Been getting several DMs about the #GenerativeArt banner image in my profile. It's an old render (from 2010) of a recursive #Voronoi projected into a #Quadtree. This video shows the interplay of 2 conceptual hierarchies:
Verlet particles with attractive/repulsive force fields are spawned in a squared 2d space and negotiate their positions over time. These positions are also used as sites for creating a dynamic Voronoi diagram to define cell structures around each particle. Each resulting Voronoi region can then become the physical (and constantly changing) bounds for the next level of recursion, spawning more particles to subdivide it into smaller regions. Each cell at each level is using its own Voronoi instance with sub-regions clipped to their respective parent region. The process becomes more and more local... The setup in the video has a maximum tree depth of 3.
A quadtree is used to visualize the hierarchy of cells from phase 1 and its depth structure represented as extruded 3D model (in isometric perspective). For this video the quadtree has a depth of 10 levels with the maximum level of recursion tracing/coinciding with the Voronoi cell edges. The elevation of cell walls depends on the depth of the cell in the original tree, with the cells at deepest level resulting in the tallest structures. Furthermore, the elevation is modulated by the distance of each point to the nearest vertex of its parent cell polygon/region...
@toxi The resemblance to a cell division is striking, yet the quadtree gives it a more abstract, virtual or digital look. It changes the scale and is very unsettling. I really like it. I almost want to see what happens next, i.e. when this organism is no longer able to regenerate and these cells voluntarily decide to die (apostosis). I'm sorry to intrude on your creative process in this way and undoubtedly pervert or caricature this project.
@nclslbrn You're absolutely right: cell division was an obvious influence, though the whole thing was actually one of the concepts I worked on for an architecture course website (UCL Bartlett) to dynamically visualize their site/content structure/hierarchy and it would have changed with every new piece of content added... Here're some more variations of that theme...
(Ps. No worries about "intrusion" or "perversion" — this project was from 2010 and we all see something different in these kinds of works... all good!)
@toxi@nclslbrn this actually reminds me of architecture more than cells... there's a book called African Fractals which covers some super interesting, non-Western city/house layouts (at times, the house reflects the layout of the city), as well as sculpture and other art. But I've only seen it in digital, scanned, super-high-contrast form, so the images take on a similar level of abstraction. Anyway good stuff!
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