Rendering Minipix
At the core of Minipix is the idea of an image render. These are self-contained blocks of code that take an image as the input and output a new one. Rachel Hays talks about "commitment to an ongoing format for ideas" and this structure enables that. Similar to the author's main art codebase, it makes the work maintainable and composable in the long run. Each renderer is independent, making it easy to add new ones over time without touching what already exists. Each addition starts with a small question that can be sketched out instead of having to think about an entire implementation.
It's only natural when working this way to attempt to stack the renderers together. To build long chains of logic by layering renderers and seeing if harmony can emerge from the collision. The experiment was tried. The renderers fought each other in unexpected ways. One of the system's core aesthetic characteristics is the ability to trace how an image has been manipulated, to maintain a sense of the original in the new output. Stacking loses this. The images become pure noise. No harmony, just static.
Several outputs from this experimentation were preserved for posterity:
