Naiadic Variations

Naiads are water nymphs, creatures from Greek mythology that hang out around small bodies of fresh water. They are typically depicted in human form but I like to think they're more watery; more fluid and flowing and formless. I came across some recently while making some work with fountains...

‡ A Nymph by a Stream, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1870)

In late 2023 I realised a project I’d been carrying around in my head for many years… I love the stubby, frothy fountains that bubble along the edge of the Barbican lake in the city of London. I love to watch the water rise and fall in infinite ever-morphing variations.

In my video work “Slow Water”, I tried to capture a version of what happens in my brain when I stare at the flowing water. You can stare along in an excerpt of this work below.

‡ Slow Water (2023)

I also created a companion piece, “Still Water”, in which I put together a digital collage of stills from the same shoot and manipulated them with a shader to produce an alternative experience. Here the motion is derived from a synthetic kind of randomness as opposed to whatever causes indeterminism in the wetter world outside of our machines.

‡ Still Water (2023)

After making these pieces, I was inspired to go a step further and try and recreate the entire phenomena out of code. What came out was more creaturely than I expected. The naiads in the fountains had clearly found a way to manifest themselves through my vulnerable human mind. (I assume the technology of lens and sensor were too harsh to tease out their shy souls.)

A Geometric Foundation and a Shader

To create the algorithmic work, I began with a simple geometric composition which abstracted the form of those Barbican fountains.

Fountain sketches — ‡ The underlying fountain illustrations

This image was then passed to a single GLSL shader that would manipulate the pixels with a variety of noises and distortions. The primary effect is achieved by interpreting the base image into black and white versions, which then wind and warp around each other in near-infinite unpredictable ways. These are the naiads.

In some rare variations we see them as reflections of each other on either side the canvas. In even rarer modes, their energy levels are extra high and their watery swirls dance in wide erratic loops.

Whatever form they take, they come in a variety of dampness-inpspired hues (7 to be precise).

Very Hi Res

The piece is animated by default, because the Naiads are alive. But I've coded a print-mode which means you can produce extra high resolution images, much bigger than a browser would typically support. (Because of the way the image is created, animation isn't supported in print mode.) Below are close-up details of some outputs rendered at 12000px wide.