Dynamic Waves

An interactive artwork on a 3.5" floppy for Mac OS 9. Hovering over a grid of big pixels will start waves you can steer at first, until they grow stronger, out of control, and the system takes over with its own dynamics.

This was an interactive project, as part of an artist-exchange organized by the Rietveld Academie, graphic design department. The artwork was distributed on 3.5” floppy disks, as a lot of art projects were distributed around the end of the last century. To run this floppy you needed a Mac computer with OS 9 on it.

The application showed a grid, on which the user could start a wave by hovering the mouse over one of the squares of the grid. The resulting waves could be influenced at first, but later, when the waves grew stronger and bigger, influencing stopped working and the system created its own dynamics.

Later it was one of the inspirations for a workshop on emergent behavior, which sparked the Zenit Zeppelins project.