What are attractors?

"A line is a dot that went for a walk." - Paul Klee

Let’s look at one of our designs from the Field and Line series. Before reading further, can you tell what’s happening with this design? All those curving lines seem to be in fluid communication with each other somehow. It’s like they are influencing each other. Are they?

If you hold two magnets close to each other, they will either attract or repel, depending on their orientation. There is a mysteriously charged area between magnets as they either pull your hands together or push them apart. Children are delighted the first time they experience this force, and that delight has never left us at CLYDE.

Our experiment begins with a rectangle. We’ll call the area inside the rectangle the field.

We’re going to draw some lines in the field, so we need dots inside the field where the lines can start. We’ll instruct the software to place these dots randomly inside the field.

Now let’s add an object called an attractor, shown as a yellow point. There are arrows showing that its magnetic power is pushing away from itself in all directions. (Attractors, like magnets, can attract or repel.) If we draw lines starting from all those dots, which way will they go?

They will take the most efficient path away from that yellow point, a straight line, as you see below.

But what happens when we add another attractor? Here we've added a second attractor, and it has the same power as the first one. The lines can not cross each other, so where will the lines go now?

Since the lines can no longer depart the field in a straight line due to the equal and opposing forces of the attractors, they must bend. Cool.

Let’s add another attractor. Once again, the third attractor is equal to the first two.

As you now know, the lines must yield to the power of the attractors, and so they curve to find the path of least resistance. We find beauty in those curves.

Keep an eye on this space, because we're just getting started with attractors.

Hey, now that you know how attractors work, take another look at the design below. Can you figure out how we made it? How many attractors did we use? Are the attractors inside the field or outside the field? If you think you know, let us know in the comments. To say thanks we’ll send you a 25% off coupon good for anything in the store.