For my midterm project, I wanted to create a “disappearing attractor”. The idea is that one object attracts the other, and just as the attracted object gets close to its target, the target disappears. One inspiration is the book “Who Moved My Cheese?” by Dr. Spencer Johnson, which I’ve never read, but dig the concept. Life is in fact always changing, and how often I can be solely focused on the end goal and miss how the process is actually key to my evolution. So I’ve essentially created this scenario in a Processing sketch. Each time the blue dot approaches the red dot, the red dot disappears and re-spawns in a new location.
The addition of the green dots came about as I contemplated the Qabalistic ideas of Partzufim Theory as explained by Rubaphilos Salfluere. In this system, the conscious mind is of a male gender and the unconscious mind female, with the uniting force being Love, or romantic love in its lower form. The unconscious here is collectively referred to as the container of everything that lies outside of consciousness (not to be confused with the subconscious, which is a special situation represented elsewhere in the system).
According to the famous esoteric axiom, “As above, so below”, the inner world is the outer world, and vice versa. This means that our external reality, everything that is “not us”, is the unconscious contents of our mind projected outward. So everything in our external reality is literally a reflection of our internal unconscious and is therefore created by that unconscious.
If this process were overlaid onto the romantic pursuit between a man and a woman, the green dots could well represent a woman’s emotions that a barbaric man would ignore in his pursuit. Since he is unable to avoid hurting her, she does not allow him to reach the goal. If this process were overlaid onto the esoteric pursuit of Illumination, the conscious mind would need to become aware of the contents of the unconscious (green dots) in order to court the representation of the unconscious (red dot) and wed himself to the unconscious.
If a Genetic Algorithm were applied to this, perhaps as a goal for the second half of the semester, the male in this simulation to learn how to approach the female while being careful to not disturb her emotions (green dots). If he can find his way to the female without disturbing any of the green dots, he will reach his goal. But he only has 28 days to do this before the whole cycle starts all over again - ha!