Before I start to work on this piece, I was in the middle of contemplating the way the world work nowadays and how it often felt overwhelming to look at how difficult it is to not get trapped inside the anxious feeling when imagining how the future is. At one point, I was thinking about what could be done to at least know where to seek refuge when that anxiety worry comes back. As cliché as it might be, I felt like one of them could at least be manifested as a body of work that could be experienced by others and at least contains the elements that might bring peacefulness even temporarily.

Solitude Meditation interprets the idea of a solitary place for one to meditate and rest their mind from the saturated thought that overwhelmed the way someone thinks clearly. It's a reflection of how I often think and what I've been trying to achieve all this time for the future. It might not give a big impact in changing things, but I thought that at least an impact was made and I could contribute to the world that we're living in.

"A room, a space, a solitude corner within the inner thought. Existed as a place to meditate and replenish the soul to be more at ease."

Below are my stories about the creative process behind this piece.

At first, I sketched the piece on the official Hydra website. Experimenting with the use of .modulate() and .blend() functions to create a subtle feedback effect. A solid black color stands as the base using the .solid() function which is then added with repeated .voronoi() and .osc() as the source for textures and the animated visual.

The third parameter of the .osc() function could show a different spectrum of colors and it was later combined using the .diff() and .color() functions. After the whole animated visuals were made, I created a square shape using the .shape() function and put all the visuals inside it while also smoothing the sides of the square shape so it creates a depth perspective to achieve the sense of a dark room.

The video above was the result of this experiment.

After the whole thing felt like enough to consider it as a starting point, I then move the codes and start to work on my Atom editor for the fxrand() implementation.

There was a bit of hesitation when finishing this piece at first because I only know how to capture the screen of the piece iteration as a PNG file only. It was thanks to my good friend and also an amazing fxhash artist for helping me with how to implement a GIF-saving feature using the Hydra+p5.js template that He provided on His Github.

Here's the link to the template that created:

https://github.com/ntworm/Fxhash_Template_HYDRA_with_P5

It is recommended to also take a look at pieces on fxhash, He created amazing audiovisual pieces that use Hydra for the visual and we also collaborated back then with the piece titled KAKOFONI ORQUESTRA on fxhash.

After learning about how to implement the GIF-saving feature for this piece I start to work more on the animated visual to look as subtle and warm as possible. I tried to put more feedback and blending modulations with brightness adjustment until it finally started to look like what I wanted.

The next thing was figuring out how the piece looks in the live mode. Usually, any visual that is coded on Hydra will always follow the resolution of the browser and looking at some past Hydra pieces that I created, I always put codes that will adjust the visual so that it stays the same (or almost the same) whenever the resolution was changed with the help of .scale() function.

But since I want to achieve the impression of a room, I decided to not add these codes and just let it be as it is so that the piece will always follow the browser window resolution. I must say that I'm pleased with this decision when I tried to test it with the full-screen preview. Been also thinking about how it might look when this piece is projected onto a big wall inside an empty and large dark room.

A reminder about this decision is that whenever the collector wants to do a screen capture and the GIF-saving feature, they need to adjust their browser resolution in the live mode and then do a reload for their minted iteration link so that it will be adjusted to the current resolution change. If the browser window resolution was changed without reloading, the piece won't adjust its resolution.

The video below is a demonstration of how the piece's resolution could be adjusted.

These are my thoughts and words about this piece. More or less, It was finally finished and minted. Thank you so much for reading this article and pardon my lack of articulation with each phrase/paragraph that you might find confusing to understand. Hope you find the meaning that I want to deliver within this piece.

All the best always <3