*First let's ask Wikipedia.
"In mathematics, a Voronoi diagram is a special kind of decomposition of a given space, e.g., a metric space, determined by distances to a specified family of objects (subsets) in the space. These objects are usually called the sites or the generators (but other names are used, such as "seeds") and to each such object one associates a corresponding Voronoi cell, namely the set of all points in the given space whose distance to the given object is not greater than their distance to the other objects. It is named after Georgy Voronoi, and is also called a Voronoi tessellation, a Voronoi decomposition, or a Dirichlet tessellation (after Lejeune Dirichlet)."
*So, that was great, and absolutely important, and laudable hard work and a credit to the immortal memory of Georgy Feodosevich Voronoi (1868-1908). Nowadays "Voronoi" looks like this:
http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/stipple
*Then there's all this stuff, too:
"Credits and sources
"The StippleGen source code is available as part of the StippleGen .zip file. To run the code from source, you'll need to download Processing, and install the Toxic Labs Library and the ControlP5 library.
"Much of the "heavy lifting" of our code is really done by the Toxic Labs Library. This includes the Voronoi cell calculation code, the polygon clipping code, and the code to determine whether or not a given point is within a given polygon. We were able to replace a number of complicated functions that we had written with simple library calls, without loss in performance. This is superbly useful software.
"Our code also uses the excellent ControlP5 library for the GUI elements.
"Thanks also to Dan Newman for helping calling attention to TSP and stipple art for use in the context of Eggbot, and particularly for documenting it on our wiki.
"Additional inspiration:
"Stipple Cam from Jim Bumgardner. Our first stipple drawing code in Processing was based on this project.
"MeshLibDemo.pde A demo of Lee Byron's Mesh library, by Marius Watz."
*So, that first paragraph is obviously pretty fiercely arcane, but that messy, complex, open-ended "set of credits and sources" is one big network-society glob of acculturation and aestheticization. Not just that they do it – but that they do it on the network, where a wondering mankind can see it, distributing tools and uploading demos, with a nice polite protocol and a value-system.
*That is a scattered yet unified set of contemporary tech-artists, busily deciding what aspects of development show promise, and where those tools should be pushed in future. They're generating the novelty, and also making the inner-workings visible on the web. They're the leather-aproned crafts-folk at the forge of the New Aesthetic. If you look for them, you can see them at it hammer and tongs.
*So, the next question to ask is, "how well do you have to know Voronoi before you can 'see' Voronoi?" Do you have to be a math guy to really-really see Voronoi – do tuples and set theory need a living presence in your brain? Is it enough to be just a coder dude, or a graphics girl, with a plug-in toolset of Voronoi? Or, is it gonna be enough to be a visually-aware flaneur, able to point and say "Hey, that looks so voronoid!"
*What's the slider-bar on the New Aesthetic – when are you sufficiently up-to-speed to 'see like a digital device'?
*I doubt that question will ever have a definitive answer. Obviously complete unawareness of all visual technology is the basic, blissful-infant zero-point there, but there's no way to measure the top. There's always some painter with a better eye, or some musician with a better ear; somebody with perceptions so keen that they make others look benighted by comparison. This seems to be particularly true of guys who write software.
*Even Voronoi, who's been dead since 1908, doesn't "get Voronoi."
