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  Passenger pigeon, version 5. The same numbers, stood up in 3D. Every year is a column of lights, and the columns bend into one long band. Yellow is still flying, blue is gone. The glow in the middle is Martha. It turned slowly and looked solid, more like a wall than a flock. So we kept going. #CreativeCoding #GenerativeArt #CodeArt

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  How Night Census gets drawn. Left: the actual loop, about thirty lines of Python. Right: what it puts on the screen. lit(yr) decides how many of a year's 223 lights stay on. The inner loop places each light with a little jitter so the columns breathe, makes the ones at the falling edge a touch brighter, and draws the rest in blue. Nothing painted by hand. Change one number and the whole piece redraws. #CreativeCoding #GenerativeArt #CodeArt #Python

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  Spring 1810, Kentucky. Alexander Wilson was riding to Frankfort when the passenger pigeons overhead thickened into one unbroken column. It took about four hours to pass. From its width and speed he estimated 2,230,272,000 birds. A century later only one was left: Martha, at the Cincinnati Zoo. She died on 1 September 1914. This study prints his flock as 22,303 dots, one per 100,000 birds. The pigeon in the middle is the part I left unprinted. #CreativeCoding #GenerativeArt #CodeArt

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  A close-up from Night Census, right where the yellow lights give way to blue. Up this close it stops reading as a chart and starts to look like weather. Every dot was placed by code; the few brighter ones along the edge are the last lights still on in their year. Which part pulls your eye first: the yellow, the blue, or the edge between them? #CreativeCoding #GenerativeArt #CodeArt

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  Passenger pigeon, version 1. Where it started. Night Census began as a chart: one light for every ten million birds, one column per year, from Wilson's estimate down to Martha in 1914. Dim, careful, lots of small print. It read more like a report than a piece. So we kept tinkering. One version a day from here, oldest to newest. #CreativeCoding #GenerativeArt #CodeArt

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  Work in progress: a first code sketch of the Carolina parakeet, once the only parrot native to eastern North America. One dot per year, spiralling out from 1583, its first written mention, to 1939, when it was declared extinct. Yellow while it lived, blue after. The last known bird, Incas, died at the Cincinnati Zoo on 21 February 1918, within a year of his mate Lady Jane. Still rough. The labels will move. #CreativeCoding #GenerativeArt #CodeArt #WIP

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  Passenger pigeon, version 2. Same chart, flipped onto warm paper. Dark ink for the birds still flying, faint red for the ones gone, the lone dot at the end is Martha. Easier to read, closer to a page from an old field guide. But red on cream is hard for a lot of eyes, so the colours had to change. #CreativeCoding #GenerativeArt #CodeArt

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  Where my logo comes from. It's drawn from DNA, but nobody's personal DNA: the public human mitochondrial reference sequence (rCRS, NCBI NC_012920.1), 16,569 bases that labs compare against. The first five, G A T C A, become numbers (A=0, C=1, G=2, T=3). They set how square each of the four frames is, how far it turns, and how much smaller the next one gets. In the middle, a figure-eight. No randomness at all. Run it again, same mark. #CreativeCoding #GenerativeArt #CodeArt

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  Passenger pigeon, version 3. The colours that stuck: yellow for the birds still flying, blue for the ones gone. Easy to tell apart for most eyes, including colour-blind ones. We also tried our own spray-paint tag on it, street style. The tag didn't stay. The yellow and blue did. #CreativeCoding #GenerativeArt #CodeArt

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  The Last Pair. When great auks were found breeding on Eldey, a rock off Iceland, in 1835, there were around fifty of them. On 3 June 1844 the last confirmed pair was killed there while sitting on their egg. A single bird was reported off Newfoundland in 1852, never confirmed. It's the empty ring at the end of the timeline. Blue for the fifty or so, yellow for the last two. The years in between are illustrative; only the ends are known. #CreativeCoding #GenerativeArt #CodeArt

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  Passenger pigeon, version 4. Out of the chart and onto a wall. The yellow and blue field in a white frame, a small museum label underneath, two little lights above. Each light is ten million birds from the flock Wilson watched in 1810. The last light is Martha, 1914. Still flat, though. Next, we tried standing it up. #CreativeCoding #GenerativeArt #CodeArt