Category Archives: fun

Garden Timelapse: Sugar Ann Peas

Time-lapse video of sugar pea plants growing from tiny sprouts over the course of six weeks.

I’ve continued to shoot timelapse video of the various veggies we grow in the garden. Here’s one more from last fall, of some sugar snap peas. They grew so fast I had to shoot twice a day! I was blown away by the origami-like way each pair of leaves unfolds as the vines grow, and the branching tendrils that whip out and grab on to whatever they can find. You might also notice some sudden changes in early September: we had a brutal heat wave that almost killed the plants. Some quick thinking and an old kid-sized umbrella saved them from total destruction. Not all of the plants survived, but the ones that made it produced crunchy pods as sweet as candy. Will definitely grow these again!

Homemade ink timelapse

My dear friend Eric Rodenbeck has been experimenting with creating his own homemade inks and paints from natural materials. Some of the inks mysteriously change in texture, and even color, as they dry. After months of looking at Eric’s paintings, I was intensely curious to see how these changes would look as they were happening. So, of course, I had to shoot some timelapse footage.

The inks I used here are hibiscus + lemon (pale red), hibiscus + orange peel (magenta), carrot greens + alum (yellow), and a sprinkling of sea salt for texture. Time span: about 1 hour.

If you pay close attention, something really strange happens about 11 seconds in to the video, when I added some yellow ink: wherever the yellow mixes with the magenta, the mixture turns a deep bluish green! What is going on there?

Timelapse video of homemade inks flowing across watercolor paper. Some yellow ink flows into a puddle of magenta, and wherever the two inks touch, the mixture turns a deep bluish green color.
Magenta + Yellow = Green?

It turns out that hibiscus gets its color from a type of pigment called an anthocyanin, whose structure and color are pH-sensitive. In an acidic environment, it’s red, but when exposed to an alkaline it turns blue. Since the yellow ink is alkaline, it turns the red hibiscus blue on contact, which then mixes with the ink’s yellow pigment, becoming a lovely vibrant green.

Here are some more photos from the day. Hopefully this will be the first of many such experiments!

Homemade inks

Impossible Paint: Asemic Writing

The Genuary prompt for day 14 is “asemic”, i.e. writing without meaning, which is something I’ve always loved. I thought it might be fun to try doing that with my watercolor simulation. Reader, I was not disappointed.

When we rerun the simulation with a different random seed each time, it comes to life in a different way. It turns out the Perlin noise that drives the brush movement isn’t affected by the seed, so “what” it writes stays the same, while “how” it’s written changes. The consistency seems to deepen the illusion of intentionality, which makes me super happy.

This isn’t my first time tinkering with procedurally generated asemic writing. That was in 1996, when I was working at PDI in Sunnyvale. There was a small group of us who were curious about algorithmic art, and we formed a short-lived club (unofficially known as “Pacific Dada Images”) that was much in the spirit of Genuary: we’d set ourselves a challenge, go off to our desks to tinker, and then meet in the screening room to share the results. The video above came from the challenge: “you have one hour to generate one minute of footage, using any of the software in PDI’s toolset”. I generated the curves in PDI’s homegrown script programming language, and rendered them using a command line tool called mp2r (which Drew Olbrich had written for me to use on Brick-a-Brac).

Genuary 2023: Impossible Paint

I love to tinker with code that makes pictures. Most of that tinkering happens in private, often because it’s for a project that’s still under wraps. But I so enjoy watching the process and progress of generative artists who post their work online, and I’ve always thought it would be fun to share my own stuff that way. So when I heard about Genuary, the pull was too strong to resist.

Here’s a snapshot of some work in progress, using a realtime watercolor simulator I’ve been writing in Unity. Some thoughts on what I’m doing here: it turns out I’m not super interested in mimicking reality. But I get really excited about the qualia of real materials, because they kick back at you in such wonderful and unexpected ways. What I seem to be after is a sort of caricature of those phenomena: I want it to give me those feelings, and if it bends the laws of physics, so much the better. Thus, Impossible Paint.

