"Comprendre c'est transformer" is the name of the exhibition where Vera Molnar's work that I re-coded was featured. You can read all about that in a previous article, but for now I want to linger on the exhibition's title for a bit. In case French isn't your strong point, it means "Understanding is transforming". Next to the work I selected itself, I was quite intrigued by this title as well. Just like her work, it is simple yet powerful. Food for thought... 

Thinking about how an understanding of something can indeed be transforming in many ways. New understandings about the world around us, give us new ways of moving through it. The way it's written up in French  also mildly implies causality. Understanding is needed in order to transform. But is that so? Maybe you can transform or change your world in such a way that you set yourself up for understanding it better later on? Or maybe they're two ends of the same stick and will inevitably create each other? What did it all really mean?

I had thought enough and had an idea. For a title, at least. "Tranformer c'est comprendre". "Brilliant", I said to myself, "Now just the art and we're done". Great progress.

Jokes aside, naming the thing also gave me inspiration of what I wanted it to look like. To say a bit more about that, let me first pull up a screenshot of my re-coded version of the original real quick:

As you can see, there's three layers to the work. From let's say busy at the bottom to less busy, almost serene at the top. Next to that, I also found the grid like structure an important feature that I wanted to preserve somehow.

With those elements and a title turned up its head, I envisioned a set of lines neatly next to each other as if on a grid. Each of these lines would grow from the bottom to the top, transforming from chaos into harmony. I tinkered around for a while and can here present you a still frame of the first iteration that gets us close to what I had in mind:

For the code and the wiggly version you can visit the sketch on OpenProcessing. I also added some stills of this sketch to the posts section in case you don't want to stray too far.

As much as it comes close to what I envision, it's not exactly there. I feel the chaotic part at the bottom is not quite chaotic enough. I also think that the middle section could have more of its own character, now it's just there in between the two elements without much of its own story. Plenty of room for improvements I'd say. But for that I realized that I'll probably need a different approach of implementing this. But that's for another time.

If you want to find out what that will look like as soon as possible, then you should definitely pop your email in the little box below, and you'll be one of the first to find out. I promise! Until then, I thank you and wish you a wonderful day.