I have always been very fascinated with flowers, these forms have appeared naturally and effortlessly in my sketches. It's remarkable how if you take four or five lopsided, elongated ellipses rotated around a center, the shape is universally recognized as a flower.

For the past few months, I've been working on something. Phoools is a generative art series of bouquets, where each flower exists through a sequence of ones and zeros. It's the result of months of research exploring organic, gestural forms with math and code.

What I do is called generative art - think of it like writing a recipe, give it to four people, they all make the dish. But change one thing - a pinch more salt, a minute less heat - and you get something new. That's generative art. You set the rules, but you don't control exactly what comes out. Its playing with the process rather than the end result, because the end result can be of infinite varieties.

My interest, however, lies not in the botanical aspects of flowers—their anatomy, flowering patterns, or pollination processes. Instead, I'm drawn to the motif itself—the gesture, the shared agreement that allows us to see and call this simple form, in all its variations, a flower, whether it's on a kid's drawing or an intricate tile. The idea of 'flower-ness'.

To truly do justice to the infinite variations of flower forms, I needed a medium that would allow me to break it down to its most fundamental level. Computation enables the discovery of possibilities beyond what I could have imagined. Nature itself is generative. Fundamental laws of physics, chemistry, and biology define our physical reality, from which all natural phenomena and beauty emerge.

At the core of it there are three ideas -

• The petal shape - By taking any vector shape and adding slight randomness to its points, we can create an infinite combination of unique shapes. Revolving these shapes around a center forms a flower.

  

• Circle packing -In nature, flowers in a bush grow to avoid overlap or intersection. This algorithm makes sure that flowers grow only in the available space they find.

  

• Recursion - Each flower continuously checks for space around it and creates new, smaller flowers by essentially calling itself again. These "child" flowers inherit some properties from their "parent," creating a cascade of related yet unique forms.

  

An individual flower lives at a point determined by other factors not in its control. The arrangement of the whole bouquet which includes taking care of the sizes, branches, growth, population density is taken care of by a Node object. A node is an object which has just four things - ( parent node, position, size, depth ). The overarching algorithm this is based on is recursive circle packing. Circle packing is a problem of placing circles within a given space so as to not have any intersections and overlaps. An example is glass beads in a jar. Now in nature, branches, roots, leaves are always recursive, a branch splits into two which in turn grow two more each.

These factors combine to create a digital garden in bloom, making sure no single flower or composition is ever repeated. Not Real, But Recognizable

My flowers are not botanically correct or realistic. Instead, they are gestural and organic, exploring the shared cultural understanding of what constitutes a flower. This motif is ubiquitous—found in tiles, textiles, architecture, and children's drawings. It's so ingrained in our culture that it's simultaneously ever-present and invisible.

This to me is pure abstraction and I set out to capture as much variety as I could, with textures, brushes and drawing methods. At the end I am a traditional artist, extending his practise with code.

Any brush/ink/paint if you look closely is a bunch of particles - their distribution, size, shapes influences the overall texture. This led me to explore all of these

Not all brushes play nicely together. It's a delicate dance of textures, palettes, and density. Take our pen hatching technique, for instance. If flowers overlap too much, their delicate hatched lines jumble together, and suddenly, you can't tell where one flower ends and another begins. Conversely, a watercolor brush allows flowers to group together, their colors blending, as long as they're in different shades of the same hue.

Generative art’s expressivity is less about imitating painterly gestures than devising a system to produce them. Here starts the question of how do you explain your composition to a machine.

The foundation of our system is the style object - an array of arrays containing compatible brushes, backgrounds, and palettes. Our algorithm selects a style based on weighted probability, determining the composition's overall feel - from branch type to color distribution.

Each style offers multiple possibilities. A style might have three compatible backgrounds and three brush types, creating nine basic combinations. Add palettes and six other parameters, and the potential variations become vast, all while maintaining the style's core aesthetic.

Lets do a overview of all elements we have in a vibe once -

• Compatible Brush: Defines the common brush style for all flowers in a composition, like "pen" and "hatch" type.

• Compatible bg: The canvas colors. Some color palettes are divas - they only work on certain backgrounds. This prevents fashion faux pas like white flowers disappearing on a white background.

• Compatible palettes : The color palettes are also defined as an array of individual color objects with weighted probability - think of it as a color roulette wheel, where some hues have a better chance of being picked than others. I had 15 palettes by the end of this, all hand picked.

