CLOUDS is an interactive documentary featuring conversations with 40 artists, designers, and hackers who use code and collaborate on open-source toolkits. It delves into themes of creativity, invention, interactive art, simulation, computational design, data visualization, and the future of storytelling.

I contributed to CLOUDS by working on its generative system viewer architecture and developing Cosmic, an N-body generative particle system specifically made for the project.

My biggest contribution was integrating Rezanator—my custom development environment for creating and animating generative systems—into the core of the CLOUDS generative system viewer. Rezanator is a modular framework that allows an openFrameworks application to seamlessly switch between various openFrameworks “applications” (or layers), making it easier to animate complex visual elements. It also integrates ofxUI and ofxTimeline, enabling sliders and buttons to be animated and controlled just like in Adobe After Effects or Autodesk Maya. This flexible framework was essential for building dynamic generative narratives, allowing viewers to experience interactive visuals in an entirely new way—curated, animated, and immersive.

Additionally, I created Cosmic, a generative system that explores GPU-accelerated N-body particle simulations. Using GLSL shaders and GPU computation, Cosmic was able to simulate and render over 1 million (1,048,576) per-particle interactions at 60 fps, pushing the boundaries of real-time generative graphics.

Directors: Jonathan Minard & James George
Executive Producer: Golan Levin
Producer: Winslow Porter
Design Director: Bradley G Munkowitz
Visual System Architect: Reza Ali
Music Composer: Luke DuBois
Participants: Bruce Sterling, Casey Reas, Daniel Shiffman, Diederick Huijbers, Elliot Woods, Golan Levin, Greg Borenstein, Jer Thorp,Jesse Louis-Rosenberg, Jessica Rosenkrantz, Joel Gethin Lewis, John Maeda, Josh Nimoy, Julia Kaganskiy, Julian Oliver, Karolina Sobecka, Karsten “Toxi” Schmidt, Kyle Chayka,Kyle McDonald, Lindsay Howard, Marcus Wendt, Marius Watz, Nick Fox-Gieg, Paola Antonelli, Philip Whitfield, Rachel Binx, Regine Debatty, Satoru Higa, Shantell Martin,Sofy Yuditskaya, Theodore Watson, Vera Glahn, and Zachary Lieberman.
Programming: Surya Ma!u, Patricio González-Vivo, Lars Berg, Jeff Crouse, Elie Zananiri, Reza Ali, Gal Sasson, Neil Mendoza, Omer Shapira, Michael Allison, Luisa Pereira, Charlie Whitney, Jack Kalish, Jason Walters, LIA, Satoru Higa, Josh Nimoy, Jessica Rosenkrantz, Jesse Rosenberg, Marius Watz, Zach Lieberman, Shantell Martin
Interface Design: Sarah Hallacher, Erica Gorochow, Additional Sound Jules Laplace
Sound Engineer: Brett Murphy
Year: 2013