What I wanted to achieve with this system was initially, a better understanding of patterns – specifically the creation of a pattern. It was hard for me to understand the points of a pattern and having to figure out where to put them on the screen with the vertex() coding. After some time playing around with vertex points I was able to better understand and evolve my pattern above. Since this prompt had to do with thinking about autonomous systems, I was thinking a lot about AI and the softwares being created currently to solve problems such as customer service. It is a generated program to think and listen to what someone is saying in the example of customer service and provide helpful answers without having to involve a real person. However, autonomous systems is somewhat hard to define due to it having different meanings in some situations while also being a relivtly new term that is still being figured out.
The first point where the pattern has ‘autonomy’ in my code is in the void star() function at the bottom of the code in the pushMatrix() and popMatrix() with the scale() function. In the scale function, messing around with the x coordinates and y coordinates of the scale of the star change the actual layout of the shape. If you increase the x coordinate and decrease the y coordinate, this alters the shape appeared and creates and a completely different pattern on the screen (as shown in the image below). The scale coordinates were changed to (20, -1) in this image which in turn started to create a new pattern of triangle-like shapes within this pattern. The autonomy part of this is the creation of new patterns within the pattern. By altering the original pattern you get new patterns created. The second point where the pattern has autonomy is the randomly generated points on the screen where the pattern goes. Since autonomy in an autonomous system is when hardware and software work together to solve a problem by performing an action. For a system to be considered truly autonomous, the system must be able to gather information, find a solution based on this information, and execute an action to achieve a goal. Since my system is being randomly generated to create different patterns the system is creating the pattern on its own, Processing is using the random function to randomly generate the information on the screen.
The first relationship is the original creation of this pattern. A star like a shape randomly generated on the screen to evolve over time to create other patterns on the screen. At one point it is interesting to watch what the black background spaces shape starts to take as more and more stars appear on the screen. Waiting and anticipating when the black background will be eaten away by the stars. The second relationship is altering the scale in the pushMatrix() and popMatrix() function as mentioned above. By altering the original shape, it creates a new relationship on the screen. It reminds me of the Sierpinkski Triangle, and by no means am I comparing my work to Sierpinkski but I was inspired by the triangle effect and how the triangles start to get smaller and smaller within the triangles. This plays a part in my own code with the alteration of the scale size. Large triangles start to appear at first and then as more shapes come on the screen the triangle pattern created in the black background space starts to get smaller and smaller. The last relationship would have been the relationship between the pattern and the background image I tried to bring into play. I left it in my code but commented it out until I can figure out how to incorporate it correctly. The relationship I was going for here was to incorporate the shape into a background that was fitting and then to have the star shape appear in different sizes, giving dimension to the background.
What was working as I expected was the visual effect of the pattern randomly being placed around the screen. I knew the color scale was what I wanted it to be and the placement of the shape was what I wanted it to be, unexpected and different every time it was loaded. What surprised me was the actual pattern itself. As I mentioned earlier I was struggling with an understanding of physically creating a pattern to start with and then have to pushMatrix() and popMatrix() the lines into some sort of shape. Throughout the creation of this is truly was a mystery every time I altered something that the outcome of this shape was going to be. I knew I wanted some sort of star shape after a while of playing around with lines and patterns, but overall I was not sure of exactly what the star was going to look like. I believe my work turned out well, I am overall happy with the pattern that was created and the shape that it took. One thing that did not work as I wanted to input an image background and I was able to get that to work, but the pattern kept creating and disappearing through the background. What I mean by this is every time a new star was created, the old one would disappear, almost like going behind the background. That leads me into my last point of what I would like to try next time, I would like to correctly execute the background attempt and getting my pattern to show up on that background image. I would also like to maybe try adding rotatinon of the shape, physically moving it in the screen.