• Compatible color arrangements : This is how we distribute our chosen colors among the flowers. We could go random, cluster similar colors, have child flowers inherit parent colors, or create a repeating sequence. Each arrangement is its own function, ready to be called into action. Visually this is the one parameter that bought the most joy to me, clusters of flowers lead the eyes through the composition like a well-designed garden path.

  

• Compatible branch - have two options - lines and splines. It might seem like a small detail, but it's a joyful discovery. Even with the same flower arrangement, a hash will generate the same set of flowers in the same position, but the wavy branch calculated and drawn between them will still vary every time you see the token.

• Orientation : simply - horizontal, vertical, random, tree, grid. It dramatically affects the composition. The angle between nodes (where new flowers sprout) compounds as the image grows, injecting a controlled chaos into the final piece.

  

• density : Controls how closely flowers are packed, based on our underlying circle-packing algorithm.

  

This system mimics nature's own hierarchy. Just as a species of flower shares common traits but each bloom is unique, our digital flowers share a brush type but vary in their individual expression. The overall style of the bouquet – the "species," if you will – is chosen once. But then, each flower – our "individual" – gets to play with this style in its own way.

Taking Alejandro's p5.brush as base, I finetuned more than 12 brushes - even created two new ones: 'stitching,' reminiscent of embroidered flowers, and 'old paper,' evoking the charm of vintage botanical illustrations. By combining these brushes in different ways (stroke and hatch, hatch and fill, and so on), I've expanded our range to six distinct brush effects. These finetuned parameters lies in a range where I found the effect to be the most pleasing. I lost count, and frankly dont care about the exact number of brush variations available. But each style has 3-4 brush, I can only estimate it to be around 20 for now.

I'll be the first to say that the algorithm or the process is not that difficult or groundbreakingly new. But I think the artistic merit of any generative piece lies in directing and finetuning the potential results. Artistic merit in general lies in what you build on top of existing ideas. When I scroll through gen art platforms - the shapes I see are triangle, squares, circles - the primitives stretched and over done, because these are the only shapes that the computer understands. It breaks my heart to see this sea of sameness in the medium we all love so much. Hope this project becomes a step in a new direction, to extend traditional practices, organic lines with computation.

With all this randomness - in petal shape, branching, position, size, texture, color palettes, and orientation - the total possible combinations add up to billions of unique pieces. They never repeat, not even slightly.

For this @highlight.xyz release, only 512 pieces from this vast sea of possibilities will be made available. When you press the mint button, neither you as the buyer nor I as the artist know exactly what will emerge. Each piece is a unique snapshot, saved from the infinite possibilities and stored permanently on the blockchain. It's a moment of quantum certainty amidst a sea of limitless potential—the wave function collapses, and art is born.

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PS : I made a film about my experience through the months making on this, its out on zora now. Do check out.

https://paragraph.xyz

Phoools (the film) - a reflection

A reflection on the process of filming phoools (the film), generatively Collect NFT The process of creating the Phoools film mirrored the generative nature of the art itself. The proce...

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The process of creating the Phoools film mirrored the generative nature of the art itself. The process was less about constructing a narrative and more about allowing one to emerge organically from the chaos of just shooting a lot of footage.

It began with an incredibly abstract brief. Instead of a traditional script or storyboard, we had a shared fascination with the flower shape, aligning our team on this nebulous concept was our first major hurdle. We spent countless hours in discussion, made a conscious decision of not crafting a narrative, but building a shared understanding of the film's essence.

From the outset, we made a conscious decision to abandon traditional beginning-middle-end structures. Our aim was to capture the essence of the flower motif - a shape that had begun to haunt my perception, appearing in the most unexpected corners of reality. We approached the filming with a set of loose ideas rather than a rigid script. A delicate balance - we needed enough structure to maintain coherence, but enough freedom to allow for spontaneity and discovery. This method required a deep trust in the process, a belief that meaning would emerge from the accumulation of moments and images.

As we began filming, ideas flowed freely. Our cinematographer might spot a fleeting floral pattern in peeling paint, while our sound designer found rhythms in urban cacophony. Experimentation was celebrated and led us to unexpected locations - from the eerie stillness of an abandoned hunting lodge in Delhi's forest to the pulsing energy of street scenes, each day of shooting was an opportunity for discovery rather than a step towards a predefined goal. This mindset allowed us to remain open to serendipitous moments that often became the most powerful elements of our film.

