Fire Card

Fire Cards is a series of generative artworks inspired by 19th-century Japanese fireworks catalogues. The images in these catalogues didn’t so much focus on realism, but on the visual associations of the pyrotechnic effects instead. Using a restricted color palette and relatively simple shapes, this resulted in vibrant, graphical posters that sparked your own imagination more than anything else.

In Fire Cards, the abstract, static images are transformed back into lively, dynamic worlds again, each with their own distinctive, centuries-old aesthetics. Using a custom animation and 2D render system, the algorithmically generated worlds slowly build up and show a magical fireworks performance.

Fire Cards are tiny, personal and unique shows of wonder.

Fire Cards is 100% code-based. There are no pre-rendered images involved. I wrote a custom 2D renderer, which is optimized for sprite animation. This setup lets me create smooth animations of the fireworks, which sometimes consist of hundreds of particles moving in sync.

I wanted to achieve a fast start-up time and a smooth animation, but the stippling algorithmI used Poisson disk sampling, which keeps the space between stipples consistent. took too long to calculate all stipples. To solve that, I gradually build up the image, starting with the background and then adding the stipples one by one.

As one of the pieces in the first wave on Fxhash, Fire Card was awarded a Tender Icon award for “extraordinary feats in long-form generative artworks”.