Thoughts Don't Arrive in Straight Lines
A procedural study of ideas drifting into form.
Every now and then I build something that isn't meant to solve a problem.
No deadline.
No feature request.
No roadmap.
Just an idea that refuses to leave me alone until I give it a place to exist.
This shader started that way.
I wasn't trying to simulate electricity or flowing water.
I was thinking about the way ideas move.
They don't travel in straight lines.
They wander.
They loop back on themselves.
They intersect with older thoughts and occasionally reveal something that wasn't obvious a moment before.
Good ideas rarely arrive fully formed.
Most of them drift into focus.
Programming isn't all that different.
Some days I sit down convinced I know exactly what needs to be built.
An hour later I'm solving a completely different problem because the first one wasn't really the problem at all.
I've learned to stop fighting that.
Some of my favorite projects have come from following a thread that looked insignificant at first.
One question became another.
One experiment suggested the next.
Eventually the path behind me made more sense than the one in front of me ever did.
Maybe that's why I enjoy procedural art.
You define a few simple rules, then step back and watch complexity emerge.
The computer isn't inventing the idea.
It's revealing possibilities hidden inside the system you built.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is create enough space for an idea to finish introducing itself.
The animation above will never look exactly the same twice.
Neither will the path that led me to it.
Still following interesting currents.