Tom Hagan

A generative design project which detects invisible Cosmic Rays (muons) falling to earth from exploded stars, patiently generating an interactive starscape. The piece is affected by muon count and the intermittence of these captures creates fluctuations in size, speed and colour.

Designed to instil the same reverie and presence when one is caught in the gaze of stars, this piece proves a relaxing and evocative journey into the cosmic activity happening in our local environment; making the invisible, visible.

Preview simulator version here without the physical detector: https://tomhagan777.github.io/Muons-Muons-Muons/

Motion design, visualising subatomic particle collision; the contact, the annihilation, and the recreation of matter.

The atoms are general stand-ins and nothing specific and designed to be used in conjunction with presentation in an educational setting; providing a more accessible entry point into particle physics and in particular when particles and their antiparticle crash; visualising their destruction, brief new creation and then decay into other new creations.

Granularities is a visual effects application that takes image data and reassembles it with larger grains of sampled data for creative manipulation.

Similar to how something like a distortion effect affects an audio signal – degrading and downsampling the signal for novel and creative output, this takes an image and downsamples the data toward a progressive and measured output.

Pixelation is nothing new and hardly anything to write home about but what this proves to be is a much more refined exploration into modular graphics and gestalt theory.

As you reduce and reduce the image in form and colour it transforms into something else until the original transmission is lost and something else entirely new and abstract is left in its place, although technically the same data is still very much present.