Created by Elijah Houston
This project is a collection of four interactive generative systems, each exploring human–machine entanglement through organic motion, rhythm, emotion, and emergence.
Across the breathing tree, color flow field, emotional blob, and firefly flocking simulation, I examine the relationship between inner emotional states, environmental systems, biological metaphors, and algorithmic behavior.
When I started this project, I knew I wanted to make something generative and interactive, but I did not want it to feel like a technology demo focused on showing what AI can do. I kept returning to ideas of nature, breath, and emotion, things that feel very human and embodied, and I became curious about what happens when those ideas are reimagined as systems. The four pieces in this project, the breathing tree, the flow field, the emotional blob, and the firefly flock, are all different explorations of the same question: what does it mean to translate human feelings and natural metaphors into rules, particles, rhythms, and algorithms.
The breathing tree came first, and it shaped the direction of the other pieces. I knew I did not want a static fractal tree. I wanted it to breathe in a way that felt similar to a body. Using p5.js, I built a recursive branching structure, then tied its scale and subtle sway to a 4 4 4 style breathing rhythm. Instead of relying on a user controlled slider or a mouse driven angle, the tree expands and contracts on its own cycle, similar to an organism following its own internal timing. That choice mattered to me conceptually. It makes the tree feel less like a tool and more like a presence the viewer can either sync with or just observe. The tree is built entirely from math, such as recursion, angles, and easing functions, but because of how the motion is spaced and softened, it reads as something alive.
The flow field was a way of zooming outward, shifting focus from a single organism to an entire environment. I wanted something that felt like wind, currents, or drifting movement, but still connected to the earth toned palette and organic motion I was shaping in the project. I used a Perlin noise vector field to move hundreds of particles as they left trails across the canvas. Over time, the screen fills with layered motion and warm color. These paths feel like sediment, weather systems, or slow environmental forces. The randomness here is not noise for its own sake. It is constrained by the field, so the particles create patterns that I could not predict in detail, but that still feel coherent. To me, this piece represents the larger systems that living things move inside, the invisible forces that shape behavior, the way emotions or social dynamics can guide us without being directly visible.
The emotional blob interpreted the same idea but from the opposite direction. Instead of representing a landscape or organism, it focused on inner experience. It is a multi layered shape that pulses in rhythm and changes color and motion based on selected emotional states, including calm, joy, anxiety, and sadness. Each emotion uses its own breathing speed, amplitude, and noise level, along with a specific color palette. Calm is slower and softer. Joy is bright and expansive. Anxiety is sharper, more red, and more jittery. Sadness is slower and heavier. Clicking cycles through these emotional modes, while the underlying logic stays the same. It is a noisy circular form animated by sine based breaths that scale and distort the shape. I like that it does not literally show a face or heart. Instead it expresses emotion as shifts in motion and tension along the outline. It became a way to think about feelings as states within a system instead of fixed labels.
The final piece, the firefly flock, adds a sense of collective behavior. Instead of a single form or a single environment, there are many simple agents following rules for separation, alignment, and cohesion. Each firefly is just a point with a position, velocity, and a few steering forces, but together they create swirling movement and complex patterns. I added a click interaction that creates temporary leader points which attract the swarm for a short time. This felt like a fitting representation of human and machine interaction. I cannot micromanage any individual firefly, but I can create attractors and observe how the system responds. This interaction creates a balance between structure and openness that I found interesting.
Throughout this project, ChatGPT was part of my workflow, not as an artist replacing me, but as a collaborator for thinking through structure, debugging problems, and adjusting motion and performance. I asked specific questions such as how to smooth recursive movement, how to manage performance in the flow field, or how to tune flocking forces without creating chaos. The model helped with code structure and problem solving, but I made the final choices about pacing, color, rhythm, and interaction. I did not accept the first output from ChatGPT. I spent time adjusting values, removing features that felt excessive, and shaping the overall visual identity into something that fit my direction.
There were several moments when the system behaved differently than I expected, and those moments shaped the pieces. Early versions of the tree were too shaky or too small, and subtle changes in recursion depth made dramatic differences. With the blob, cross faded transitions between emotions looked impressive but made the experience less readable, so I removed them. With the fireflies, adding too much environmental force made the flock lose its shape, so I simplified the rules. In each case, I had to decide when to let the system remain simple and when to refine it.
I chose these four artifacts because together they form a small ecosystem. The tree is an individual breathing form. The flow field is the environment. The blob is internal emotion. The fireflies represent collective behavior. All four pieces live somewhere between control and emergence, between my decisions and the computer's rules, and between human meaning and machine execution. Working on these systems helped me think about my own creative process with AI and code in a more flexible and open way. It also made me more aware of how structure, randomness, and emotion can blend into something that feels artificial and natural at the same time.
AI Tools Used:
Essential Chat Logs: