10 ms·

Why Love Generative Art?

248 points by Artnome 8y ago

lixtra 8y ago
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ArtWomb 8y ago
Good retrospective. Excellent playlist on youtube of early computer art, including some of Manfred Mohr's films that still have the power to hold the attention of modern, distracted minds ;) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmmzCSWIggxABGOurYq2IvB7Zr_OeNAAU https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmmzCSWIggxABGOurYq2I...
- tripzilch 8y ago
  They left out the demoscene :( I mean, it's not generative art (with a few exceptions) but it definitely is computer art. In the early 2000s I went to demoparties that had over 2000 attendees. These were combined showcase/gallery events with competitions and live art. Imagine a LAN-party where no one's gaming, but instead coding, drawing or producing music (and socialising--because "real party is outside"). And when I go to check, the scene is still active today. That's gotta count for something, right? :)
abainbridge 8y ago
Personally, I don't trust art from digital computers. It might contain subliminal messages from the feds. Gimme a few sticks and elastic bands any day. The Harmonograph - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck_JY-Z5kZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck_JY-Z5kZI
OnACoffeeBreak 8y ago
Can anyone recommend tools for getting into generative art? I have tried using a gamedev engine. It worked OK, but there have got to be better suited tools out there.
- hoopism 8y ago
  As mentioned in the article Processing is great! Super easy to start and there's some great sample libraries and code to to use for guidance. http://processingjs.org/ http://processingjs.org/
  - deevolution 8y ago
    After processing you can move onto openframeworks, which is written in c++ and more performant, but also comes with a bit of a learning curve if you dont have previous experience with c languages. https://openframeworks.cc https://openframeworks.cc
- vincnetas 8y ago
  Also check nodebox [0]. [0] https://www.nodebox.net https://www.nodebox.net
- DanBC 8y ago
  There's an old book with a bunch of pseudocode that might be interesting, especially if you're interested in the early examples provided in the article. Computers, Pattern, Chaos, and Beauty by Clifford Pickover. https://www.amazon.com/Computers-pattern-chaos-beauty-Graphics/dp/0312041233/ https://www.amazon.com/Computers-pattern-chaos-beauty-Graphi...
  - ciaron 8y ago
    Clifford Pickover has some great books, I can't recommend them enough if you're interested in the intersection between maths and art.
- simonhfrost 8y ago
  https://p5js.org/ https://p5js.org/ for a javascript version of Processing
- tholman 8y ago
  Here's something I've been working on ~ https://generativeartistry.com/ https://generativeartistry.com/ ~ aimed at getting people started with generative art using the <canvas> ... its less about the tools, and more about learning general techniques that will get you creating.
sakri 8y ago
I got to live parallel to some of this. In the early 00's Agencies would send their designers/creatives/frontend devs to conferences that centered around Flash. Along with marketing talks and inspirational self help crap, the events gave a platform for some very smart/creative individuals. The enthusiasm drove a circle of innovation and competitiveness, which was good fun to watch. The scene has somewhat fallen off my radar since those days, but articles like this remind me of my soft spot for it.
- Fifer82 8y ago
  I have fond memories of this time as well. It is the first time I have seen an article where I am seeing old names like Joshua Davis and Jared Tarbell. Manny Tan and Keith Peters were similarly cool. I don't get a lot out of the art side, but I have always been fascinated by this particular topic. Where little pieces of code, depending on some inputs, can generate some really fun output.
nwatson 8y ago
Great artist painting in "generative" fashion by hand ... one can see her murals in many North Carolina locales especially around Winston-Salem ... Laura Lashley ... https://m.facebook.com/laura.lashley.77/posts/picfp.1514530781/?photo_id=10214569410858376&mds=%2Fphotos%2Fviewer%2F%3Fphotoset_token%3Dpicfp.1514530781%26photo%3D10214569410858376%26profileid%3D1514530781%26source%3D69%26refid%3D17%26cached_data%3Dfalse%26ftid&mdf=1 https://m.facebook.com/laura.lashley.77/posts/picfp.15145307...
java_script 8y ago
Check this shit out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqayDnQ2wmw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqayDnQ2wmw (epilepsy warning)
- bane 8y ago
  As a demoscener, it's always awesome to see our craft leak out into other places. Aphex Twin getting in on the aesthetic is a real feather in the cap of the scene.
