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.  

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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.