in the blink of an eye (2014)

Background: This was my final project for one of my favorite classes in my entire academic career, ARTD 252 Interactive Digital Art. That class was my first introduction to coding as a thing you could do far more with than “just” spit html out on a page. It was eye-opening.

Below you’ll find the prompt, my response, and a recorded video of my code’s output (the full code takes a very long time to run to completion). Looking at the code now, I knew absolutely nothing back then. So much extra work that could have been solved much easier with a smattering of functions and loops, but that’s learning baby!

Prompt: How do you design an interactive visualization that captivates from one data point to over two billion?

I graduate in the summer of 2014. It feels like my college experience went by in the blink of an eye.

How long is a blink? (330 milliseconds)

How many blinks was college really? (approximately 2,096,639,997 blinks, give or take a few)

Why did they go so fast? (don’t say time flies when you’re having fun don’t say time flies when you’re

Each trail spawned represents one ‘blink,’ and new blinks spawn every 330ms.

Check the code on github. Requires Processing to run.