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Why Love Generative Art?

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61–70 of 85 posts

Re: Why Love Generative Art?

#61
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with generative art is There are no problems. It's just another art form. > I’ve met a lot of people who hate all things digital, as well as a lot of people who get what I do and love it So just ignore them. There is always an audience who will appreciate your work. > I explored what it might take to make a living from generative art I'm doing that currently as well, but I think it always will be my sid…

> There are no problems. It's just another art form. :) You are right, of course. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The "problems" I list are based on unspoken assumptions about what the goal is. > So just ignore them. There is always an audience who will appreciate your work. Totally agree, and ignoring them is an option. I'm personally interested in hearing out the haters and learning what valuable lessons are…

I feel it's the same with music. You can't really 'tune' a Katy Perry song more to appeal a classic music lover and vice versa.

> my story just isn't compelling to people who...

Your work should tell a story, and the method of creation is secondary. I totally appreciate if you used equations I can't even grasp, but my mother shouldn't know about that at all and she can still consider it nice.

There was a guy who posted here on HN, he used machine learning to create art and his mistake was that he revealed his method, the magic was gone, since it was not obvious how it was made.

I'm not a great artist or anything, I just see a pattern that art that grabs people's attention has some kind of message or relevance to the current age.

Re: Why Love Generative Art?

#62
In light of this article, new genres like glitch/aesthetic/simpsonswave are just versions of generative art. All that stuff takes some simple code to augment images, then MS paint comes in to superimpose an 80's car, some green lines, and a statue of david, haha.

I really enjoyed reading about the newer AI methods though.

Here are some of my drawings :)

https://www.instagram.com/p/BY_yHsuB8nF/?taken-by=kolmogorov...

https://www.instagram.com/p/BklsIsBlmij/?taken-by=kolmogorov...

https://www.instagram.com/kolmogorov_smooth_jazz/

Re: Why Love Generative Art?

#63

Nice to see generative art discussed on the frontpage. :) I think the next several years will be really interesting for generative art. Consumers are getting more interested in it, and some of our tools and collective knowledge has really grown since the days of Flash and before. In some cases, we are revisiting old techniques with new & easier-to-use hardware, like AxiDraw pen plotters. It's allowing artists to iter…

Absolutely beautiful work. My childhood love for sketching and doodling grew into a love for digital art (Macromedia Flash 5 anyone?) and later generative art. Anytime I'd try my hand at with generative I spent way too long trying to get a setup or a workflow together. Eventually they get left in the island misfit quarter-done side projects well before I've gotten to playing with images. Any advice? Stories on workfl…

Thank you! This is all in JavaScript with some open source tools I'm building[1]. I write about my process in a few places: often on Twitter, recently in a TinyLetter, and occasionally more in-depth on my blog[2].

I'd suggest Tim Holman's GenerativeArtistry[3] as a starting point to get back into it.

Good luck! Feel free to ping me any time on Twitter or IG if you have any Qs about generative art.

[1] - https://github.com/mattdesl/canvas-sketch

[2] - https://mattdesl.svbtle.com/

[3] - https://generativeartistry.com/

Re: Why Love Generative Art?

#64
post #22

The problem with generative art is not that it isn’t considered art by everyone. The main problems are: - It is very difficult to value. One can’t see at a glance whether it took time or skill to create. And similar to other types of art that involve mechanical reproduction, e.g. photography, generative art can be produced on demand, it’s not irreplaceable like a sculpture or painting is. - It usually lacks a good st…

I also love generative art ... mostly .... and I've made quite a bit but ....... The problem I have is generally when it appears to me it didn't require much effort. Making a program that draws random dots, random rectangles, random lines, is almost a rite of passage for new programmers. A lot of generative art looks like hardly many more steps beyond that. Draw 100 rectangle each slightly smaller and rotated from th…

I work traditionally and understand the greater sense of accomplishment when you put in more effort. For me it's usually about the journey I took to solve the problem more than the actual outcome so I definitely appreciate it more. Outside of myself though I think most viewers of art don't care if it took 10 minutes, 10 days, or 10 years.

Re: Why Love Generative Art?

#65
I was hoping it would mention Jared Tarbell, as I discovered his work back when he was making it on http://complexification.net, thanks to StumbleUpon (may it rest in peace). Too bad the article didn’t mention this site of his, but to be fair I didn’t know about levitated, so I was glad to learn that.

Re: Why Love Generative Art?

#66
Electric Sheep is generative crowdsourced evolutionary art that enables viewers to vote for their favorite "sheep" animations to send them off to the pasture to breed with other user's favorites with genetic cross-over and mutation.

So it just gets better and better, in response to what people actually enjoy!

https://electricsheep.org/#/about

http://scottdraves.com/sheep.html

http://scottdraves.com/flame.html

http://flam3.com/

http://flam3.com/flame.pdf

Once I fell asleep while watching Star Trek Deep Space 9 on Netflix, and then half woke up after the Electric Sheep screen saver has kicked back in but I didn't realize it, so my brain struggled for several minutes trying to make sense of the never-ending wormhole sequence that I though was an out-of-control shuttlecraft lost in space!

