Summary
Facades is a long-form generative art project based on a series of photographs taken in the IDS Center's Crystal Court in the winter of 1999. The images had initially been digitized and manipulated in Photoshop, resulting in two sets of distinct effects, both of which have been recreated for this collection
Background
Downtown Minneapolis is a unique amalgam of contemporary structures, linked together by a network of enclosed skyways that make it possible for its inhabitants to comfortably navigate downtown during its normally subzero winters. And it was winter when I happened to be visiting,
Crystal Court, IDS Building, Minneapolis, MN, from original 1999 photo shoot
Deconstruction
With the raw photos digitized, I began experimenting in Photoshop, and settled on two sets of effects. The first was a fairly basic posterization effect with adjustments to hue and saturation, which ultimately served to "brutalize" the structures. The second utilized the manipulation of the image's color curve, and I landed on a setting that produced a very satisfying grainy, watercolor effect.
From there it was just a matter of isolating various sections of interest and cropping them to give them their own space as standalone images. It was through this process that I began referring to the image sets as "deconstructions", which then begat the working title "IDS Decon".
Conversion to Code
As I had started learning p5js in the beginning of 2022, it seemed that replicating the processed images would be an excellent exercise for mastering some core fundamentals, such as dynamic grid generation, skewing, line deformation and color/texture control through particles and noise.
and having stumbled on this bit of code on creating irregular grids by Wolfcat Workshop, I dug right in.
Once the basic grid-generation loop was in place it was then a matter of analyzing the source graphic to properly understand how we were going to handle the coding ofd the visual components. As you can see in the images above, the IDS photos presented a complex set of layered trusses and windows, which, in combination with their reflections, created a Escherian lattice that could bend the mind if you let it.
Initially, I was not even considering this to be a generative piece, but rather was just using p5js as the library for reconstituting the image in live code, e.g. as computational art vs. generative.