People use my noise function everywhere. I’ve gotten used to it, and it’s definitely cool to see.
But every once in a while I am surprised by how it is used. Today, in a set of illustrations to accompany several opinion pieces in the New York Times, it was used by illustrator Sean Dong in a number of inventive ways.
But the one that jumped out at me was this visual for the piece about Capitalism. It was elegantly done, and it also reminded me a lot of some of the earliest things I did with noise back in the day.
His illustration is a morph between the Earth as a sphere, to the Earth as a superquadric, to the Earth as a sphere displaced by my noise function. Very simple, very weird, very effective, and very familiar (to me, at least).
I remember creating a very similar sequence in my early experiments with noise. I even eventually ended up printing some of those shapes on a 3D printer.
To the readers of the NY Times his illustration hopefully conveyed the ways that Capitalism can distort our perception of reality. To me it was pure (and delightful) nostalgia.