Candleshift

This week, in Zach Lieberman’s Drawing++ class at the MIT Media Lab, our assignment was to create a generative drawing based on nature.

“Create a code based generative drawing that models something in nature, such as handwriting, grass, clouds, etc.”

I often light candles when I work to have something to stare into while lost in my thoughts, and I had recently noticed that the form of the candle flame was shockingly beautiful and dynamic.

Initially, I wanted to convert the shape of the candle flame into a series of contours to draw with my pen plotter, much as I did with my
Emotion Data Postcard a few weeks prior, but I decided that I wanted to do something different, and especially try to avoid becoming overly reliant upon pen plotters for this class.

I decided to stick with the same basic idea, focusing on the form of the flame, but instead of drawing its contours, I instead overlaid the video with itself in order to dynamically show the progress of the flame down the candlestick and then back up as a tongue of flame blazing its final moment of glory.