alexpotato 8y ago
Saskia Freeke has some amazing work done via generative methods. You can check out her profile here: https://www.instagram.com/sasj_nl/ https://www.instagram.com/sasj_nl/ Great example: https://www.instagram.com/p/BltlYsgnVd9/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link https://www.instagram.com/p/BltlYsgnVd9/?utm_source=ig_web_c...
coldcode 8y ago
Not exactly generative art, but still computer aided art - my home is filled with impressionist artworks I created from photographs using a product called Impresso Pro which does a nice job of adding brushstrokes to images in a realistic fashion. I use all the options to direct the choices and even manipulate the photo in Pixelmator first to influence the choices. Is the computer doing most of the work? Yes, but I still decide what it does and wind up with things I like. They are then printed to large canvases and I hang them up. It would be fun to make some completely generative art pieces if I had more time.
akshayB 8y ago
There is lot of equations and geometry that are hiding under the hood along with some clever programming. Personally one of my personal favorites is Fractal art which involves lot of recursive programming.
dahart 8y ago
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 story. Getting attention in the art world may depend more on the artist’s narrative than on the art itself, and many art consumers will similarly buy when the story is right, and avoid art they love when it has a bad or boring story. I think people legitimately and reasonably need to be able to have something interesting to say when their friends comment on the artwork in their house. I say this as a generative artist and absolute generative art lover myself. I explored what it might take to make a living from generative art for a year, and 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. The thing is, the people who hate it or don’t get it have a point. > Myth Two: The artist has zero control and the autonomous machine is randomly generating the designs. The computer is making the art and the human deserves no credit, as it is not really art. This one I’ve run into a lot. People who don’t think I deserve full credit, or just don’t know how to assign or think about credit. > Myth One: The artist has complete control and the code is always executed exactly as written. Therefore, generative art lacks the elements of chance, accident, discovery, and spontaneity that often makes art great, if not at least human and approachable. This one I haven’t seen much of, and I’d question whether it’s a common myth. But, more importantly, I cringe at the idea that randomness leads to discovery or spontaneity or human approachableness. I would never compare randomness to surprises or creativity in traditional art, but that idea is fairly pervasive among generative art initiates. I use randomness a lot, but randomness is very boring. It’s mechanical variety without surprise, randomness rarely leads to surprise without a lot of generative creativity on the part of the artist.
- tripzilch 8y ago
  > It usually lacks a good story. Then it's not generative art. Without the story, generative art is just procedural / computer generated art. And indeed because of the mass-production related reasons you name, that sort of art is less valuable. Because why this particular instance, this random seed, and not the billions of others giving rise to similar-yet-not-similar artworks that never were? Without the story of the process, there is no answer to this question and it diminishes the value of the art to something that simply "looks nice". Maybe the story is just "because the artist randomly saw this particular one out of billions and decided they liked it enough" -- which isn't the best story, IMHO. Generative art is really all about the process. You can have a camera on a plant, producing pseudo-random numbers that generate an image, video or sound. Now you have a story. You can do something similar but instead use the crowd of people walking past your art piece, and you have a different story. You can adapt the way it visualises so that it fits the story. But most importantly, you create a meaningful answer to the question "why this particular instantiation?" It goes as far that the visualisation (or audio or whatever) can be relatively simple or unoriginal as long as the story behind it is REALLY interesting, you've got a great piece of generative art. The reverse, however, is not. If you got a great visualisation, that is super intriguing to look at, yet the story behind it is merely an afterthought or almost non-existent, you've got a great piece of procedural / computer-generated art. It's not very good generative art if the process doesn't play a prominent role in the story. It might be nicer to look at, probably easier to sell because it looks nice and people are more likely to want to hang it on their walls. But making things because you want to sell them is craft (which is cool, if you want to make a living--of course you can do both). > many art consumers will similarly buy when the story is right, and avoid art they love when it has a bad or boring story What the hell is an "art consumer". If you want to sell something then yes, it's gotta have some utility value. That's what separates art from craft. I'm not sure how that's relevant. It sounds to me like your problem is with commercial exploitation of your art. There's a certain arrogance in the statement that "art consumers" will avoid art they love if it has a boring story. Who do you think you are to decide for your audience what art they "really love" and what not. If you mean that they avoid art that they find like really, really PRETTY, but then avoid it because there is no story and it's just one instance out of billions of random seeds and value it appropriately, then that's a pretty superficial way to look at what it means to "really love" a piece of art. Of course the story is important. The alternative is getting your craft up to the level that it outshines any possible lack of story.
js8 8y ago
I looked at the chart in the middle and was like, whoa, that one is pretty nice! It reminded me of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlLqYBU8qsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlLqYBU8qsY
rices 8y ago
Wew! Nice write up - I'm a huge fan of Tarbell's work. I'm curious if generative art lead him to found Etsy. This field is still in its infancy - I'm excited for the future. I wrote a generative art algorithm a bit ago - check it out :D - https://anemy.github.io/concentric/#/ https://anemy.github.io/concentric/#/
- sago 8y ago
  It's a really handsome piece of work. I love the papercraft aesthetic. Well done. One of the randomizations I generated was uncannily like a winking eye. But sadly I only discovered the shareable link after I had lost it. Oh, the ephemeral nature of generative art!
b0rsuk 8y ago
Three more approaches not mentioned in the article: Pixel Sorting ------------- A subtype of glitch art. Generally you do it horizontally or vertically. You choose contiguous intervals in a bitmap and sort pixels in it by color, hue, value etc. Here's a moose I made based on a Wikimedia Commons photo: https://www.reddit.com/r/pixelsorting/comments/7oioko/moose/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pixelsorting/comments/7oioko/moose/ Glitch art ---------- Also has its own subreddit. People over there get excited over printers breaking down in the middle of printing a page, etc. Sometimes results are truly intriguing. Primitive --------- Geometric primitives. The ingenious library written in Go. It transforms an image into a composition of 2D overlapping, translucent polygons. Output is available chiefly as an .svg https://github.com/fogleman/primitive https://github.com/fogleman/primitive Using this and images from a search engine, I made a calendar with animals. I could post it if anyone's interested.
- akx 8y ago
  Re glitch art, I wrote a (moderately popular?) tool for it: http://akx.github.io/glitch2/ http://akx.github.io/glitch2/
darzu 8y ago
In my view, Minecraft worlds are beautiful works of generative art and the appreciation and exploration of these worlds probably makes this the most popular and beloved form of generative art to date.
zmitri 8y ago
I do some generative art [1] and I think a lot of the concerns in this article have to do with it being accepted by the art world vs consumers. In my experience consumers enjoy generative art, and are happy to buy generative work so long as its in a medium they are used to - such a as a print or plot - and are not interested in moving/digital screens. Instead of picking a render and placing it for sale, show the buyers the software, show them the parameters and give them an option between a few renders to choose from. It makes it way more personal. People and popular culture are also much more tech savvy now and appreciative of elements of digital/internet culture. This is just my opinion, but I believe many generative artists seem to put the algorithmic focus ahead of the aesthetic. From my experience if you treat the aesthetic as the primary objective and the technology as a tool it resonates better. Jared Tarbell and Manoloide both seem to do this, but have very different styles, and are by far my favorites in the space. [1] http://instagram.com/dmitricherniak http://instagram.com/dmitricherniak
techbio 8y ago
Generative art would be more compelling with clean, commented source attached. Even to non-programmers. I am always drawn to good explanations for inexplicable beauty, but what better explanation for the unknown than procedures to repeat it? (Especially if the source itself is formatted artfully.) I would love to see human readable DNA for example, one day. Edit: Not that I believe DNA to ever be human readable, I'm referring to a level of abstraction that might be, and the expression of awe that art can evoke in relation to this and many other natural processes.
filleokus 8y ago
Are there any artists who work in kind of the intersection between data visualisation and generative art? I'm thinking of works where the main point is not necessarily to show the data as clearly as possible (i.e not a graph), but rather where the data is somehow interleaved and helps tell the story. Somewhat similar to the map of the US in the article based on the roads.
- zmitri 8y ago
  Yes, there are lots. I would say Mike Bostock of d3 fame is an example of someone who does that well, as so is Yi Shen (https://twitter.com/pissang1 https://twitter.com/pissang1).
- spot 8y ago
  Jer Thorp and Aaron Koblin
g3ndo 8y ago
@bkezy0 has some interesting work on Instagram. It's more of a mix between generative and non-generative than anything pure. Still worth checking out. Profile: https://www.instagram.com/bkezy0/ https://www.instagram.com/bkezy0/
Jupe 8y ago
Generative/algorithmic art: https://www.flickr.com/photos/abstractusinterruptus https://www.flickr.com/photos/abstractusinterruptus
mattdesl 8y ago
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 iterate more quickly and become better curators of their output. Open source and online tools like Glitch are helping share knowledge and ideas, and together the community is pushing each other toward more and more interesting results (conceptually, algorithmically and aesthetically). The community (mostly Twitter & IG) is one of the things that makes generative art so fun to be a part of. Totally shameless self-plug: you can follow my own generative art on IG below [1]. I hope to set up an online print shop in the coming months. [1] - https://www.instagram.com/mattdesl_art https://www.instagram.com/mattdesl_art
- kjeetgill 8y ago
  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 workflow? Is this all in processing?
  - mattdesl 8y ago
    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 https://github.com/mattdesl/canvas-sketch [2] - https://mattdesl.svbtle.com/ https://mattdesl.svbtle.com/ [3] - https://generativeartistry.com/ https://generativeartistry.com/
sjb554 8y ago
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_smooth_jazz https://www.instagram.com/p/BY_yHsuB8nF/?taken-by=kolmogorov... https://www.instagram.com/p/BklsIsBlmij/?taken-by=kolmogorov_smooth_jazz https://www.instagram.com/p/BklsIsBlmij/?taken-by=kolmogorov... https://www.instagram.com/kolmogorov_smooth_jazz/ https://www.instagram.com/kolmogorov_smooth_jazz/
sixstringtheory 8y ago
I was hoping it would mention Jared Tarbell, as I discovered his work back when he was making it on http://complexification.net 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.
DonHopkins 8y ago
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 https://electricsheep.org/#/about http://scottdraves.com/sheep.html http://scottdraves.com/sheep.html http://scottdraves.com/flame.html http://scottdraves.com/flame.html http://flam3.com/ http://flam3.com/ http://flam3.com/flame.pdf 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!
acdanger 8y ago
Not necessarily generative art, but I've always been a big fan of Team Lab’s work. https://www.teamlab.art/ https://www.teamlab.art/
ForrestN 8y ago
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.
sp332 8y ago
Vi Hart has a "Sol Lewitt Forgery" VR project. http://elevr.com/portfolio/sol-lewitt-forgery/ http://elevr.com/portfolio/sol-lewitt-forgery/ I don't know how far it got but I liked the idea.
beat 8y ago
Note that generative art is not necessarily digital. I used to make generative music using a pretty mundane electric guitar and amp, with a digital delay looper (which I suppose makes it kinda digital). I leaned the guitar against the amp to induce feedback, which went into the looper, which was on a long fade (probably 20+ repeats, well over a minute of music echoing around in there), with modulation to destabilize the pitch. Thanks to the configuration, the feedback was unstable, continuously generating an unpredictable melody of feedback. Kinda loud, but kinda lovely.
TeddyDD 8y ago
I am currently writing master thesis about generative art, this article comes in handy :) If you interested in generative art there is nice tool called Context Free Art: https://www.contextfreeart.org/ https://www.contextfreeart.org/ It's not as well known as Processing or other tools and that's a pity.

