Years ago, in Dr. Pickover’s book Computers, Pattern, Chaos and Beauty, I first encountered the idea of plotting time-discrete phase planes. In the time since, I’ve often explored these for various functions, whether still images or animations. Most of the animated work has remained unreleased due to considerations of size: most video compression options overly distort the images due to the dust-like nature of much of this material, reducing the quality. But for the sake of example, and potential curiosity, I’ve decided to post one of the short films. The quality isn’t ideal, so bear with it, but it strikes the best possible balance between the intended quality and a filesize suitable for streaming over the web; perhaps as bandwidth increases and codecs improve, I will eventually be able to share the original, full resolution versions.

The individual frames were calculated with perl, rendered with GD, while the audio was produced with cSound, compressed with LAME and the two mixed with mencoder.

The audio is called “Moving Grey” part I, and comes courtesy of Andreas Bjorck.