An encyclopedia of code-based art
Every page explains one thing — a technique, a work, an artist, a tool — and embeds code you can run, steer and break. Built from a corpus of 272 verified sources.
Try one
A flow field: build a grid of angles from smooth noise, drop a particle on it, and step wherever the field points. Drag Field scale and Step length against each other — the relationship between them is the whole technique.
What it looks like when it goes wrong (4)
- The integration step is larger than one field cell, so each step skips the field it was supposed to follow. The curves stop being smooth and break into straight dashes at odd angles.
- Neighbouring cells decorrelate. A flow field only reads as flow when nearby points agree about direction — past that point it is just noise with extra steps.
- Density without length. The field is invisible because no curve travels far enough to reveal where it is going; you get texture instead of structure.
- The whole canvas samples nearly one value, so every curve points the same way. The result is combed hair — the classic sign the field is under-scaled rather than the algorithm being wrong.
Clean-room implementation — written from the described algorithm, not from source. Reuse policy