Week 1: Introduction and Visual Composition

• Patterns and perception, perception vs. cognition
• Breaking the perspective, collage, loops, modulo, translate & rotate, camera perspectives
• References: Hockney, Escher, Traceloops, Leon Eckert
• Assignment #1:

Introduction

What do we mean when we say patterns?

| Note: repetition, consistency, system, function, way, method, generative, a set of rules,

units, group

colors, shapes

timeline, time, actions that happen over time —> scale

chaos has a pattern, never repeats itself

dimensions, axis, scales, 2D, 3D, directions

underlying universal principle

sunflower, fibonacci

math | | --- |

• When we say patterns without context, our minds immediately thinks about visual patterns
• Yes, that is one pattern but we’re expanding the term in this class
• Patterns is the thing that distinguishes sense from senselessness, signal from noise
• We ‘recognize’ something as something, ‘red’ as ‘red’ if we have experienced it before. It is the repetition in our experience that informs us and triggers our thoughts and emotions, meanings and feelings
• Patterns in this case is about how we make sense of the world, how something gets translated from sensorial stimuli to sensorial perception to cognition
• It is the basis of how we think and feel

[EXERCISE] With this definition, let’s take a few minutes to write about a few patterns we experience in our lives.

<aside> 📌 OBSERVATION

• What is the pattern?
• What is interesting about this pattern? How does it make you feel?*
• What is the nature of the pattern e.g. repetition, sequence, variation?

• Putting this into words will help us articulate the intangibles, define focus, and engage with the gist or the magic of the material.

(additional)

• How might you make this pattern more perceivable/recognizable? (how might you frame the experience such that others can experience it too / how might you turn this into something others can experience too?)
• How might you recreate this pattern in code?

</aside>

As humans, we experience everything through our senses, and that’s very limited.

We only experience the split second, the only split second that is right in front of us.

But what is happening right in front of us - at one moment in time?

There are millions of things happening that we are not experiencing. That we are filtering out. That are otherwise noise.