EXPERIMENTS: the electronic palette (PROCESSING)

Every time I get back to my amateurish coding and learning the potential of Processing, I am always surprised and fascinated how just a few lines of even bad code provide complex and occasionally pleasing results.  And this is even before I have gone properly into more complex ideas of emergence, dynamic systems, computational models of nature and other theories I want to explore visually.  I suppose being rather visual in orientation, it helps me think when I can directly see the outcome of what I am doing emerge in front of me.  So while playing around with some classes and recursive functions today and I came up with this by writing about 20 lines of quite messy code using mostly simple random equations.  Thought it would be nice to show the screenshot here as a starter to my long road to mastering the interface of aesthetics and underlying code.  The plan eventually is to develop a database of “palettes” that can be used for various projects: quick prototyping, simulation, experimentation etc.  But meanwhile, here are some quick examples (with just a little color correction post-factotum) of what has emerged from the electronic palette:

And here a few very quick experiment where I composed a palette with 5000 particles moving around semi-randomly in 3D space with their color subtly affected by the movement in the 3D-space (the z-axis). Instead of doing anything more fancy, the aim here was merely to experiment with the possibilities of this and to prove the concept,. Even this might look a bit more complex, in fact, I actually only used rectangles and ellipses to compose these images. I let the program run for a few hours and see what comes of it.