248 points by Artnome 8y ago

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Good retrospective. Excellent playlist on youtube of early computer art, including some of Manfred Mohr's films that still have the power to hold the attention of modern, distracted minds ;) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmmzCSWIggxABGOurYq2IvB7Zr_OeNAAU https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmmzCSWIggxABGOurYq2I...

tripzilch 8y ago
They left out the demoscene :( I mean, it's not generative art (with a few exceptions) but it definitely is computer art. In the early 2000s I went to demoparties that had over 2000 attendees. These were combined showcase/gallery events with competitions and live art. Imagine a LAN-party where no one's gaming, but instead coding, drawing or producing music (and socialising--because "real party is outside"). And when I go to check, the scene is still active today. That's gotta count for something, right? :)

abainbridge 8y ago

Personally, I don't trust art from digital computers. It might contain subliminal messages from the feds. Gimme a few sticks and elastic bands any day. The Harmonograph - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck_JY-Z5kZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck_JY-Z5kZI

OnACoffeeBreak 8y ago

Can anyone recommend tools for getting into generative art? I have tried using a gamedev engine. It worked OK, but there have got to be better suited tools out there.

hoopism 8y ago
As mentioned in the article Processing is great! Super easy to start and there's some great sample libraries and code to to use for guidance. http://processingjs.org/ http://processingjs.org/
- deevolution 8y ago
  After processing you can move onto openframeworks, which is written in c++ and more performant, but also comes with a bit of a learning curve if you dont have previous experience with c languages. https://openframeworks.cc https://openframeworks.cc
vincnetas 8y ago
Also check nodebox [0]. [0] https://www.nodebox.net https://www.nodebox.net
DanBC 8y ago
There's an old book with a bunch of pseudocode that might be interesting, especially if you're interested in the early examples provided in the article. Computers, Pattern, Chaos, and Beauty by Clifford Pickover. https://www.amazon.com/Computers-pattern-chaos-beauty-Graphics/dp/0312041233/ https://www.amazon.com/Computers-pattern-chaos-beauty-Graphi...
- ciaron 8y ago
  Clifford Pickover has some great books, I can't recommend them enough if you're interested in the intersection between maths and art.
simonhfrost 8y ago
https://p5js.org/ https://p5js.org/ for a javascript version of Processing
tholman 8y ago
Here's something I've been working on ~ https://generativeartistry.com/ https://generativeartistry.com/ ~ aimed at getting people started with generative art using the <canvas> ... its less about the tools, and more about learning general techniques that will get you creating.

sakri 8y ago

I got to live parallel to some of this. In the early 00's Agencies would send their designers/creatives/frontend devs to conferences that centered around Flash. Along with marketing talks and inspirational self help crap, the events gave a platform for some very smart/creative individuals. The enthusiasm drove a circle of innovation and competitiveness, which was good fun to watch. The scene has somewhat fallen off my radar since those days, but articles like this remind me of my soft spot for it.

Fifer82 8y ago
I have fond memories of this time as well. It is the first time I have seen an article where I am seeing old names like Joshua Davis and Jared Tarbell. Manny Tan and Keith Peters were similarly cool. I don't get a lot out of the art side, but I have always been fascinated by this particular topic. Where little pieces of code, depending on some inputs, can generate some really fun output.

nwatson 8y ago

Great artist painting in "generative" fashion by hand ... one can see her murals in many North Carolina locales especially around Winston-Salem ... Laura Lashley ... https://m.facebook.com/laura.lashley.77/posts/picfp.1514530781/?photo_id=10214569410858376&mds=%2Fphotos%2Fviewer%2F%3Fphotoset_token%3Dpicfp.1514530781%26photo%3D10214569410858376%26profileid%3D1514530781%26source%3D69%26refid%3D17%26cached_data%3Dfalse%26ftid&mdf=1 https://m.facebook.com/laura.lashley.77/posts/picfp.15145307...

