Shape of Mind

There is no heart shape in the code, and no outline drawn in advance. On each frame, every one of the two hundred and fifty points multiplies three layers of Perlin noise to decide how far it sits from the axis, and every point sixty pixels apart is drawn with a heavier stroke. As the axis turns with time, those heavier points leave rings on the picture. The scale of the whole picture keeps falling with the frame count, so the later a point is drawn, the closer it is pushed to the centre, which is why the centre is the densest.

The second version, written on 10 January 2024, turns to white points on black, with less sway, faster rotation and two fine white specks scattered beside each point. Neither version fixes its random seed, so every time it is opened a different disc grows.

For the exhibition, Che-Yu Wu wrote a short text for each version on the Art & Culture Center’s artwork form. The white ground is the first version of October 2023, the black ground the second of January 2024.

The plotter was Che-Yu Wu’s idea. When the NCCU Art & Culture Center first discussed the exhibition with him in October 2023, he already wanted a plotter drawing the work on site. The picture on screen is built up point by point, frame after frame, and a pen can only draw lines, so on the opening day he rewrote both versions: the positions a point at one height passes through over three thousand frames are joined into a single curve, sixty-three curves to a sheet, saved as vector files with p5.js-svg.

He left the centre a one-page instruction sheet: check that the pen is clamped and the paper taped down, open the work’s link, wait for the picture to appear and press the space bar to save an SVG, place it in Inkscape within an A4 area, then send it from the iDraw extension. The plotter took turns with four programs: the two line versions of Shape of Mind, and plotter versions he made of two earlier daily sketches, 200802 Tangled and 230124 Chain Drawing.

The exhibition was the NCCU Art & Culture Center’s second Digital Creation and NFT Open Call Exhibition, under the theme He, She, It: Residing in Multiple Universes, part of the digital art series of the 24th NCCU Art Residency Program. In October 2023 the centre invited Che-Yu Wu and Newyellow to be its digital art advisors; the two helped select the students’ submissions and also showed work alongside NCCU students and staff as invited artists. Nine of the eleven exhibitors came through the open call, with photography, watercolour, digital work and programming.

On the evening of 24 April 2024, Newyellow and Che-Yu Wu gave the talk Experience and Guide of Digital Creation at the Digital Art Center on the second floor, then took the audience up to the fourth-floor gallery to see the show.

The exhibition closed on 6 June. Two years later, on 25 April 2026, Che-Yu Wu looked back on it at a MONOLAB digital creation salon, and what he talked about was the plotter that kept on drawing.