Folding Lines

When I visited MoMA in the summer of 2026, I saw Samia Halaby’s Kinetic Paintings. I looked into her work afterward and was inspired by her approach to using a material for what it is capable of doing.

I was also spending time learning C++, and I wanted to try something like that myself. I wanted to let machines do machine things: maths, pixels, shapes, sequences, and repetition.

The aspect I wanted to add was human interaction. How could a person interact with the machine while it was doing these things? A MIDI controller felt like the right tool: a physical way to play with the system and influence what happens on the screen.

Folding Lines is a live visual instrument built with C++, raylib, a screen, and a small MIDI controller. It opens with an animated sequence of folding diagonal lines, then moves into a performance mode where the controller’s pads place visual events on a 3 × 3 canvas grid.

There are four visual tools: folding lines, radial line circles, parallel lines, and square fields. The rotary controls adjust color, thickness, spacing, intensity, repeat offset, and the number of repeats. Other controls toggle repetition, collapse the forms, or wipe the canvas.

Each input sets a process in motion. Forms appear, repeat, fold, and transform over time, making the drawing a performance shared between the person and the system. Keyboard controls also make it possible to try the project without a MIDI controller.