I Once Wrote Code to Make Endless Chickens
Then, my laptop got stolen.
In the early days of our relationship, my husband would drive me into the north Georgia mountains where he grew up. He’d insist that the scenery was unremarkable, but this was my only exposure to pastoral landscapes outside of video games, and I found myself bewitched even by beef cattle.
Once, we discovered a windowed box dispensing free copies of a local magazine. For whatever reason, the cover — predominantly black, overgrown with large, stylized flowers, and a pink-faced white chicken standing starkly against it — set off fireworks in my brain. I don’t know if it was the chicken’s heavenly expression or the fact that the scene looked pulled from a 90s cartoon, but I liked it — really liked it — and I wanted to look at it forever.
I placed the magazine carefully in the glove compartment before transferring it into my clear plastic briefcase. This briefcase, which I returned to periodically for a hit of dopamine, once housed cheap paintbrushes; now it protected the most inspirational paper-things I owned: clippings, illustrations, a doodle of a twenty-eyed monster I discovered in the lost-and-found in eighth grade, and now this chicken.
At first, I wanted to draw the chicken by hand. Most birds, I learned, begin with a circle. Then, you lift your pencil, move it down and to the right (or left), and draw a bigger circle. Two sweeping arcs encase these circles, and you can get creative with the tail. This reliably forms the basis of a folk art chicken.
But, I needed more, and I wanted them to look just like the one on my precious magazine cover. I knew a thing or two about procedural generation, and, at this point I considered myself an expert on cartoon bird anatomy, so it wasn’t hard to draw out the schematics of a computer program that could produce for me endless folk art chickens.
For years I worked on it: in coffee shops, airports, bars on hotel rooftops. In front of the TV in my grandparents’ small house in Hyderabad, surrounded by mosquitoes and mango trees. Mostly at odd hours in my home office.
I got quite far, in fact, producing geometric birds standing against quilt-like backdrops en masse.
One night, after coming home late, I left my backpack in the back seat of my husband’s car while we stopped at a restaurant for hot orange tea. When we returned, the windows were shattered. My backpack was gone, along with my infinite chickens-in-progress. The next morning, my laptop’s location services came online and led me to a construction dumpster 6 miles from me.
The whole ordeal was obviously deflating, but also begged a question: what is the value of indulging oneself in something so painstaking, when the guarantee of payoff is virtually zero? Was writing a software so esoteric – which was ultimately stolen and thrown in the trash – just a waste of precious time? Or, are the moments I spent transfixed, tinkering, and accumulating artifacts of experimentation valuable just because they make my brain light up?
I believe the answer, for me, is yes. And in every medium I’ve explored since then, I began with a chicken.