Now the editing process, was as unconventional and generative as our filming. Faced with 120 GB of footage and no predetermined narrative, we needed a method that would allow patterns and connections to emerge organically. We used figma, an infinite canvas became our playground, a space where we could see our entire film at once. We grouped clips and screenshots according to shapes, rather than time or location, this allowed us to see visual rhythms that might have been missed in a traditional linear edit. Circles clustered with circles, organic shapes found kinship with one another, and the rigid lines of urban architecture created their own constellations. Transitions that might have seemed jarring in a traditional timeline made perfect sense when we could see the visual connections between disparate shots. The order of our images wasn't dictated by time or place, but by the visual echoes between shots, creating a dreamlike flow. This approach to editing was more than just a practical solution to working with non-narrative footage. It became an extension of the film's themes, a way of finding order in chaos, of allowing meaning to emerge from pattern. It reinforced the idea that in both nature and art, complex and beautiful structures can arise from simple rules and relationships.

The original soundtrack was churned up in a matter of a few days. Another problem of working without scripts, we realized was this - we needed the music for the edit, and the edit dictated the music. Its by the brilliant Asteroidbelttangoclub, a lot of back and forth happened. We started with a reference playlist, aligning with each others voice. Film scores are made exactly to accompany the story, which we didn't have at that point. What we had was groups of shots - fast match cuts, transitions, and a lot of shapes. I remember at one point drawing scribbly maps of how the music can build up and flow. Once we realized we had a compatible reference for the scope of what things could sound like there was a marathon of back and forth with AsteroidBeltTangoClub in which audio montages and themes were proposed to go with sections of the footage, and bpm decisions were pinned down for the audio textures in each area, enough to trust we could get into the editing The music wasn't merely accompaniment; it was a vital component of the film's DNA, influencing the rhythm of our edits even as it responded to the visual flow.

Our protagonist's journey mirrored my own experience as an artist obsessed. In the beginning, we see our character noticing floral patterns in the world around him. But as the film progresses, these observations become more than just passive recognition. The boundaries between the observer and the observed begins to dissolve. The flower shapes start to consume the character's reality, much as they had consumed my own creative vision.

The visual language we developed for Phoools is unabashedly psychedelic. This wasn't a conscious choice to create a "trippy" aesthetic, but rather an organic result of trying to faithfully represent the altered state of perception that comes with deep artistic focus. Colors bleed and blend, shapes morph and multiply. Moments of calm observation give way to frenetic sequences of pattern recognition, mirroring the ebbs and flows of creative thought. It's a visual representation of the artist's mind at work - sometimes methodical, sometimes chaotic, always in pursuit of that elusive spark of inspiration.

The everyday objects and scenes we filmed take on new significance when viewed through the lens of our floral obsession. A drain cover becomes a mandala, a tangle of hair transforms into a garden. This heightened, almost hallucinatory perception is not an exaggeration. By embracing the surreal, we've managed to create something paradoxically authentic.

Looking back, Phoools, in its final form, is a waking dream, a psychedelic journey that is about the creative process itself. This reinforced my belief in the power of generative processes, not just as a means of creating art, but as a way of exploring the very nature of creativity itself. Showed me that by surrendering to the flow of ideas, allowing narratives to emerge organically, can transform not just the art, but the artist as well.

Below are the full credits

Phoools (the Film) by @kyu_mehul
Director(s) - Aditya Mishra (@adiboivisuals) and @kyu_mehul
Edited by @adiboivisuals
Cinematographer - Jiten Bachate (@jinsenparker)
Camera Operators - Lokesh (@k4camera), Deepesh Baisla (@deepeshart) and @jinsenparker
Production designer(s): @jinsenparker & @kyu_mehul
Colorist - @adiboivisuals
Original Soundtrack - Asteroidbelttangoclub & Tyler Kiley
Additional Sound - Manu (@childofbrahma)
Stop Motion Animation and additional shots - @adiboivisuals
VFX - @kyu_mehul
Post Production Manager - Sayantan Maity (@maisayantan1)
Typography - Devang Vats (@devang_vats)
Poster - @deepeshart
Special thanks to Agam Jot Singh (@avoilamusic) and Abhinav KJ (@abhinavkj_)

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Further reading, more on the art - https://paragraph.xyz/@kyu-mehul/art