WildGarden is custom software for painting with a Wiimote. I designed and developed it during my last year at Parsons. What I consider to be merely a first complete iteration of the project was exhibited during the 2010 BFA thesis show.

This was the *official* project description I submitted for the exhibition:

WildGarden enables participants to create visual compositions through an exploratory process of invoking and manipulating algorithmically generated elements that simulate paint strokes. WildGarden’s digital paint strokes employ particle algorithms such as flocking and path following. While the paint strokes can move and develop independent of user intervention , a participant has the power to use a Nintendo Wii controller to expressively direct how their compositions evolve in real time by affecting core parameters of the paint strokes. Each paint stroke can be modified to affect its colors and size, as well as the behavioral parameters that determine how fast and to what degree of chaos it moves.

WildGarden additionally provides utilities for customizing color palettes and saving and exporting high-res screenshots of compositions.

WildGarden is implemented in Java using the open source Processing library, and the entire project is available as both a standalone application and an open source toolkit that can be applied in other projects.

The project source is hosted on Google code. The 0.1 release is downloadable for OSX.

GUI screenshots

Compositions

Working with Zeke Shore and Andrew Mahon, I helped develop the Parsons CDT BFA Thesis website, which showcases some of the student work that was exhibited at Parsons in June 2010 (including Zeke/Andrew’s thesis project: VoxPop, and my project: WildGarden).

These images are all from an ongoing series of little things I’m making with Processing (and in some cases, with openFrameworks), where I take source images (like these heads I found on Wikimedia Commons) and turn them into stencils. The stencils become vessels for masking, surrounding, and revealing particle systems drawn beneath them, as well as triggering sequences that manipulate their pixels based on cellular automata rulesets.

Transforming a source image into a cellular automaton