Always on the look out for tiny but interesting generative art samples, I came across a tweet by Martin Kleppe (no longer a twitter users it seems) with an intriguing snippet of code and some suggestions for alternatives. I thought that this might work in processing so decided to give it a go.

Here is the Python version of Martin's original code.

size(1024, 1024)
background(0)

for x in range(0, 256):
for y in range(0, 256):
if (x ^ y) % 9:
rect(x _ 4, y _ 4, 4, 4)

Martin suggested replacing 9 with 5, 17 or 33 to get different patterns but I think the original works very nicely.

It could be an aerial view of a city with repeating blocks of buildings. Also, it reminds me of a previous job where I might spend days looking at microprocessor chips either through a high powered camera or microscope, or in some cases, an electron microscope.