“Flowering Fingertrapped Fireworks” is a code that was purely spawned from fascination with the way agents in RTA 838's week four’s tutorial code “bloomed” at one point in the video. Playing around with spawn shape, friction (which I renamed to density to represent the closeness of the burst), and colour furthered this mental connection to a flower (along with the fact that spawned bursts consistently had a fairly smooth center); and, when observed by viewers in my space, one likened the layering of the “petals” to that of finger trap toys cats or children might play with.
The Firework part of the name comes into play when the background is toggled back in - as the layering responsible for shapes becoming petals becomes non-existent, and suddenly viewers are left with shapes that flash, burst, and dim through a consistent loop of decreasing opacity. The fact that some shapes may come back into view before they are spliced forever also helps with this illusion, as parts of fireworks may burst back to life in one last dance before they become one with the dark.
The randomness of spawn placement and petal growth is supposed to be reminiscent of the fact that both fireworks and flowers can grow in ways that are never repeated (as different, subjective, element affect their growth), but still have a visual patterned consistency to them that allows our brains to group them together.
Want to play with the code? Click here!
