Iterative Pattern

Generating a texture or textile design

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1. In Spamgetto (2009), the Italian design agency Todo presents computationally generated wallpaper whose elements include text from thousands of spam emails.

Brief

Write code to generate a tiling pattern or textural composition, as for wallpaper or fabric. Give consideration to aesthetic issues like symmetry, rhythm, color; detail at multiple scales; precise control of shape; and the balance between organic and geometric forms.

Your pattern should be designed so that it could be infinitely tiled or extended. Design something you would like to put on the walls or floor of your home, or that you could imagine yourself wearing. Export your pattern in a high-resolution format, and print it as large as possible for your peers’ review. Remember to sketch first.

Learning Objectives

Variations

Making It Meaningful

Pattern is the starting point from which we perceive and impose order in the world. Examples of functional, decorative, and expressive pattern-making date from ancient times and take the form of mosaics, calendars, tapestry, quilting, jewelry, calligraphy, furniture, and architecture. There is an intimate connection between pattern design, visual rhythm, geometry, mathematics, and iterative algorithms. This prompt invites the creator to hone their understanding of these relationships in formal terms. An important variation of this prompt is to realize designs physically, through either digital printing, fabrication in an unusual material, or at an unexpected scale. This can be a watershed moment of synthesis for software artists who crave making something physical.

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2. Georg Pólya's illustrations (1924) of the seventeen periodic plane symmetry groups had a profound influence on the algorithmic patternmaking of M. C. Escher.

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3. Zellige terracotta tiles in Marrakech (17th century) form edge-to-edge, regular, and other tessellations.

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4. Casey Reas's One Non-Narcotic Pill A Day (2013) presents a dynamic collage pattern generated from a video recording.

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5. Alison Gondek, a scenic design student at Carnegie Mellon studying introductory programming, used p5.js to create this pattern inspired by the “Circular Gallifreyan” language from Doctor Who.

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6. Vera Molnár was among the first artists to use a computer. Her 1974 untitled plotter drawing demonstrates patterns arising from the interaction between procedural iteration and randomized omission.

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7. Leah Buechley explores the intersection of computation and craft. The design of her lasercut curtain (2017), generated in Processing, features multiple forms of iteration and controlled randomness.

Additional Projects

Readings

  1. David Bailey, David Bailey's World of Escher-Like Tessellations, 2009, tess-elation.co.uk.
  2. P. R. Cromwell, “The Search for Quasi-Periodicity in Islamic 5-fold Ornament,” The Mathematical Intelligencer 31 (2009): 36–56.
  3. Anne Dixon, The Handweaver's Pattern Directory: Over 600 Weaves for 4-shaft Looms (Loveland, CO: Interweave Press, 2007).
  4. Ron Eglash, African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999).
  5. Samuel Goff, “Fabric Cybernetics,” Tribune (blog), August 23, 2020.
  6. Branko Grünbaum and G. C. Shephard, Tilings and Patterns (New York: W. H. Freeman & Company, 1987).
  7. “Wallpaper Collection,” Collections, Historic New England, historicnewengland.org.
  8. Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London: Bernard Quaritch Ltd., 1868).
  9. Albert-Charles-Auguste Racinet, L’Ornement Polychrome (Paris: Firmin Didot et Cie, 1873).
  10. Casey Reas et al., {Software} Structures, 2004–2016, artport.whitney.org.
  11. Petra Schmidt, Patterns in Design, Art and Architecture (Vienna: Birkhäuser, 2006).

Notes