Meditation #5

I don’t know… I struggled with this assignment. Math is already a challenge for me (though I like to code, I’m a little math-phobic) let alone being “creative” with math. I understand what we looked at in class and enjoyed watching the math videos linked on the assignment page but applying these concepts in an “interesting” way requires a deeper confidence that I do not posses. I tried…

At first I thought that it might be interesting to determine the random number by asking the user to press down on the mouse for an undefined amount of time. That number would then be mapped again a range of 0 – 1 to set the pixel brightness. You can see that sketch here. You’ll also see that it doesn’t really do what the assignment requests and instead sets large areas to that brightness forever, which makes sense because the number isn’t really changing over time. Another oversight is the fact that this number will only increase each time you click the mouse, meaning that the pixels very quickly reach their maximum brightness. Clearly this doesn’t look very random.

My second attempt is better but not really exciting or interesting either. In this sketch I took a common cubic equation and set the values to be mouse dependent. You can see that sketch here. So, as long as you’re moving your mouse, the sketch looks random, I suppose.

I don’t really have an existing p5 sketch that relies heavily on random so I took this random example and utilized my own random function. You can see that sketch here.