Re: Why Love Generative Art?

#67
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also love generative art ... mostly .... and I've made quite a bit but ....... The problem I have is generally when it appears to me it didn't require much effort. Making a program that draws random dots, random rectangles, random lines, is almost a rite of passage for new programmers. A lot of generative art looks like hardly many more steps beyond that. Draw 100 rectangle each slightly smaller and rotated from th…

Don't forget that 99+% of the population can not program at all.

[deleted]

Re: Why Love Generative Art?

#69
Disclaimer: I come more from the contemporary art world even than from the tech world. (Much of my job is looking at thousands of art exhibitions from around the world each month. My little non-profit publishes the ones we think are most important to see at the moment so that the public can learn about them for free even if they aren't rich collectors.)

First, I want to say that I'm thinking about Generative Art in the context of "contemporary art," which despite sounding like it could apply to literally any art made in the current era actually denotes a specific social context and the set of people, institutions and works that constitute it. Some people call this "fine art" but I don't like the implied hierarchy and value judgment of that term. I think there's a separate case to be made that Generative Art is actually more akin to important historical craft and decorative arts traditions, which have great artistic importance and matter much more to many people than contemporary art. I mean "contemporary art" the way people usually mean it when they start institutions called "Museum of Contemporary Art" or "Contemporary Art Center."

Generative Art qua "contemporary art" seems to fit a pattern that you see a lot in startups: people who are into coding and technology enter a given field that they aren't so involved with and start applying their skills to it. As far as I know, the AirBnB people weren't running bed and breakfasts at the beginning, they were looking for problems to solve with technology. That worked great, for the most part: they identified concrete problems and found ways to solve them.

The odd thing about Generative Art, which seems to fit this pattern insofar as the energy and interest is coming much for from the tech side than the art side, is that art doesn't have any problems because it has no clear purpose. Any idea you may individually have about what art should do, or what makes art "good," can be easily defeated by famous counterexamples. Lots of important art declines to be beautiful, to start interesting conversations, or to care at all about the history of art, for example. In other words, no one ever sat on a bench in a contemporary art museum looking at paintings and, chin-on-fist, said "there has to be a better way!"

This article goes to great effort to insert Generative Art into the history of art, more or less finding math-y geometric art or artists who used algorithms. These artists were often doing so to resist earlier ideologies about the genius of the master's hand, or to pretend to escape their own subjectivity, rather than out of an enthusiasm for visual algorithms as a craft. I'd suggest those interested in contextualizing Generative Art historically also research "process art," which normally had a messier aesthetic but, like Generative Art, posited the activity of producing the artwork as the most expressive aspect of the artist's practice. The act of painting, for process art, would be more important than the painting itself, almost closer to performance art than any other movement. That certainly seems to fit the Generative Art ethos, which is often about the construction of a specific activity that leads to an uncertain result. That said, process art is associated with the 1970's.

We're about two decades into a deep rejection of art movements, which are inextricable from the problematic, exclusive teleology of modernism. A certain kind of person with a certain kind of power used to dictate what forms and ideas were important, and rewarded artists who fit the narrative and, well, were the same race and gender as all the other successful artists. These days, artists are generally expected to be individuals rather than to be swept up in some cultural wave. To be part of a group with such a narrow direction ("we make art using cutting-edge software!") subordinates the individuality of each artist and, I think, compromises their efforts to be successful in the field of contemporary art.

Therefor, I think that the project of including Generative Art as a movement into contemporary art discourse is probably quixotic. Instead, I'd suggest that we're likely to see more and more individual artists incorporate these tools, not just because they're neat tools but in service of their own unique aims. Simon Denny, for example, engages heavily with digital and start-up culture, but he does so (I would argue) from a place of critique and fascination about what the state of technology implies about both current society and human beings on some kind of fundamental level. I don't doubt that an individual artist could exclusively use Processing to make their work and have an art career. But they would need to make the case for themselves, rather than for Generative Art, and in my opinion the less they position themselves as representing a craft-driven community the more likely they are to be successful.

I did want to say that I really appreciate the effort in this article to highlight the contributions of women to Generative Art. This is very much in keeping with where the art world is at the moment. Just like tech, art has been the subject of extreme discrimination that is only just beginning to be improved, and there is broad consensus about that within the art world.

Re: Why Love Generative Art?

#70
post #22

The problem with generative art is not that it isn’t considered art by everyone. The main problems are: - It is very difficult to value. One can’t see at a glance whether it took time or skill to create. And similar to other types of art that involve mechanical reproduction, e.g. photography, generative art can be produced on demand, it’s not irreplaceable like a sculpture or painting is. - It usually lacks a good st…

The "difficult to value" part seems like a problem for artists and the art business rather than for art appreciation? I suppose Patreon might help to some extent? It can be used to fund the artist rather than buying (and therefore needing to value) specific items.

To some extent, "generated by computer science techniques" seems like an interesting story? Maybe understanding how computer programs are designed and used is a specialized taste.

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