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Generative art over the years

231 points by evakhoury

by p5v

3 subcomments

Generative art was my first love. By accident, I ended up being a student of the great Frieder Nake (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frieder_Nake) and that changed my future trajectory.
Eventually, this led me to writing my own indie book on generative art with Go: https://p5v.gumroad.com/l/generative-art-in-golang, which led me to a talk I gave on GopherCon Europe: https://youtu.be/NtBTNllI_LY?si=GMePA3CfVQZJq2O7
These were great times, but I think the book is not worth buying anymore. Sadly, AI-generated imagery sort of killed the mojo of algorithmic art for me, and I've been trying to get back to it for the last few years.

by monokai_nl

2 subcomments

I really like generative art. It's part intellectual ingenuity, part aesthetics.
I've only realized later that it had a name, but since I've had my hands on a computer, I've been making generative graphics with code one way or another. First in GWBasic, later in Flash, and more recently in JavaScript.
In my view generate art is art created by an autonomous system. The trick is to balance randomness with intent and to create clever algorithms with maximum visual impact. Nowadays the term "generative" is more associated with AI, and to differentiate it from AI Art, I call it Algorithmic Art now. I wrote a piece about it: https://monokai.com/articles/algorithmic-art-as-a-subset-of-...
And I know NFT's are frowned upon here, but I've always found Algorithmic Art a perfect match for NFT's. Where before I created autonomous systems that ephemerally generated different outputs each run, now you can store specific outputs on the blockchain by just storing the PRNG seed. There are platforms that facilitate this, like Artblocks or Fxhash.

by ww520

4 subcomments

Years ago. I dabbled in generative art. I even wrote a small Forth-like language to control the generation. It's basically controllable chaos with math or chaos within bounding patterns. The results were often unexpected. Some examples: https://imgur.com/a/UjWLy7s

by nsainsbury

0 subcomment

Fellow generative artist here :waves:
I started out in all the usual ways - inspired by Daniel Shiffman making generative art first using Processing, then p5.js, and now mostly I create art by writing shaders. Recently after being laid off from my job, I actually took my obsession further and released my very first mobile app - https://www.photogenesis.app - as a homage to generative art.
It's an app that applies various generative effects/techniques to your photos, letting you turn your photos into art (not using AI). I'm really proud of it and if you've been in the generative art space for a while you'll instantly recognise many of the techniques I use (circle packing, line walkers, mosaic grid patterns, marching squares, voronoi tessellation, etc.) pretty much directly inspired by various Coding Train videos.
I love the generative art space and plan to spend a lot more time coming up doing things in this area (as long as I can afford it) :-)

by heliographe

1 subcomments

> I now have a small library of simulated materials: watercolor washes, dry brush strokes, felt-tip pens, cracked glaze, pencil fills. None of them are physically accurate. I’m not simulating fluid dynamics or anything like that, I don’t need to. They’re impressions, heuristics that capture enough of the character of a material to be convincing and evoke an emotion.
I find this to be a key insight. I've been working on a black-and-white film app for a while now (it's on my website in profile if you're curious), and in the early stages I spent time poring over academic papers that claim to build an actual physical model of how silver halide emulsions react to light.
I quickly realized this was a dead end because 1) they were horribly inefficient (it's not uncommon for photographers to have 50-100MP photos these days, and I don't want my emulator to take several minutes to preview/export a full image), and 2) the result didn't even look that good/close to actual film in the end (sometimes to the point where I wondered if the authors actually looked at real film, rather than get lost into their own physical/mathematical model of how film "should behave").
Forgetting the physics for a moment, and focusing instead on what things look and feel like, and how that can be closely approximated with real time computer graphics approach, yielded far better results.
Of course the physics can sometimes shed some light on why something is missing from your results, and give you vocabulary for the mechanics of it, but that doesn't mean you should try to emulate it accurately.
I read this interview with spktra/Josh Fagin and how he worked on digitally recreating how light scatters through animation cels, which creates a certain effect that is missing from digital animation - and it was validating to read a similar insight:
"The key isn’t simulating the science perfectly, but training your eye to recognize the character of analog light through film, so you can recreate the feeling of it."
https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/dangerous-light

by xrd

1 subcomments

It is worth mentioning this site when talking about generative art, IMHO.
https://bauble.studio/
And
https://toodle.studio/
Both written by the same guy who wrote the Janet for Mortals book, about the Janet language, which supports both those sites.
I'm really wanted to see if I could combine those tools to make Arabic art inspired generative art. Anyone know of any projects which are doing that? There is a lot of crossover in modern generative art and ancient Arabic art.

by atum47

3 subcomments

One of my hobbies back in college was to write fun js fiddles [1]. It was super fun to have the time and curiosity to investigate something. I've been missing it more and more each passing day. I was super curious about generative art, procedural generation... I guess it is a negative term now, with AIs being able to create such complex stuff as video, audio and God knows what else. I was once working on a memes app where users could submit images. I was knee deep in how to identify duplicate images to keep my meme database "clean", so I was investigating cosine similarities... Few months went by and AI can do that better. Thats how ai feel now: AI can do it better, so why bother?
1 - https://jsfiddle.net/u/victorqribeiro

by LysPJ

0 subcomment

If you consider the patterns in nature to be art (which I do!), you might enjoy the book "The Computational Beauty of Nature" by Gary William Flake. [0]
The subtitle is "Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation".
It's a wonderful book to own as a physical copy, and the contents are very inspiring for generative art.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Computational-Beauty-Nature-Explorati...