java_script 8y ago

Check this shit out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqayDnQ2wmw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqayDnQ2wmw (epilepsy warning)

bane 8y ago
As a demoscener, it's always awesome to see our craft leak out into other places. Aphex Twin getting in on the aesthetic is a real feather in the cap of the scene.

alexpotato 8y ago

Saskia Freeke has some amazing work done via generative methods. You can check out her profile here: https://www.instagram.com/sasj_nl/ https://www.instagram.com/sasj_nl/ Great example: https://www.instagram.com/p/BltlYsgnVd9/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link https://www.instagram.com/p/BltlYsgnVd9/?utm_source=ig_web_c...

coldcode 8y ago

Not exactly generative art, but still computer aided art - my home is filled with impressionist artworks I created from photographs using a product called Impresso Pro which does a nice job of adding brushstrokes to images in a realistic fashion. I use all the options to direct the choices and even manipulate the photo in Pixelmator first to influence the choices. Is the computer doing most of the work? Yes, but I still decide what it does and wind up with things I like. They are then printed to large canvases and I hang them up. It would be fun to make some completely generative art pieces if I had more time.

akshayB 8y ago

There is lot of equations and geometry that are hiding under the hood along with some clever programming. Personally one of my personal favorites is Fractal art which involves lot of recursive programming.

dahart 8y ago

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 story. Getting attention in the art world may depend more on the artist’s narrative than on the art itself, and many art consumers will similarly buy when the story is right, and avoid art they love when it has a bad or boring story. I think people legitimately and reasonably need to be able to have something interesting to say when their friends comment on the artwork in their house. I say this as a generative artist and absolute generative art lover myself. I explored what it might take to make a living from generative art for a year, and 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. The thing is, the people who hate it or don’t get it have a point. > Myth Two: The artist has zero control and the autonomous machine is randomly generating the designs. The computer is making the art and the human deserves no credit, as it is not really art. This one I’ve run into a lot. People who don’t think I deserve full credit, or just don’t know how to assign or think about credit. > Myth One: The artist has complete control and the code is always executed exactly as written. Therefore, generative art lacks the elements of chance, accident, discovery, and spontaneity that often makes art great, if not at least human and approachable. This one I haven’t seen much of, and I’d question whether it’s a common myth. But, more importantly, I cringe at the idea that randomness leads to discovery or spontaneity or human approachableness. I would never compare randomness to surprises or creativity in traditional art, but that idea is fairly pervasive among generative art initiates. I use randomness a lot, but randomness is very boring. It’s mechanical variety without surprise, randomness rarely leads to surprise without a lot of generative creativity on the part of the artist.

