Visual complexity is a bad ass site. It introduced me to the term generative art and reawakened my interest in exploring it myself. I fell in love with the mathematics and images of fractals that exploded in the eighties. One of my favorite books in high school was chaos by James Gleick. The pictures were beautiful, and the math to compute them could be grasped by someone with just a high school education.

I eventually tired of the images and wrote the whole thing off as I realized that most of the slick pictures were little more than thomas kincaid paintings for geeks. They looked pretty, but lacked message or meaning. I still played around with this stuff from time to time, but it was just a personal hobby of mine.

When I stumbled onto visual complexity things changed. Here were images and programs that just dripped and oozed with meaning and message. Here were artists that distilled meaning out of data and poured it onto the page, so that every inch of the screen illustrated their point. They pull the narrative out of the noise and instead of telling it with words and numbers, they distill it down to raw pixels so it leaps out at you with a glance. That is what I aspire to.

So poke around the site a little bit, there is a ton there and I plan on linking to some of the ones that have really inspired me, and others that are just plain cool.