.

Both programs make use of a lot of the same code. The grass blades are just slightly altered versions of the hairs in this program.

I have a new program to illustrate a concept I have been using to make periodic, highly variable and continuous variations in programming entities called classes.

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This program takes input from the mouse, the farther to the right the cursor is, the more waves are added together in each band of color and the farther towards the bottom the mouse is the more line segments are used to draw the wave.

The waves across the screen are a compilation of sine and cosine waves with varying amplitudes, offsets, and frequencies. I’m working on building a class that allows simple control of the result of such a complicated series and composition of functions to be used in further programs.