Generative art over the years

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

ww520 wrote: post #27

Lerc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may like https://c50.fingswotidun.com/ It's what I doodle with to generate images using a stack based program per pixel. Every character is a stack operation, you have 50 characters to make something special.

That's pretty neat; some of output are beautiful! Mine is also pixel coloring at the lowest level. I have a shading kernel in GPU doing the low level work, mainly applying colors recursively like fractal. I got sick of writing shader code so I make a high level language supporting math operations in concise expression that are compiled to shader code in GPU. The main thing is it supports functions. That let me reuse…

Post by rikroots » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 6:55 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #36

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 spent a fair amount of time with p5 etc, but the results always felt limited and brittle. You need a lot of complexity before anything really interesting happens, and Processing lacks features like gradient fills that limit what's possible. It helped there were people like Jared Tarbell who (IMO) were way ahead of what most people were doing, and were willing to share their code. I wasn't unhappy with some of the r…

Post by andypiper » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 10:11 PM UTC

sandbags wrote: post #62

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 w…

Post by crooked-v » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 2:27 AM UTC

zamadatix wrote: post #57

monokai_nl wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generative systems often produce random outputs every time it runs. When run in a browser, an output just vanishes after a refresh and is usually never found again if you haven't saved the PRNG seed. Using a blockchain, you can store a specific output of your generative system in a way that's definitive and collaboratively agreed upon. If you believe in collecting / trading digital assets, that's a prerequisite for a…

I'm not sure I manage to follow accurately. If you don't save the art you make then it's gone, generative or not. If you do save the output in some way (either by saving the output itself or saving the full information needed to regenerate the output) what is special about doing so on the blockchain vs anywhere else beyond the aforementioned proof of ownership? One is of course allowed to care about proof of ownershi…

Post by monokai_nl » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 4:13 AM UTC

sdenton4 wrote: post #64

monokai_nl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A generative system can produce an infinity of outputs. An art platform combined with a blockchain allows you to store a finite number of outputs from the same system definitively without knowing upfront what the outputs would look like. This forces you to think carefully about your system: it should produce interesting works with each iteration. Some people call this long form generative art. Regarding Monokai, I’ve…

Yah, I think the question really comes down to: what's so special about a block chain vs any other public record or database? For example, it's just as easy - and more accessible - to put the code and example configurations with output in a github repository.