Grouped by method
A method is a family of technique: the kind of rule or system a work is built from. Two works can look nothing alike and still share a method, while two that could pass for siblings often come from completely different rules. Grouping this way puts the real relationships side by side, so you can follow a technique from its plainest form to the point where it turns strange.
- Aperiodic Tilings
However far you follow the pattern, it never comes back around. Tiles get split into smaller copies of themselves, or shaped so only certain edges fit together, which is how Penrose's rhombs cover a surface without ever repeating.
- Cellular Automata
Each cell reads its neighbours and follows one short rule about what to become next. Run that rule everywhere, step after step, and the image builds itself.
- Flow Fields
An invisible field of directions covers the canvas. A line dropped into it follows the current and stops when it crowds a line already there.
- Iterated Function Systems
Chance picks which of a few shrink-and-rotate rules moves a point next, and after enough steps the dots settle into a fern or a triangle full of holes.
- L-Systems
Starting from a short string, fixed replacement rules rewrite it over and over. Read the result as instructions for a pen, step forward and turn, and a plant grows out of the text.
- Noise Fields
Not all randomness is jagged. A smooth field hands every point a value its neighbours nearly share, so sizes, offsets and flow directions ripple across the work instead of jumping.
- Number Theory
Whole numbers steer the line: primes mark positions along a spiral, remainders decide each turn, and structure nobody put there shows up anyway.
- Optical Illusions
Your eye will insist the figure is turning. Nothing is moving: rings of small squares repeat with a tilt that flips direction from ring to ring, and the drift comes entirely from that.
- Parametric Curves
Everything follows from one steadily climbing number. A formula turns it into a position or a turn angle, and a single unbroken line traces the whole figure.
- Reaction-Diffusion
Two virtual chemicals spread across a grid at different speeds while one converts the other. Spots, stripes and branching fronts grow out of that alone, with the Gray-Scott equations as the usual starting point.
- Space-Filling Curves
There is only one line, and it visits every cell of a grid without ever crossing itself: the same U-shaped motif, turned and mirrored at finer and finer scale. Hilbert's version is the one you will recognise.
- Stitch Patterns
Borrowed from knitting, alternating stitches run in rows and columns, each starting on or off by a coin flip, and they interlock into regions the rule alone gives you no way to predict.