Ardi

Live Demo

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Concept

When I escaped to Seattle in the middle of the pandemic, the beautiful nature of the Pacific Northwest (PNW) healed many wounds. I also discovered many cozy coffee places and chill breweries. One of my favorite is Fair Isle. I liked the simplicity and elegance of the taproom and the bottles. I loved tasting different craft saisons with unique and local ingredients. I liked the experimentation, the surprise element, which is also what I enjoy in my own art.

When Andrew told me about the upcoming batch of Ardi, things came together.

Ardi is a collaboration with Bottleworks and Full Throttle and is the second in the series. The name is based off of humanoids and represent the evolution of the series. Last year was Orrorin, this year is Ardi.

Ardi is a piquette inspired saison made from Syrah and Mouvedre grapes with foraged elderflowers. Each beer in this series with incorporate second use fruit (the piquette aspect) and a foraged aspect.

What immediately came to mind then is to do an algorithm to generate abstract representations of clusters of elderflower. The algorithm start from an origin point, splitting to different branches iteratively, controlled by a few parameters — angle, length, and the steps it iterates before terminating. Then in the end of the branch, the algorithm draws a simple five-pedal flower.

The algorithm is meant to echo Ardi’s theme of evolution and gathering with increasing complexity. Everything starts very simple, but increasingly, through iteration and some randomness, you get this beautiful composition that I hope compliment the end result of Ardi the beer.

Ardi, a piquette-inspired farmhouse ale with Mourvèdre and Syrah grapes and steeped with foraged elderflower, 7.5% ABV, 750ml & draft, BATCH: One, PACKAGED: July 2022, by Fair Isle Brewing

Diversity

It was important to me that the algorithm has ability to generate variations of the composition through changing some parameters. For example, by changing the color and opacity of the background, flower, and stem, as well as the compositional parameters of angle, length, and step sizes, you can create your own unique Ardi composition.

Some examples below:

You can use the sliders and color pickers in the live demo to generate your own and click “export” button to save as an image file. If you like your creation, don’t hesitate to share it on social media and tag us @maximalmargin and @fairislebrewing.

I can’t wait to see your unique creations.

Installation Video

The work was showed as an installation in the Fair Isle Brewing taproom. Here is an installation video.

Technical Notes

If you are interested in the algorithms itself, it’s an L-system with the following grammar:

{
    a: "F",
    b: "F[----FX][--FX][++FX][+++FX][+++++FX]"
}

The coding train has a great tutorial on Fractal Trees - L-System if you want to learn more.