What is randomized? The number of “peaks,” their location, their sizes, “heights,” colors (if you hit ‘C’ to load the random color scheme), the size of the virtual landscape, the window size (but only in the offline version—variable window sizing didn’t work out for the embedded version), the shapes of the peaks, and probably some other things I forgot. Oh yeah, the line thickness too.

I wanted to explore some possibilities of indeterminate artworks—art that has no specific final form. If you refresh the page, you’ll get a newly generated landscape. However, you’ll notice that the different versions are still recognizable as the same piece; this is a result of the specific ways in which I’ve allowed randomness into the work. For example, the line width does vary, but only within a range of a few pixels. The shapes of the peaks vary (by altering the control lines of their bezier curves), but each peak is still made up of a pair of joined bezier curves according to a specific function. This means that the peaks will vary, but you’d never see something like a cube pop up all of a sudden.

These possibility spaces are explicit in something like this computer program, but they exist in other works in more subtle ways. For example, I just finished a short paper on indeterminacy in Shakespeare: the script determines most of the action, but there is a lot that can be changed at will while remaining “loyal” to the script. So, King Lear can’t be abducted by aliens mid-play, but he could be wearing a space-suit the whole time.

Yeah, have fun playing with the landscape, and if you’ve got some Processing know-how, check out the source code.