Yellowtail by Golan Levin

This now legendary piece of software was begun by Levin at the Interval Research Corporation in 1998 and completed at MIT in 1999 and 2000. He would go on to show this piece to John Maeda, which would convince Maeda to let Levin join MIT’s Aesthetics and Computation Group (ACG) the following year. Once there, Yellowtail, which was conceived before Maeda even created DBN, “was first implemented using the EasyDraw DirectDraw framework by Scott Snibbe; then the ACU C++ graphics framework by the MIT ACG, and then in the Processing Java framework by Ben Fry and Casey Reas.” The work, beyond getting Levin in MIT, also was one of the first to be tested in the legendary development of Processing at MIT in the mid-to-late-’90s. This work’s place in art history is secured.

Levin spoke to this author, Peter Bauman, about his work in the 1990s saying:

“My work from the late-90s was a reaction to the making culture that assumed that multimedia was constructed from preloaded assets like sprites and background images. I was like, ‘No, the computer is a dynamic medium that can generate things on the fly.’”

The piece itself is an interactive software work that transforms user gestures into dynamic, abstract animations. Strokes made by the user are looped continuously, allowing control over both the shape and movement quality of lines. Each line has its unique cycle, creating a fluid, responsive animation, resembling organic textures.