Buried Treasures

Description

This was inspired by Eliot's lost Gogos, and other toys that people lost in the class. I wondered where all these lost toys went, and imagined that eventually, all plastic returns to the Earth (or ocean) somehow. I also imagined that there are different layers of dirt and detritus that stack on top of each other, and over time, each layer becomes part of a geology filled with plastic toys and other colorful artifacts. These layers begin to turn into mountains containing hoards of lost items beneath waiting to be found by archaeologists at a later date; lost, but not yet found.

Design Process

For this project, I knew I wanted to work with layers of imaginary plastic. I had to figure out how to seperate out the layers of circles and add random points within them for both the dirt clusters and the toys/treasures. There is a "sampling" stage that picks a random screen position and determines whether or not it is in the current layer; if it is not, it tries again until we get a hit. Each layer can get the top of the previous layer, and adds some p5 noise to the top of that, creating a narrow strip where the dirt and toys can be drawn. This ends up amplifying the hills that form in the first few layers, and towards the end we get noise mountains (in a future iteration of this, maybe there will also be some process that can smooth out the noise somewhat). I also had three categories of colors; dirt colors, pollution colors, and toy colors, and attempted to balance the random chance of each occurring to not create overwhelming visual saturation. VS code has some wonderful color picker tools that makes selecting colors a bit easier, but I still think this part can use more work and careful attention. There is a lot of randomness going on in general in this sketch, and this is organized/managed by using a lot of object oriented programming (classes and inheritance) to contain different methods that are ultimately just for sampling layers to position and draw clusters of random circles layer by layer.

Reflection

In future incarnations, I would like to mess with the colors, noise patterns, and accumulation logic of the various layers. Maybe making the toys more explicit, or going outside of the bounds of the assignment by using images to make the lost items more explicit and interesting to look at (even if they remain tiny).