Recursive Drawing logo (via totem.cc)
There’s a new web-app on the net that allows anyone to create complex shapes and images through what’s known as Recursive Drawing (process of repeating items in a self-similar way). The RD app was designed by Toby Schachman as his thesis project for the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and features a minimalistic GUI, consisting of a circle and a square, which lets the user get started in generating your images in a spatially oriented environment. Moving the actual shapes manipulates the source-code of the app — in essence writing and re-writing the software.
In contrast, writing a program consists of coding line-by-line, using any number of languages, to change input to output. In order to change or modify the end result the programmer needs to trace the numerical value of the changed process back to the relevant instructions. This can become a repetitive nightmare of jumping back and forth through piles of code to achieve the desired result, which is why Toby thinks that by adapting his prototype app to the way programming is done could potentially make the job much, much easier. Think of it like writing text and seeing what that running process does in real-time, much in the same fashion as Photoshop. This would bring the gap of spatial-interfaces and programming-interfaces closer together, which would give ‘alternative programmers’ such as artists, architects and modders the ability to create programs that represent their work.
Toby created his Recursive Drawing app based off of the textual programming language Context Free which generates images through written instructions known as grammar. The grammar itself is ‘formal’ with every production rule is in the form of V- w (V representing a single nonterminal symbol with w representing a string of terminals) and when compiled form Context Free languages (these languages are identical to pushdown automata languages which are a type of stack for temporary data storage).
Toby states that he will be presenting his prototype Recursive Drawing app at this year’s (2012) Splash (Systems, Programming, Languages, Applications, Software for Humanity) conference in October. Those interested in trying the app can visit Toby’s website at http://totem.cc/onward2012/
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