in osculari #60

The building block is a cube: a unit of virtual matter separated from the external void by six square faces of digital bark.

Growth begins when two cubes are attached face to face. The bark that separates them disappears, and the blocks fuse into a single organism. Each cube can expand like this in one of six directions, ultimately branching into an orthogonal tree-like structure that can fill infinite extents of Cartesian space with interconnected square faces.

When two faces meet in this system, the branches they belong to can combine. It is as if the digital bark encapsulating virtual matter has gradually peeled away, and the exposed inner tissue hidden beneath the faces blends together — a healing process in which two branches converge and begin to grow as one.

This growth tells a story about the resilience of a living being and how its fragmented parts come together to create a new wholeness. The newly found unity offers strength and hope for regeneration.

While constrained by its own expansion, the tree ensures that no part obstructs another from view. The viewer's eye gives the structure purpose and motivation to grow, but the expansion is jagged and chaotic. Limited to straight angles, the tree takes the shape of a human-made composition. It is a blend of primitive architecture with futuristic structures, and it is unclear whether it is still in construction or already in a state of ruin.

— The size of the image generated by the algorithm adapts to the size of the browser's window. Add parameters "w" (width) and "h" (height) to the end of the URL address for a different size, e.g. "&w=2400&h=2400". Please note that the algorithm will adjust the resolution to the square aspect ratio.

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Testing was performed across browsers and devices, but please ensure it works on your device before minting. If you experience memory issues, you can decrease the RAM usage at the expense of quality by adding the URL parameter "&lowMemory=true".

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All drawing and geometric methods by Jacek Markusiewicz using javascript with the following libraries or third-party code: three.js (MIT License); three-mesh-bvh by G. Johnson (MIT); seedrandom by D. Bau (MIT); OpenSimplex Noise by J. Forisha (Public Domain); triangle barycentric coordinates from "Real-Time Collision Detection" by C. Ericson, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers 2005 Elsevier Inc, after J. Calsbeek, GameDevStackExchange (CC BA-SA 3.0); ray-cylinder intersection by I. Quilez (MIT); HSL to RGB colour mapping from Wikipedia after icl7126 and K. Kielczynski on StackOverflow (CC BY-SA 4.0). For structure smoothing, I use my implementation of the Catmull-Clark subdivision. Compiled using fxhash-boilerplate-webpack (MIT). For details, please see the ./bundle.js.LICENSE.txt file included in the package.

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This project is part of the digital section of Cure³ at Bonhams, curated by Alex Estorick and Foteini Valeonti of reGEN.