White Koala

**Finding the Way**

_Finding the Way_ is my attempt to visualize the life choices each person is presented with. The jumble of options, and thoughts, we must navigate as we try to find our way through it all.

Looking deep into my mind’s eye, _Finding the Way_ emerged from a simple grid. Within that grid of cells, different fill effects appeared, and I explored how this tangle of lines worked at varying scales.

The first draft began to look like the topographical map of a city, some kind of abstract landscape, but the composition felt a little flat. So I introduced flow fields, as well as attractors and repellors to create points of white space, which made for more organic and dynamic outputs.

Colors are associated with particular emotional states. And the focal points in each piece are linked to personal challenges we might face. Other traits connect to the type of thoughts a person might have on a particular day.

If this were your path, can you see a way forward?


**High-Resolution Downloads**

I love big images that are not limited by the size of a screen (where we’re usually stuck seeing art these days). So, I’ve included an option to create high resolution image outputs that can be printed at large scale.

Pressing 1 to 9 will render the work at higher pixel densities. The maximum supported resolution is only limited by your computer’s capabilities. However, I've successfully generated up to keypress #9, resulting in a 13,000 x 16,250 pixel output. At that size you could make a massive 43 in x 54 in print (110 cm x 138 cm) with incredibly high detail/quality.



**Contact**

- White Koala, April 2024
- Twitter: @WhiteKoalaArt
- Website: https://whitekoala.art

Each person is built different, with a unique inner life. What does the inside of your mind look like, especially as it encounters challenges and new ideas? How do we keep moving forward?

Finding the Way

Stranger in the Q

_Xeno_ is a journey into the unseen worlds of distant star systems. Breathtaking and colorful, dark and frightening. Extraterrestrial landscapes and natural phenomena, traces of extraterrestrial life and minerals, mountains and coastlines, sunsets and sunrises. And all of the palettes have been titled according to the names of the nearest star systems.

This piece began eleven months ago, in early 2023. I created a custom library for one of the _Genuary_ challenges, which led to the first _Xeno_ prototype. Over the next few months, while coding from my phone, I made about ten different versions of this algorithm, leading to some pretty interesting results. As I prepared for this show, I switched to working on my laptop; and the final piece is combination of the best parts from each of my experiments from over the last year.

Most of the work is done on the fragment shader with the occasional use of simplex noise. This is one of the most complex shaders I've done so far — tackling some things that are quite hard to control — so I'm very happy with the result.

CLICK on image to turn on an animation mode (requires modern GPU to run).

Please enjoy!

https://strangerintheq.art/xeno


A generative exploration of unseen extraterrestrial things — landscapes, life forms, natural phenomena, etc. Xeno is made using a single pass of a fragment shader with a lot of noise. Please enjoy!

Xeno

Juhani Halkomäki

My journey began with a simple aspiration: to capture the elusive quality of Tove Jansson’s black and white pen drawings, like her beloved Moomin book illustrations. There’s something enchanting in how the strokes make the darkness come alive.

As I experimented with generative pen strokes, my lines suddenly transformed into delicate droplets, each with its own unique size and weight. These droplets, like cosmic rain, transcended the flat surface, bleeding into the third dimension. They coalesced, forming shapes that evoked straws, tubes, and perhaps even heavenly brass instruments. Time and space wove their dance, shaping organic paths for these mysterious forms to follow. And thus, Resting Place For Wild Pigeons emerged — a name whispered by an optical character recognition algorithm when it too tried to find meaning in the work.

Much like the visuals, the process was a winding road. At its core lies a collision detection algorithm — an invisible guardian ensuring that shapes never overlap. And yet, the complexity of the final outputs belie the simplicity: circles, drawn one by one, woven into an intricate tapestry to form a Resting Place For Wild Pigeons.

Terrestrial feelers, a heavenly horn section, wormholes to parallel universes, or a resting place for wild pigeons — Juhani Halkomäki’s debut on ETH, embarks on an adventure across time, space, and dimensions. Its purpose? To discover meaning within the gaze of the viewer.

Resting Place For Wild Pigeons

Leonardo Solaas

Time is like a furtive acid. It quietly dissolves objects, lives, and memories. Every novelty is already old, every meeting already a goodbye. Everything around us is flowing away — even if, fixated on permanence, anxious to hold on, we choose not to notice.

_Evanescencia_ tries to capture through a digital procedure the feeling of things passing and fading by setting in motion a two-step algorithmic process. First, a structured particle system is used to draw a representational image of a flower, but it remains hidden from view. Instead, the color values from this source image are translated into forces that guide the movements for a swarm of drawing agents. As they drift around this flow field, a nebulous picture is gradually built up on the screen by the traces of color they leave in their wake, each of them a fuzzy aggregate of thousands of tiny lines.

The flower, thus, remains an elusive presence: it is generated behind the scenes, and immediately deconstructed in a way that brings it to the border of abstraction. It becomes, not a representation of something beautiful, but an immaterial force. It is the invisible source of a painting, as if sketched from a distant memory or from vague imagination.

Press  
[s] to download image capture.  
[2-9] to redraw and save an upscaled image (the numbers correspond to a multiple of the base 800 x 1000 pixel resolution).  
[SPACE] to pause/unpause animation.  

Made with p5.js



What stays with us from the things that are gone? What is kept, lost or changed by memory? What remains of the flowers of yesterday? Evanescencia is not about representing the concrete, but fading memories, vague imaginations, and the quiet dissolution of everything around us.

Evanescencia

itsgalo

```
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██████╔╝██║   ██║█████╗  █████╗  █████╗  ██████╔╝███████╗
██╔══██╗██║   ██║██╔══╝  ██╔══╝  ██╔══╝  ██╔══██╗╚════██║
██████╔╝╚██████╔╝██║     ██║     ███████╗██║  ██║███████║
╚═════╝  ╚═════╝ ╚═╝     ╚═╝     ╚══════╝╚═╝  ╚═╝╚══════╝
                                                         
```
BUFFERS is a meditation on color and movement at the level of the pixel. It continues a line of inquiry that began with RASTER (2022) and SOBEL (2023), works that use looping movements and shader feedback to produce perpetual animated paintings. Caught between the tradition of the screensaver and the infinite animation of a GIF, BUFFERS calls attention to the rhythmic repetition of flickering and dancing pixels that permeate our idle screens.

Best experienced at fullscreen on a modern browser. Unique, deterministic qualities emerge when viewed in different aspect ratios and resolutions.

There are several keystrokes available. Please allow at least 10 seconds for the animation to achieve a visible, looping equilibrium before saving. Press 'g' to download a looping ninety-frame GIF. Press 's' to capture a single frame. Press 'f' for fullscreen (Press ESC to exit fullscreen). And double click to maximize the canvas.

JavaScript and GLSL

An infinite and seamless animated loop using pixel quantization and shader feedback to create a rhythmic and meditative pixel dance.

Seamless 90 frame loop.
Infinite runtime.
Dimensions variable.
JavaScript and GLSL.

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