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The Agar Patron


The above image was sent to me by Johnna Arnold. Her daughter, Zaya, and her daughter's friend, Tessa, created this picture using The Agar Patron and then Johnna used screen capture software to grab it and then she e-mailed it to me.

I've always loved trails, and their organic evolution.

For example, I like to see how often in public places the sidewalks, the places the landscape engineers envisioned people walking, and the actual trails, match.

Of course, people like to chart their own paths, often at the expense of expensive landscaping and in complete defiance of sidewalks.

On our farm in Mississippi, the cows would create deep paths in the fields, and when we had the pastures photographed by a fellow selling pictures taken from the air, I could see all the trails at once, and their patterns.

Of course, in Mississippi we also have the 'fire ant,' and several other varieties of ants, and I used to follow their trails as well.

The artist Yukinori Yanagi has made some incredible work using ants, though while I admire his work, some part of my conscience feels bad for the ants.

I wanted to see what sort of wandering line I could make in Flash and luckily for me, in the book Foundation Actionscript for Animation by publisher "Friends of Ed" I found some code that could be modified to make lines I pictured in my head, (I started with one) and there are also some good lessons on random numbers, which helped me to make the line wander.

For future versions I want to add the ability to save the lines and then to replay their wanderings.

And perhaps a box around the head of a line, with musical tones assigned to the four sides of the box, and as the line wandered and bumps against its walled it head it would randomly trigger tones... or words.... or pictures...

The Agar Patron Artist Statement (Microsoft Word .doc)

The Agar Patron Source File (Adobe Flash .fla)