Branching sand patterns

Here in Sargí, Brazil, when it isn’t raining, we get to take a lot of long walks on the beach. One feature we noticed right away were these unusual patterns just on top of the surface: little clusters of wiggly lines made of light sand that contrasted sharply against the dark, damp, compact sand beneath. Some were small and isolated, while others formed dense networks. We wondered out loud: what were these shapes, and where did they come from? Were they the trails of some tiny worm or crustacean? Detritus tossed up from the digging of underground warrens? That was our best guess on the first day. But the shapes were so tiny— barely wider than a few grains of sand— and we never saw any evidence of whatever life we imagined was creating them.

Later in the week, the weather changed, and the shapes changed too. The lines got longer, and they seemed to favor certain directions more than others. In particular, there was a strong breeze blowing up the coast, and the lines were oriented in the direction of the wind. Also there was something vaguely familiar about the way the shapes branched out and meandered, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

It took a few more miles of walking, staring, and spacing out before it hit me. I knew where I’d seen shapes like this before: senior year of high school, on the screen of my Amiga 1000.

Like a lot of kids at that particular time, I was into fractals. I’d coded up renderers for Mandelbrot sets (in BASIC, super slow!) and other forms of emergent weirdness. And for one class project, I picked diffusion-limited aggregation: a simulation of fractal growth based on randomly meandering particles that stick together when they touch, creating shapes that look like lightning bolts, branching trees or coral fans. (This technique has since been used to great effect by digital artists and creative coders of all sorts.)

Looking down at the sand, I realized what I was looking at was, literally, exactly the process I had simulated (oh so slowly!) on that home computer: an accretion of individual grains of sand, propelled by the wind until they hit an obstacle, at which point they stick firmly in place.

Here are a few more photos of these patterns. Having an idea of how they’re formed doesn’t make them any less fascinating—in fact, it only raises more questions, like: could you “read” the history of wind since the last high tide by analyzing these shapes? Just how much information is encoded in their twisty branches?

I wish I had more time to spend on this (not to mention, shoot some timelapse!) but we leave Sargí tomorrow. As we’ve said many times this trip, “deixa pra próxima.”

Peppers popping

Time-lapse of two small peppers ripening from green to bright orange.
The peppers ripen amazingly fast once they get started.

One minor success of our summer garden has been the pepper plants. They haven’t produced a lot of peppers, but the ones they’ve made have been crispy and super sweet. Apologies for the shaky camera – it was hard to keep a steady viewpoint with the phone poised on a head of fast-growing lettuce. (Memo to self: maybe use a monopod next time?)

Growing Shiso

The first month of our shiso plants. Left: green shiso; right: red shiso.

This season I got a head start on the garden, and also started branching out with some interesting-sounding seed packets from local growers. One herb I absolutely love, but have only ever seen in Japanese food, is shiso leaf. I wanted to see if we could grow it here, and what else we could do with it besides roll it in sushi. So far it’s been a raging success: a ridiculous number of sprouts have come up, seemingly twice as many as the seeds I planted. The leaves are gorgeous and super aromatic. Really looking forward to seeing what we can make out of this later in the year!

It’s also really fantastic on avocado toast. Left: with pepitas, ancho chile flakes, and cilantro from the garden. Right: with sesame and red shiso.

Monster Mash in Two Minute Papers!

If you’re any kind of graphics geek, you’re probably familiar with the outstanding YouTube channel, Two Minute Papers. If not, you’re in for a treat! In this series, Károly Zsolnai-Fehér picks papers from the latest computer graphics and vision conferences, edits their videos and adds commentary and context to highlight the most interesting bits of the research. But what really makes the series great is his delivery: he is so genuinely excited about the fast pace of graphics research, it’s pretty much impossible to come away without catching some of that excitement yourself.

What an honor to have that firehose of enthusiasm pointed at our work for two minutes!