Deconstructing Nature - Day 1

My colleague Werner and I are holding a challenge this week to produce one visual work each day. I've given myself the theme of "Deconstructing Nature", which you can interpret as wide as you want.

Day 1 — Day 2 — Day 3 — Day 4 — Day 5

For the first day I wanted to design the layout of a space – specifically a garden – according to patterns occurring in nature. I thought about:

• The spread of forest fires
• The intricate nerve pattern of plants
• Patterns of underground movement: worms, ants, tree roots, ...

I liked the idea of constructing something above ground that followed movement patterns below ground. I stumbled a lot trying to model the movement of worms, but in the end used a tweaked boids algorithm to produce strange natural/artifical hybrids.

Here's the result from day 1:

Here are some details of the work:

The work is made in NodeBox 1 using a tweaked Boids algorithm (created by Tom De Smedt).

Here are some other sketches I made:

The source is available in the Deconstructing Nature GitHub repository.

And finally, you can watch a timelapse of the construction.