tripzilch 8y ago
> It usually lacks a good story. Then it's not generative art. Without the story, generative art is just procedural / computer generated art. And indeed because of the mass-production related reasons you name, that sort of art is less valuable. Because why this particular instance, this random seed, and not the billions of others giving rise to similar-yet-not-similar artworks that never were? Without the story of the process, there is no answer to this question and it diminishes the value of the art to something that simply "looks nice". Maybe the story is just "because the artist randomly saw this particular one out of billions and decided they liked it enough" -- which isn't the best story, IMHO. Generative art is really all about the process. You can have a camera on a plant, producing pseudo-random numbers that generate an image, video or sound. Now you have a story. You can do something similar but instead use the crowd of people walking past your art piece, and you have a different story. You can adapt the way it visualises so that it fits the story. But most importantly, you create a meaningful answer to the question "why this particular instantiation?" It goes as far that the visualisation (or audio or whatever) can be relatively simple or unoriginal as long as the story behind it is REALLY interesting, you've got a great piece of generative art. The reverse, however, is not. If you got a great visualisation, that is super intriguing to look at, yet the story behind it is merely an afterthought or almost non-existent, you've got a great piece of procedural / computer-generated art. It's not very good generative art if the process doesn't play a prominent role in the story. It might be nicer to look at, probably easier to sell because it looks nice and people are more likely to want to hang it on their walls. But making things because you want to sell them is craft (which is cool, if you want to make a living--of course you can do both). > many art consumers will similarly buy when the story is right, and avoid art they love when it has a bad or boring story What the hell is an "art consumer". If you want to sell something then yes, it's gotta have some utility value. That's what separates art from craft. I'm not sure how that's relevant. It sounds to me like your problem is with commercial exploitation of your art. There's a certain arrogance in the statement that "art consumers" will avoid art they love if it has a boring story. Who do you think you are to decide for your audience what art they "really love" and what not. If you mean that they avoid art that they find like really, really PRETTY, but then avoid it because there is no story and it's just one instance out of billions of random seeds and value it appropriately, then that's a pretty superficial way to look at what it means to "really love" a piece of art. Of course the story is important. The alternative is getting your craft up to the level that it outshines any possible lack of story.

js8 8y ago

I looked at the chart in the middle and was like, whoa, that one is pretty nice! It reminded me of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlLqYBU8qsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlLqYBU8qsY

rices 8y ago

Wew! Nice write up - I'm a huge fan of Tarbell's work. I'm curious if generative art lead him to found Etsy. This field is still in its infancy - I'm excited for the future. I wrote a generative art algorithm a bit ago - check it out :D - https://anemy.github.io/concentric/#/ https://anemy.github.io/concentric/#/

sago 8y ago
It's a really handsome piece of work. I love the papercraft aesthetic. Well done. One of the randomizations I generated was uncannily like a winking eye. But sadly I only discovered the shareable link after I had lost it. Oh, the ephemeral nature of generative art!

b0rsuk 8y ago

Three more approaches not mentioned in the article: Pixel Sorting ------------- A subtype of glitch art. Generally you do it horizontally or vertically. You choose contiguous intervals in a bitmap and sort pixels in it by color, hue, value etc. Here's a moose I made based on a Wikimedia Commons photo: https://www.reddit.com/r/pixelsorting/comments/7oioko/moose/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pixelsorting/comments/7oioko/moose/ Glitch art ---------- Also has its own subreddit. People over there get excited over printers breaking down in the middle of printing a page, etc. Sometimes results are truly intriguing. Primitive --------- Geometric primitives. The ingenious library written in Go. It transforms an image into a composition of 2D overlapping, translucent polygons. Output is available chiefly as an .svg https://github.com/fogleman/primitive https://github.com/fogleman/primitive Using this and images from a search engine, I made a calendar with animals. I could post it if anyone's interested.

akx 8y ago
Re glitch art, I wrote a (moderately popular?) tool for it: http://akx.github.io/glitch2/ http://akx.github.io/glitch2/

darzu 8y ago

In my view, Minecraft worlds are beautiful works of generative art and the appreciation and exploration of these worlds probably makes this the most popular and beloved form of generative art to date.

zmitri 8y ago

I do some generative art [1] and I think a lot of the concerns in this article have to do with it being accepted by the art world vs consumers. In my experience consumers enjoy generative art, and are happy to buy generative work so long as its in a medium they are used to - such a as a print or plot - and are not interested in moving/digital screens. Instead of picking a render and placing it for sale, show the buyers the software, show them the parameters and give them an option between a few renders to choose from. It makes it way more personal. People and popular culture are also much more tech savvy now and appreciative of elements of digital/internet culture. This is just my opinion, but I believe many generative artists seem to put the algorithmic focus ahead of the aesthetic. From my experience if you treat the aesthetic as the primary objective and the technology as a tool it resonates better. Jared Tarbell and Manoloide both seem to do this, but have very different styles, and are by far my favorites in the space. [1] http://instagram.com/dmitricherniak http://instagram.com/dmitricherniak

techbio 8y ago

Generative art would be more compelling with clean, commented source attached. Even to non-programmers. I am always drawn to good explanations for inexplicable beauty, but what better explanation for the unknown than procedures to repeat it? (Especially if the source itself is formatted artfully.) I would love to see human readable DNA for example, one day. Edit: Not that I believe DNA to ever be human readable, I'm referring to a level of abstraction that might be, and the expression of awe that art can evoke in relation to this and many other natural processes.

