Due Tuesday November 6th in class.

Write a program which presents an ever-changing, imaginative “landscape”. Populate your landscape with features that are suitable for your concept: perhaps trees, buildings, vehicles, animals, people, food items, body parts, hairs, seaweed, space junk, zombies etc. Give consideration to the depth of variation in your landscape: after how much time does your landscape become predictable? How might you forestall this as long as possible? How can you generate a landscape which is both consistent and engaging?

Consider: foreground, middleground, and background “layers”; variation at the macro-scale, meso-scale, and micro-scale; natural and human-made features; utopia, dystopia, and heterotopia; and the potential for surprise, through the placement of infrequent features.

Review these noteworthy examples:

• Daniel Brown generates dystopian housing projects in his beautifully lit fractal series, Travelling by Numbers (2016). http://flic.kr/s/aHskyNR2Tz
• “Fractional noise” mountains (c. 1982) developed by Benoît Mandelbrot and Richard F. Voss at IBM were a landmark in mathematical terrain synthesis. http://www.wired.com/2013/01/mandelbrot-images/
• In Jared Tarbell’s classic Substrate (2003), simulated urban tectonics arise from elementary principles of accretion, branching, and feedback. http://www.complexification.net/gallery/machines/substrate/
• Katie Rose Pipkin generates barren flowerpot landscapes in poetic and mysterious browser work, such as Mirror Lake (2015). http://katierose.itch.io/mirrorlake
• Also Isopeth: http://inconvergent.net//app/isopleth/

Please see:

• the lecture material on randomness in art and computation
• the tutorial on Perlin Noise.
• Here is an example using a class (your landscape should in no way resemble this one if you choose to work with it)

Extension: feel free to experiment with 3D, or mixtures of 2D & 3D

Submission:

• Make a post on this blog with a description of your project, with a bibliography referencing any research materials. Include one or more screenshots or animated gifs of your project and a link to the version on OpenProcessing.