A Million Colors

How the 'walk' algorithm walks through 1 million colors.

This version threads all one million colors in a near-continuous order — each a single step from the last through the RGB cube — and drops each beside the neighbor it most resembles. Kindred colors pool together and the picture grows as a soft, organic cloud.

Nothing organic goes in — only a finite, exhaustively specified set of colors and their likenesses, nothing invented. Yet something with body comes out: cloud, colony, tissue. The surprise lives entirely in the relations among known elements. Ask where the quality enters: at what point does similarity become morphology? Form without an intended object — the data domesticated as far as it can be, its organization getting away from us.