Dave Whyte, known as beesandbombs, is a generative artist and motion designer based in Dublin, Ireland, who makes short looping animations built from code.,He holds a PhD in Physics from Trinity College Dublin, and has made thousands of five-to-ten-second loops since 2011, exploring procedural form and perception one simple shape or pattern at a time.,
Whyte's interest in generative art began while he was studying physics, when he started using the plotting software Mathematica for its graphics functions. He then began imitating the GIF artists he followed on Tumblr, particularly davidope, before a friend recommended he try Processing, the software he has used almost exclusively ever since because it lets him sketch out ideas quickly without the long render times of dedicated 3D programs. After completing his PhD, Whyte decided against an academic postdoc and began freelancing full time once he had enough commissions to support himself.He worked under the same name as his Tumblr account, Bees & Bombs, which had already helped popularize coded GIF animation.His working method often starts from a single shape or pattern, which he tries to render in two different ways before finding a compelling way to alternate between them, or from arrays of identical shapes set slightly out of phase with each other.
When four of Whyte's pieces debuted on SuperRare, the Museum of Crypto Art acquired all four within 24 hours.In 2021 he contributed Shimmer, an edition of 75 made with JavaScript and p5.js, to Social Codes, a group exhibition of coding-based artists on Feral File curated by Casey Reas.,His animations have also reached beyond the crypto art world.,One of his loops illustrated a Quanta Magazine article about a mathematical paper on uniform point distributions.Outside programmers have also tried recreating his pieces in other languages, admiring how he combines simple shape transformations into results greater than the sum of their parts.
