Flockworks

A Generative art inspired physical system, used to render interactive paintings with flocking active matter. More works at DecodingKunst.

This Processing code solves a system of "self-propelling" active disks, of varying sizes and velocities, with alignment interactions and some noise. A few different rendering techniques are available for visualizations. The alignment interactions routine is a modification of the method given in: Martín-Gómez et al., ``Collective motion of active Brownian particles with polar alignment", Soft matter 14(14), pp.2610-2618 (2018).

NOTE: This code can be run locally in the Processing IDE, or online at OpenProcessing.

How to interact with the code:

• Moving the mouse cursor changes the "alignment interaction neighbourhood" of each particle, visualized as a white circle around one of the particles.
• Making this circle smaller leads to a disordered, isotropic state
• Making it larger leads to localized order, and eventually to global flocking
• Mouse click freezes the motion of the particles, while keeping on their reorientation dynamics (this can be used to demonstrate the effect of orientation alone on flocking)
• In the draw function, the rendering can be changed to one of several options
• Right click will save a frame
• Appropriate lines can be uncommented to save frames for a movie as well

Paintings

Upon taking enough artistic liberty and deviating from the underlying physics, I arrived at these interesting junctions.

Floating Weeds

Fragments

Some tips for making artworks:

• Opacity is key to making trails. Change the "45" in the line fill(bgcol, 45); in the range 0-255 for endless-no trails.

• Colours can be changed in color [] cols = {#E63946, #F0A202, #457B9D, #F1FAEE};, you can find your own nice colours at Coolors.

• Layer multiple renderings for more textured paintings.

• Variations will lead to new directions. For instance, explore changing the renderings through

for (int i=0; i<N; ++i) {
    // p[i].show();           //-- Simple rendering with spheres
    // p[i].showPaint();      //-- Another nice rendering I used for some paintings
    // p[i].showFlutter();    //-- Shows the active agents as fluttering spheres
    p[i].showLine();       //-- Shows only the diametric line along polar angle   
    // p[i].showLinePaint();
  }

and modify the functions in the "functions.pde" file.