Energy is everywhere: it’s moving our bodies, buzzing around a city, growing the universe, and connecting everything within it. Perhaps the strongest symbol humans use for energy – for ideas, life, and the various incarnations of power – is light itself.

For centuries, each form of art has tried to capture the energetic luminescence of a bright light, a warm glow, a spark... if we could only draw with its pure brilliance! From Caravaggio’s diagonal beams, to Picasso drawing with light across Gjon Mili’s photographic emulsions… this pursuit persists through obsessive efforts by artists of every media.

a fortiori seeks to capture this power of light with code, output on the native illumination of modern screens. The visual deconstruction of light and its reassembly into a frozen moment produces the tangible shards of each spark – resulting in a sum of marks that exceeds the value of their individual parts. It’s then the obsessive energy of generative art’s looping and controlled randomness that enable its repeated mark making, of all types, to express the nearly-intangible intensity of light.

What one hand might communicate in drawing, with light or stick or keyboard, 100 hands would therefore say 100 times louder, clearer, and more impactfully. And if one could capture the authentic energy of traveling light in a single image, it stands to reason that 500 of these images will multiply their energy-inducing qualities together, and exponentially grow their collective power. In this idea, the medium is the message – proving the power of the medium, and its ability to generate energy.


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TENDER x Thomas Noya
December 2022

Source code is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.

a fortiori was created in p5.js and is optimized for live output in Chrome. Press these keys in live view to control the art and render high resolution versions of any token:

x = pause
y = play
1 = 1000x1000
2-9 = 2000x2000, …, 9000x9000
0 = 10000x10000
t = 12500x12500
f = 15000x15000
s = save PNG

Outputs beyond 10,000 pixels square are dependent on individual computer and browser capabilities.

10% of all primary and secondary proceeds donated directly to Girls Who Code

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