Sea of Code
2024, Generative Art

Exhibited at

Patterns of Flow

Description

Sea of Code is a generative work in which both animation and audio are produced through JavaScript code. On screen, simple objects rendered in an eight-color palette drift into view; over time, the number of colors increases toward full color, while the forms grow more complex and organic, gradually blending into one another. The piece overlays this visual flow with a sense of continuity and discontinuity in the passage from past to future—moments that appear broken or missing when seen locally, yet feel connected somewhere in the whole, like a gradient.

The title “Sea of Code” evokes not only technological progress but also the history of computer art itself: a lineage that has often struggled to become mainstream, yet has been carried forward through countless experiments and acts of preservation. Even when an author’s words are lost, fragments of thought remain embedded in algorithms and code, whose preservability is reinforced as they are copied, circulated, and archived. At the same time, that sheer abundance can feel overwhelming—like sinking into an ocean. Past, present, and future are woven together through code, while still holding seams, gaps, and discontinuities.

Without relying on representational motifs, the work aims for dynamic, emergent beauty arising autonomously from the motion of simple geometric forms. Color is generated through an algorithm that does not depend on a fixed color palette. Sound is produced as an electronic, melody-like sequence reconstructed via a Markov chain from data extracted from classical music. Continuity and rupture, preservation and forgetting, localized evolution and hybridization—these processes unfold simultaneously, composing a “sea” experienced through both sight and sound.


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