Rests of a Fire
by Chakir Ali, posted on December 1, 2025
Who I am
My name is Chakir ALI (First name Chakir, like Shakira without the A). My name is also Griz, Gray, Gris astre, etc…
I am an artist based in Geneva. I specialise in animation, illustration and anything 3D. I am a big fan of long boring nature documentaries, and as such, I’ve always loved working with culture and sciences such as for SFITS, CVI and the library of Geneva.
I have a cat. Her name is Kitty. She turned 18 years old this year.
Here is a picture of her. 😀
Idea
These images are the many residues of fire, and perhaps the many rests of my fire within, reduced, dithered, and demultiplied.
I also wanted to relearn how to code from scratch, and understand all of the coding logic without external help (except with the help of Tim).
I think the title of these gifs make them look a bit more evocative than simple particles moving around lol. Check them out!
At the start of this project, Tim asked me if my creative coding could be a representation of who I am. Personally, the question of “who I am” is one that continuously sends a chill down my spine, vis à vis people’s reactions to me.
In a nutshell, the story of who I am is a history of affordance.
As a [redacted text], I keep a lot of what I am hidden away for security reasons. Perhaps it is more out of fear than anything, and this fear is a source of ostracisation, even within myself.
I felt that those very fears over my security greatly diminished my creativity and openness. These gifs and that question of representating who I am, in a sense, made me feel very frustrated, because they reminded me exactly of how I haven’t been able to do just that for so long.
Then, the titles of these gifs, the movements of the particles, and the colors I selected, were exactly what I had control over. Albeit minimal, diminished and dying, I felt that they were what’s left of my creativity, of the things I allowed myself to show in my creative process.
And for the most part, that made me feel very sad and stifled. A fire whose sole strangulating smoke is its biggest presence.
This is what I’ve painstakingly learned, and I’ve decided today to make that fire burn a little bit brighter.
Process
The code is essentially a bunch of arcs being called i n a for loop, and being driven by mapping functions, cos, sin and tan functions that fluctuate and get edited to change the shape of the path of the particles.
Here is part of my code and the terminal in which I tried to convert my gifs to 1080p mp4 files… and succeeded!!
A little zoom on the code.
I wanted to have the arc be controlled by variables x and y for positions, w and h for width and heights of the arcs.
But then I realized that method was harder for me to visualise than just having a long arc() function with all of my equations in there. It was easier to understand… I also had to brush up on my trigonometry.
Will add more pictures!
A favorite piece of code
A favourite piece of code? Why, none other than the iconic println(“Hello, world!”)…!!
But in all seriousness, in my code, I really liked playing with the mapping function.
Here, for example, is the variable that is used to edit the strokeweight of these arcs.
float sw = map(sin(radians(frameCount) + i * 15), -1, 1, 1, 12);
Find me on…
Any social media under the name “grisastre”.