filleokus 8y ago

Are there any artists who work in kind of the intersection between data visualisation and generative art? I'm thinking of works where the main point is not necessarily to show the data as clearly as possible (i.e not a graph), but rather where the data is somehow interleaved and helps tell the story. Somewhat similar to the map of the US in the article based on the roads.

zmitri 8y ago
Yes, there are lots. I would say Mike Bostock of d3 fame is an example of someone who does that well, as so is Yi Shen (https://twitter.com/pissang1 https://twitter.com/pissang1).
spot 8y ago
Jer Thorp and Aaron Koblin

g3ndo 8y ago

@bkezy0 has some interesting work on Instagram. It's more of a mix between generative and non-generative than anything pure. Still worth checking out. Profile: https://www.instagram.com/bkezy0/ https://www.instagram.com/bkezy0/

Jupe 8y ago

Generative/algorithmic art: https://www.flickr.com/photos/abstractusinterruptus https://www.flickr.com/photos/abstractusinterruptus

mattdesl 8y ago

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 iterate more quickly and become better curators of their output. Open source and online tools like Glitch are helping share knowledge and ideas, and together the community is pushing each other toward more and more interesting results (conceptually, algorithmically and aesthetically). The community (mostly Twitter & IG) is one of the things that makes generative art so fun to be a part of. Totally shameless self-plug: you can follow my own generative art on IG below [1]. I hope to set up an online print shop in the coming months. [1] - https://www.instagram.com/mattdesl_art https://www.instagram.com/mattdesl_art

kjeetgill 8y ago
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 workflow? Is this all in processing?
- mattdesl 8y ago
  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 https://github.com/mattdesl/canvas-sketch [2] - https://mattdesl.svbtle.com/ https://mattdesl.svbtle.com/ [3] - https://generativeartistry.com/ https://generativeartistry.com/

sjb554 8y ago

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

sixstringtheory 8y ago

I was hoping it would mention Jared Tarbell, as I discovered his work back when he was making it on http://complexification.net 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.

DonHopkins 8y ago

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 https://electricsheep.org/#/about http://scottdraves.com/sheep.html http://scottdraves.com/sheep.html http://scottdraves.com/flame.html http://scottdraves.com/flame.html http://flam3.com/ http://flam3.com/ http://flam3.com/flame.pdf 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!

acdanger 8y ago

Not necessarily generative art, but I've always been a big fan of Team Lab’s work. https://www.teamlab.art/ https://www.teamlab.art/

ForrestN 8y ago

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.

sp332 8y ago

Vi Hart has a "Sol Lewitt Forgery" VR project. http://elevr.com/portfolio/sol-lewitt-forgery/ http://elevr.com/portfolio/sol-lewitt-forgery/ I don't know how far it got but I liked the idea.

beat 8y ago

Note that generative art is not necessarily digital. I used to make generative music using a pretty mundane electric guitar and amp, with a digital delay looper (which I suppose makes it kinda digital). I leaned the guitar against the amp to induce feedback, which went into the looper, which was on a long fade (probably 20+ repeats, well over a minute of music echoing around in there), with modulation to destabilize the pitch. Thanks to the configuration, the feedback was unstable, continuously generating an unpredictable melody of feedback. Kinda loud, but kinda lovely.

TeddyDD 8y ago

I am currently writing master thesis about generative art, this article comes in handy :) If you interested in generative art there is nice tool called Context Free Art: https://www.contextfreeart.org/ https://www.contextfreeart.org/ It's not as well known as Processing or other tools and that's a pity.