C-Scapes

"Most of my purely generative work has been about creating and harnessing emergent complexity & nonrepetitve, ever-changing behaviors (and their interactions) borne from extremely simple systems, mechanisms, algorithms & languages: Exposing, investigating (and yes, celebrating) generativity in its raw form. By minimizing, though not entirely avoiding, additional human aesthetic decision making (here primarily in the form of curating automata rules & color themes), I'm trying to focus the observer on the raw beauty of the underlying processes and bring it to the fore. My hope is, this too will lead viewers asking themselves the deeper questions about the nature of rules, behavior, order and complexity in their own lives, esp. in the current rising polarizing political & anti-science climate. Furthermore, I'd like to provide a counter point and emphasize the unique qualities of generative art, compared to other, more figurative and abstract art approaches.

C-SCAPE simulates a shared toroidal environment in which multiple cellular automata (CA) are evolving and influencing each other, forming short-lived symbioses and/or wiping each other out, only to be restored again later on. The automata are all operating on a single row of pixels at a time and therefore are only 1-dimensional. Yet, many of them also have a short term memory and can produce more complex structures/behaviors by utilizing their memory of previous cell states. Each individually minted version produces a unique system which evolves over time and never repeats.

C-SCAPE#208

C-Scape created by Karsten Schmidt

families: struct3-tex theme: amaranth-iceberg-mint-noir

C-SCAPE #38

families: struct3-tex theme: berry-gray-lavander-mint

families: struct3-tex theme: berry2-noir-solar

C-SCAPE #85

C-SCAPE #253

families: struct4 theme: blackgold-lavander-paleheat-solar

families: struct4 theme: gray2-invnoir-noir

C-SCAPE #99