Since I was a kid I have played with computers and math. The first computer I ever used was an Apple II (?) that my dad built from a kit he ordered. It had a keyboard with no case, an open motherboard with wires sticking out everywhere, and a cathode-ray-tube monitor without a case. The parts lay on an old wooden door that had been turned into a table, and it was down in the basement where you sat with your feet on the bare cement floor while you used it. I still remember the first program I ever wrote, a simple number-guessing game that responded “Too high!” or “Too low!” and “That’s right! Do you want to play again? (Y/N)” My family gathered around to try it out when I was finished, and when it worked I felt I had really made something.

As I got older I kept playing with math and computers. I sat up into the night reading Chaos by James Gleick with a laptop at my side, using Excel to try and simulate some chaos patterns. It was fun, but very limited in what it could do. With some time off, I decided to learn some new programming languages, and I was thrilled to discover object-oriented programming through Java. I wrote a program to generate different kinds of random walks, and modified it to color them in various ways.

Somewhere around this time I got the idea for 1000 Random Walks. I am fascinated by the variety of patterns that emerge from such a simple set of decisions: “Up or down? How far?” and “Left or right? How far?” Having seen some of the pixel-art projects like the Million Dollar Homepage, Pixelfest, and others it occurred to me that people might be used as a source of these random decisions. The idea appealed to me because this project seems to achieve a nice balance between participation and structure. Each point is the result of four decisions made by different individuals, but the coloration and presentation are done with the whole image in mind. Many of the pixel-art projects are interesting in concept, but the resulting images are disappointing because there is no meaningful connection between different people’s input.

My simplest desire for this project is to see the variety of patterns that emerge from the collective decisions of many people. There is something different about these human-generated patterns that makes them more appealing to me than the computer-generated patterns. I appreciate your participation in this project, and I hope you enjoy the patterns that are created as well!