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Generative art over the years

blog.veitheller.de

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Re: Generative art over the years

#41

Post by grufkork »

phlsa wrote: post #33

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

I’d like to recommend vvvv. It’s a node-based version of C# that is always runtime. The edit-compile-run loop is eliminated so you can tweak both constants and behaviour instantly. For a processing-like drawing interface I’d recommend the built-in Skia library which I think processing is modelled after. VVVV overall is definitely a steeper learning curve, but it’s very powerful as you can use any .net libraries, 3D graphics, shaders and much more. Shaders in particular is a great tool that lends itself to a dataflow representation.

Touchdesigner is more popular and I suppose declarative, but vvvv is more general purpose and similar to the processing workflow. It’s a very weird tool I’ve used for everything between MIDI instruments, live installations, escape rooms, VJ rigs and, well, proc art.

Re: Generative art over the years

#42

Post by sevenseacat »

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!

Re: Generative art over the years

#45

Post by LysPJ »

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...

Re: Generative art over the years

#46

Post by Brendinooo »

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...

Re: Generative art over the years

#47

Post by MisterTea »

p5v wrote: post #28

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 T…

> I ended up being a student of the great Frieder Nake

That is quite wonderful.

> Sadly, AI-generated imagery sort of killed the mojo of algorithmic art for me,

I am surprised you did not specifically mention Nake's provocative writing "There Should Be No Computer-Art" : https://dam.org/museum/essays_ui/essays/there-should-be-no-c...

His argument is still 100% relevant in the age of AI.

Re: Generative art over the years

#48

Post by monokai_nl »

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.

Re: Generative art over the years

#49

Post by futura_heavy »

abrookewood wrote: post #11
atum47 wrote: post #7

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…

Machines can quickly build repeatable, efficient, 'perfect' clothing - but people still knit.

I’ve been a fan of Libs Elliott’s generative quilting patterns for years and years: https://pin.it/4Mhpfc5OK

Re: Generative art over the years

#50

Post by dfxm12 »

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...

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