Code for a generative art piece inspired by Kusama pumpkin sculptures
When the theme of fall was announced my mind instantly went to pumpkins. However, I wanted to go in a direction that would blend my love for both computer science and art history. Thus for this first project, I took inspiration from artist Yayoi Kusama's iconic pumpkin sculptures.
My code draws a new pumpkin every three seconds randomly picking from four Kusama inspired colors: orange, red, blue, and green. The pumpkin graphic is made of three ellipses (pumpkin body), two round rectangles (stem), and five circles (dots). The dots get smaller the further they are from the center, which gives a bit of dimensionality to the pumpkin. All pumpkins have the same black dots.
Here is a gif of my coding process. It was a lot of trial and error.
To install my piece, I put my ESP32 (connected to a battery) inside of an envelope. The I decorated the envelop with dots that very closely match the colors of the pumpkin; sadly this does not show well in images. Then using string my piece was hung in front of a window.