A Sense of Attraction is a series of generative images about the possibility of drawing feelings and emotions. The starting point is photos of flowers, which provide the organic shapes and the strong colors. However, those naturalistic images are transformed into semi-abstract designs through an algorithmic process that sets in motion a large number of autonomous computational agents. The input photo serves as a sort of virtual terrain to guide the movement of these “drawing particles”. The accumulation of their trajectories as they are traced to the screen gradually builds the resulting image.

Therefore, this is also a visualization of swarm behavior, or a picture of a multitude. The photos of flowers become something else by means of the mathematical interpretation of color values as force vectors. In each particle the tension between control and randomness, or between environment influence and self-determination, results in a complex path that is perhaps the simplest possible seed of a feeling in the heart of a computer.

The generative program was coded by the author using the Processing language.