https://elputnam.github.io/KindlyNotions/
I never really managed to do what I intended with this sketch. I have been playing with fade in and fade out using alpha channel and size of shapes, so for this I wanted to create pulsating lights like stars or fireflies that fade in and out at different rhythms. I could not manage to get them to reverse, but only fade out. Instead I settled for a simple twinkling effect by creating an array and then randomly changing saturation and brightness. I wanted to contrast this with a central form, so I instead shifted the fade in/out to that shape. Once I started rotating it though, I found it made me feel a bit nauseous, so I slowed it down to create the rotating square, which became a kind of self drawing machine.
One thing that occurred to me as I made this sketch is through the process of creating Emergent, I have produced 50 or so web pages that are just generative animations without any contextual information and do not link to each other. There is something about this collection of pages, pages that end in themselves, that counter the networked nature of the World Wide Web and the Internet.