by acomjean

0 subcomment

P5.js is pretty great.
I used it create art, basically taking animal photos and using the dna sequence from that animal to recreate the photo using the 4 letters. (I did four passes using different size letters and layered in Gimp). People seem to like them, and they got into an art:science show.
https://p5js.org/
Coding train has a lot of videos on using p5.js Some of them more sophisticated than the childish iconography appears. It’s pretty fun.
https://thecodingtrain.com/tracks

by hparadiz

1 subcomments

I used to help run an art website and had to figure out how to do taxonomy for art. Imagine if someone asked you to put all art into categories.
One major truth discovered:
Art is always in the eye of the beholder.

by francoi8

0 subcomment

One Lab is an Android/iOS app I develop that has quite a few generative algorithms (mostly pixel shaders). You can combine them with the various effects in the app to create your custom generative stack.
Link: https://onelab.ilixa.com/

by paul_manias

0 subcomment

If you enjoy generative art then check out the Reddit group r/generative for daily posts from generative artists on the Internet. There's lots of good stuff there, and much of it is animated.
https://www.reddit.com/r/generative/

by sandbags

1 subcomments

My Dad and I are doing a generative art experiment with his HP-7475A pen plotter.
I wrote an application called Axo which is a graph-based programming tool that outputs paths to be converted into HP-GL, SVG, or G-Code (we've used this for engraving with a laser cutter). Axo is an homage to Reaktor, Patternodes, ArtMatic & Max, all applications I have enjoyed using.
Here's a gallery of some of the bits I am happiest with so far: https://axo.mattmower.com/projects/mausart/gallery
At some point I want to pair the virtual image with a picture of the real-life plot. Some of the plots look great on nice paper.

by kakkun

1 subcomments

Guess it's a good place to show off my generative art library: https://github.com/thekakkun/kanoko
I use it to generate a new wallpaper every time my computer is booted.

by dfxm12

0 subcomment

My first appreciation of generative art might have been the Streets of Rage 3 OST, even if I didn't know it at the time. Composer Yuzo Koshiro utilized a tool he called "Automated Composing System" to procedurally generate a bunch of random sequences, in an attempt to make sounds that haven't been heard before. He picked the ones he liked the best and incorporated them into the tracks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmV_r_s6JgE&list=PLE1355A8B1...

by calebm

0 subcomment

I'm a generative artist also (https://gods.art). I made a Python starter script for doing generative art: https://github.com/calebmadrigal/truthygraph.py/blob/main/tr..., as well as a web app for making pretty graphs: https://fuzzygraph.com.

by satvikpendem

0 subcomment

I used to make generative art around 15 years ago as well, seems not much has changed in this aspect (note that this is not generative AI art). A few years later I remember using Processing.js after reading The Nature Of Code by Dan Shiffman as well, fun times. How time flies.

by rtpg

0 subcomment

https://www.amazon.com.au/Generative-Design-Visualize-Progra... for anyone who is interested in a guided experience of writing this stuff, I have this book. Filled with examples, conceptual explanations (sometimes having someone explain something very simple to you is helpful!) and a lot of nice pictures.
I think there are newer versions of this book, though I haven't tried finding it. It's a hefty coffee table book as-is

by Brendinooo

0 subcomment

I remember having some spare time at my first job and being really inspired by Ben Barry's work for Facebook's f8 conference:
https://v1.benbarry.com/project/f8-conference
I ended up learning enough processing to mimic a lot of what he did with the connected dots. It was great.
I'd love to get back into this sometime! Gotta have a reason though...

by empressplay

0 subcomment

The #creativecoding and #genart tags on most social media networks will get you a front row seat to the international generative art community -- it's a very creative crowd!

by phlsa

1 subcomments

Reading this makes me want to fire up Processing [1] again. I remember spending hours and days with it in my early twenties. The immediacy of writing a few simple commands, hitting "Run" and seeing graphical output is still unsurpassed and created an almost addictive creative feedback loop that I haven't seen anywhere else yet.
[1] https://processing.org

by xcf_seetan

0 subcomment

I used to play with generative art but using genetic algorithms. Anyone remembers [0]evolvotron? I made some simple images back in 2012[1].
[0lhttps://github.com/WickedSmoke/evolvotron
[1]https://xcfgeneticart.blogspot.com/?m=1

by schmudde

0 subcomment

Been getting into Rudy Rucker, who was funded by the AutoCAD folks to do cellular automata research: https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/.
Autodesk funded some really interesting projects.

by sevenseacat

0 subcomment

Looks like equation art, which my best mate used to do a lot of back when we were at university in the mid 00's. Defining formulas for R, G and B values, and then graphing the values and packing them into images. Was kind of fun!

by albedoa

1 subcomments

> An early phyllotaxis spiral, circa 2016.
What a strange claim. How late is too late to be considered early?

by bandrami

1 subcomments

As someone who makes and enjoys generative music I've always wondered what the parallels were like in the visual and plastic arts. This is cool.

by bethekind

0 subcomment

My favorite is Brownian motion fractal art. Something about it just tickles my brain just right

by devstatic

0 subcomment

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