Haptic Hierachy

160,000 connected particles keep in touch with their soulmate, despite a class divide between swarms

Similarly to Paradoxical Proximity this piece uses the Clifford Attractor with carefully selected parameters.

Instead of plotting individual points based on the attractors, instead two particles starting at a similar but not the same position are put through the attractor, and lines are drawn between them with sand painting using a custom library based on this.

Due to the chaotic nature of the attractor, only a small number of iterations is made per pair (10 in this case) to avoid them getting too separated when they are in the same attractor (this tends to make the shape much more fuzzy).

The particles may be in the same attractor or they may be in a nearby attractor. For sand painting lines between the attractors, a B-Spline is used to create the smooth curve.

Finally, I implemented a “Multiply” colour blend mode, which means that as colours are layed on top of each other the resulting colour darkens - this is similar to how ink tends to behave.