Mesh

mesh 1 mesh 7

Sometime in 2005 I saw a Portishead video by Chris Cunningham that was filmed under water. One of the things that I remembered most was the appearance of the clothes as they moved through the water. Over the next few years I'd periodically come across some underwater photography and I'd always be struck by the way the fabric looks. It's as if time slows down and a little bit of history is captured in the shape of the material.

This project is an attempt to recreate the feeling of an underwater fabric by modeling a system of weights and springs. Like a real fabric, the appearance of the mesh depends on what has happened to it. These images are generated by starting with a randomly-configured mesh, subjecting it to random perturbations, and waiting for the system to settle. The following movies show what this process looks like in action:

mesh 1 movie
mesh 7 movie

Related Pages

Portishead: Only You
The Chris Cunningham music video.
Zena Holloway
Underwater photography.
Cortices
Similar computer art.