Q2: Losing Light

Greatings from Hjómskálagarðurinn in the sometimes sunny, mostly rainy rock in the North Atlantic.

A few weeks ago was the longest day of the year. In Reykjavik, that means almost 24h of sunlight. We've crossed the peak of the sinusoidal sun path and lose around five and a half minutes of sunlight a day. The equinox is the steapest decline and flipping to more darkness than light each day.

Cellular Automata

Given several simple rules and some input, cellular automata can create incredibly complex patterns and structures. These patterns are thought to be encoded in natural system and the progression of each step of the structure is only dependent apon the direct parent. This limits the states, memory and history needed to produce the next layer in the struture. This makes it more robust and simpler, but as you can see still produced wildly different patterns.

At the moment there is a kickstarter project which is solictiting funds to create unique scarves knitted using cellular automata rules. This means each scarf with a slighly different starting seed will be completely different. Not just slightly different, but as the steps unfold based on the rules you will get wildly different patterns - no two will be the same.

We experimented with some cellular automata art in the form of postcards. Embedded in the postcard, we used our return address as the seed for the growth of various different rules. We put the cellular automata code up on GitHub so that anyone can create your own art work.