Inspired

Large Images Ahead

For reasons unbeknownst to me, I have felt visually inspired as of recently.

It started from a place of silliness. This is Dante’s Inferno, rendered via glsl and a custom render pipeline using SDL_GPU. Custom is kind of a goofy way to word it, I built a way to display the shaders I wrote instead of using glslViewer or ShaderToy.

This QR uses gzip compression, base64 encoding, and a custom error correction scheme. If you point your phone at it, you get mostly garbage. However, the process quickly became more about the aesthetics of the shader than the actual text.

I’m not going to post the many iterations between that one square and this next image, but things escalated, and quickly. This is a render of the full Divine Comedy. Portrait orientation, 7x11 grid of plaintext QR tiles (version 40, SCALE=6) under a serif title block. Saved with dpi=(300,300) metadata so print shops honor the physical inches. Taking donations to print the thing. Hah!

This next one I created for my desktop. It’s all 34 cantos of the Italian Inferno, one QR square each.

Each canto is bz2-compressed and encoded into a version-40 QR code at SCALE=1 (185x185 px tile). Laid out as a 9x4 grid on a black canvas with small gold roman-numeral labels beneath each tile.

I genuinely love it. Weirdly enough.

I’m really fond of the next 3. The first is me trying to learn a tiny bit about general relativity after watching too much 3blue1brown. I’ve learned so much watching that man’s videos, I can’t recommend his channel enough.

Anyways, here’s my attempt at emulating what it might look like when two massive objects collide. Like neutron stars, black holes, whatever. Things that literally wield spacetime like weapons.

It is absolutely fucking bonkers how complicated a simple concept like ’two bodies orbit each other’ really is. This is a combination of both vert and frag shaders.

This is one of my favorite pieces of art, and applying some shaders to it was a cool way to interact with it. I’m going to do more of this.

And, finally, rule 30. ‘Nuff said.

Anyways, I just wanted to share this weird turn. I’ve never been a visual art guy, I’ve always expressed myself through music or writing, so this is new and weird. Probably bad, but FUCK IT!

Take care of yourself. Take care of each other. Much love.