Concept:
I decided to alter my initial idea due to some issues. In order to achieve the desired effect, I needed to have hundreds of particles, and because they had to be aware of each other and interact among themselves, that required a lot of iterations which turned out to be too heavy on p5js and resulted in a lot of lagging. Thus, I decided that I still want to explore particles, and have a theme of emergence but not in an artificial life way, but more in a creating a pattern way.
To achieve this concept, I wanted to allow the particles to move independently and only be attracted or repelled in random areas. For this reason, I decided to create magnet objects, that would have a power coefficient of either 1 or -1 and would thus either attract or repel the particles respectively. With such design, I have a lot of opportunities for generative art and customization, since a lot of components can be either randomized or granted control over for the user.
Here is my current sketch:
Next steps:
This version looks optimal for the pen plotter, however I still need to fix my SVG files. Since my lines are a bunch of dots, I need to convert them into curves or otherwise this will take forever for the pen plotter to draw. Regarding my sketch, I need to implement the different modes. I am thinking of introducing simple UI to allow the user to adjust the number of magnets, particles and colors of the sketch. This way I would have a high number of combinations a user can achieve with only 5 sliders(one for magnets, one for particles and 3 for color: red, green and blue). Below are a few versions of my sketch I was able to achieve by altering these components.
