The project
How it works
Au loin generates landscapes that scroll without end. Here is how they are built and how one of them becomes a canvas.
The seed
A seed is a text of your choice, a word or a sentence. The site turns it into a number, and that number decides the shape of the terrain and the position of the trees, houses and boats. Change the seed and the landscape changes entirely.
Always the same landscape
The calculation is deterministic: the same seed and the same style always give the same image, byte for byte, on any screen. This is what makes it possible to find a landscape again, share it by link and print it as you saw it.
The styles
A style sets the colours, the light and the time of day of the landscape. You choose one in the player menu, and the same seed is redrawn at once. The styles on offer are:
- Mediterranean
- Paris
- Japan
- American West
- Outback
- New York
- Mars
- Forest
- Jungle
- China
- Egypt
- Cave Painting
Landscapes can be seen at several times of day, and Mars and Cave Painting only at night:
- morning
- noon
- evening
- night
Simple shapes
The landscape is made of simple shapes: flat areas of colour, overlapping planes, terrain, trees, houses and boats reduced to the essentials. This is a deliberate starting point, and the styles will grow richer over time.
China and Egypt are exceptions: they are drawn in ink on paper, with washes and a paper grain, after {Shan, Shui}* by Lingdong Huang. Cave Painting is also an exception: it is painted on a rock wall, lit by a torch. See the credits.
From landscape to canvas
Pause the landscape, choose the part you want to keep, then order. The print is saved, printed on a canvas stretched over a wooden frame and delivered in France. The details of formats and prices are on the offer page.
The atelier collections
The atelier collections do not scroll: they are still images, computed once by a program written by the author, then chosen one by one. Each print is printed as it is, with no seed and no framing, on the same canvas as the landscapes. The Flowers collection draws on nonflowers by Lingdong Huang.
The author
Au loin is a project by Wilfried Fournier, of the Code & Canvas studio. Each landscape is calculated by an engine written for this project alone.