Happy New Year 2015!

Now, in many places people set off colorful fireworks to celebrate the New Year.

Here on the blog, though, I’ll offer instead some rings of color, artwork created with a new program that Chris has written for the iPad. He wrote it on Christmas day and has dubbed it Saturnalia.  With the program, you create new circle artworks by tapping and starting with a small center dot. Then as you move the iPad around, up and down, or from side to side, the program automatically adds rings of new color around the original center dot, growing the size of the circle as it goes:

Sample Saturnalia work

It is mesmerizing to create the works, since you tap the screen once and then slowly move the iPad around to add the next ring, and then the next, etc. It’s in theory predictable what colors will come based on how you’re holding the iPad and how the light is hitting it (well, that’s a simplification of what’s going on, at least). So if you want to have some control of the colors, you can carefully move the iPad in certain ways, or just randomly move it to see what kind of variation will happen next.  As you watch the circles slowly come to life in the program in real-time, the effect can become rather hypnotic.

Chris’ original idea was that the artwork created with Saturnalia would be only ephemera.  However, I requested that there be a feature in this app to save the works in order to share them with others.  Chris nicely obliged by adding a “save” feature. So, taking a couple of dozen or so of the works I’ve created with the program thus far, I added some audio and made a little video as a New Year’s greeting to ring in the New Year with Saturnalia.

Enjoy!

Saturnalia: Ringing in 2015  – click on the image above to open the video

P.S. It make take a few seconds (or more) to load the video, so be patient. If you have any problems, just let me know.