SELF-ORGANIZATION
(through many iterations of a median filter)
Many, if not all things have a tendency to self-organize in one way or another. If you repeat the same action over and over again, these self-organized structures emerge.
The median filter is normally used to reduce noise in an image (1). In this work, I showcase the self-organizing properties of the median filter.
In the ‘parent’ directly below—the first generation of this image—there are 300 x 5 randomly generated black and white pixels. Using specific settings for the median filter, these random pixels will slowly but indefinitely grow. In its growth, it will gradually self-organize, as you can see further below, in the ‘child’ that results from several thousand iterations of the median filter.
parent:
child (scroll (→) to see the entire process):
The original 300 x 5 pixels were placed at the left side of the canvas. By applying the median filter several thousand times, these pixels slowly expanded to the right. At first, this happened rather irregularly (although you can already identify certain structures). Then, as time progresses (scrolling to the right means going forwards in time), a strict order of vertical lines starts to spontaneously emerge from the chaos.