Assignment 1 (Abstract Piece Mimicry with Processing)

I chose a piece by Josef Albers called Gitterbild. It was made in 1921. It is a combination of glass, iron latticework, and bronze wire.
The main reason I like this piece and the reason it is in the MOMA exhibition is because of the color. You can really see how smart the original position of the squares are when you start shuffling them around. I have shuffled them around a lot of times and none of the other arrangements have looked near as good. It really shows that he knew what he was doing with his color. There is no real shape that you can make out of the squares so it allows the eye to focus more on the color. Initially I didn't know it was made of glass but knowing now it makes the piece more impressive to me. In the new realm of digital art it is hard to tell how much work a person put into their piece unless they tell you. With a piece like this one you know how much work he must have put in to making the glass and carefully putting it all together. It shows the physical skill as well as his amazing understanding of color theory. In fact he later became  a teacher and had a great influence on color theory.
This is the link to his work in the MOMA exhibition: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/inventingabstraction/?work=14

Here is the link to my attempt to mimic this work with Processing:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/isg173qzdmrftwl/Assignment_1.zip
I tried to match the colors as well as I could and focused on the squares and the wire. There is some randomness to the squares that have dots on them and I randomized the angle of the wire lines to make them look bent and curved. There are some interactive features. If you mouse click it will toggle between an image of the original piece and my generated one. This allows you to easily compare the two. Also, I added a feature that allows you to scramble the squares into a new order and then you can see them move into their new positions. You press the 's' key to shuffle the squares' position values then you press and hold the 'm' key to move the pieces. It takes about 5 seconds for all the pieces to move into place. You can press the 'r' key to reset to the original placement or toggling to the original image with a mouse click will reset the placement of the generated piece.