
Exploration of Generative Art - qrv3w
https://generativeartistry.com
======
tholman
One of the creators here! Always happy to be mentioned and glad to answer any
questions.

A true love of mine, and something I'm loving see slowly grow and appear in
our tech and programming community is interactive tutorials and blogs, which
personally I feel teach and inspire creativity in a way like no others. This
site is built with a library I called tutorial markdown [1], and the whole
blog is also open source [2], and has a little indie podcast too [3]

I really want to see this type of experience grow, so yeah, if anyone is
working on similar things I'd love for them to share it here (or with me
otherwise). Here [4] is a great blog post by John Otander showing off some
great interactive blog posts on the web, all of which are very HN worthy in my
opinion.

[1] [https://github.com/tholman/tutorial-
markdown](https://github.com/tholman/tutorial-markdown)

[2] [https://github.com/tholman/generative-
artistry](https://github.com/tholman/generative-artistry)

[3]
[https://generativeartistry.com/episodes/](https://generativeartistry.com/episodes/)

[4] [https://johno.com/year-of-the-interactive-blog-
post/](https://johno.com/year-of-the-interactive-blog-post/)

~~~
pierrec
>if anyone is working on similar things I'd love for them to share it here

Sure, I also made a tool to generate interactive blog posts and used it to
write a couple of articles on pretty niche topics related to generative art.
Whenever I have the time to do so, I would love to write more content like
that. The framework is here, articles are linked at the beginning:
[https://github.com/pac-dev/dspnote](https://github.com/pac-dev/dspnote)

------
_hark
Along these lines, I work in geophysics/AI right now and trained a GAN on some
seismic data, which people usually visualize with ridgeline/joy plots
(literally just realized people call them joyplots because of the joy division
cover...). It ended up looking pretty cool:
[https://brantondemoss.com/seismicdream](https://brantondemoss.com/seismicdream)

~~~
blululu
These are beautiful - well done. Ridgeline plots are very common in EEG and
ECoG (electrophysiology). The lead singer of joy division had epilepsy - the
band's logo is a plot of a siezure. If you are interested, this work might be
very interesting if you trained on brain waves (different spectrum). There are
publicly available datasets:
[https://github.com/openlists/ElectrophysiologyData](https://github.com/openlists/ElectrophysiologyData)

~~~
_hark
Sounds interesting, I'll take a look. If you want to email me (grab from my
website) so I can ask some questions about the data (if you have expertise
here) that would be helpful.

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nikivi
I collected some links on generative of art if anyone is interested

[https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/art/generative-
art#links](https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/art/generative-art#links)

~~~
mavsman
Great! I've also created a list of tools, mostly CLI tools since that's what I
was more interested in personally.

[https://github.com/bradydowling/awesome-generated-
art](https://github.com/bradydowling/awesome-generated-art)

I'd definitely be open to PRs of other things that are relevant.

------
sa46
Does anyone know of generative art for gothic style [drop caps]? I thought it
would be neat to generate the curves from a letter instead of relying on a
font. I know Gwern.net uses some neat tricks to load a subset of the drop-caps
fonts.

[drop caps]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial)

[gwern]: [https://www.gwern.net/About#implementation-
details](https://www.gwern.net/About#implementation-details)

------
greggman3
I am so confused / mixed on generative art. I've made a bunch. I often enjoy
looking at it. I have friends that make a living from it. But I waffle on
whether it's good/bad/art/not-art.

I've been told by commenters on HN that my generative art is not art if it was
created without intent to express some truth about the world or some such
criteria. Not sure I agree.

On the other hand it used to be a rite of passage to make a "draw random lines
in random colors" program in like the first few days of learning to code and
technically that is generative art.

My friend who makes a living on generative art for installations does lots of
flowing cubes and I'm super happy for him and always say positive things. But,
in my head sometimes I'm like "seriously, all you did there is write a random
line generator" because having made similar pieces I know effort wise it's
more like a doodle then a project. In other words most of my generative art
took less than an hour to make. I can turn my generative art to make images
similar to ones he gets paid for in few minutes. So, sometimes it's hard not
to see certain generative art as low effort? I'm not sure how to describe my
feeling here.

If some one showed you their program that had 2 numeric fields and an add
button and you set the 2 fields, clicked add and the sum of the 2 fields is
displayed (in other words the 2nd or 3rd program you ever wrote,
[https://jsfiddle.net/greggman/hypv0ugo/](https://jsfiddle.net/greggman/hypv0ugo/)).
You'd be happy for them they are making progress on learning to program but if
they posted that as "Show HN" you'd likely not give them much praise.

That's the type of thing I often feel about some percent of generative art and
I don't know how to stop feeling that any more then I wouldn't feel like "why
are you showing this?" about the adding 2 numbers example.

~~~
onion2k
Generative art is op art[1] made with math and a computer instead of a
paintbrush and a ruler.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op_art](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op_art)

~~~
greggman3
That is not really the point i was trying to make.

Maybe this analogy will help.

We praise chefs for making great meals. Conversely we don't praise people for
boiling water. In fact it's a common joke if you ask someone who is has no
cooking skills if they can cook they might joke "I'm great at boiling water!"

So my question is where is the line between boiling water and cooking.
Similarly where is the link between no-skill required code that puts a pretty
picture on the screen and high-skill required to put a pretty picture on the
screen. In general we don't praise the first.

random lines in rand colors = 0 skill units

random lines in similar hues += 1 skill unit?

random lines in a similar direction and similar hues += 1 skill unit?

I know rating art on how much skill it takes is not a valid way to rate art
but we still make some kind of distinction between stick figure human and the
Vitruvian Man and so I'm conflicted about it

For me an large percentage of generative art fits on the stick figure side
than the Vitruvian Man side. It might look pretty but it took no more effort
or skill than drawing a stick figure.

~~~
onion2k
_For me an large percentage of generative art fits on the stick figure side
than the Vitruvian Man side._

Sure, most things are a loop and a couple of sin functions. I find it
pleasantly surprising when I figure out how people have made seemingly
complicated things by building up simple techniques.

If DaVinci walked around the Guggenhiem maybe he'd feel the same way about a
lot of the art there. I'm not sure it would detract from the art if he did
though. "I could have made that easily" is more a testament to the viewer's
skills than a criticism of the artist's work.

------
fjfaase
There is a difference between people writing programs to generate art and
(classically trained) artist who use programs to investigate art. I guess
there are more examples of the first and fewer of the latter. One Dutch artist
who in 1969 started using programs (at first with the help of others) to
generate art is Peter Struycken.
[https://www.pstruycken.nl/index.html#En](https://www.pstruycken.nl/index.html#En)

------
jmount
An older generative art project, with some history: [https://win-
vector.com/2020/06/11/genetic-art-introduction-v...](https://win-
vector.com/2020/06/11/genetic-art-introduction-video/)

------
swayvil
Here's the biggest generative art forum on the planet :
[http://reddit.com/r/generative](http://reddit.com/r/generative)

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SkittishLemur
I don't know, I looked at the one with packed circles, and the algorithm was
silly: A loop that grow radius by one and check for collision each time,
instead of directly setting the radius to the proper value.

Edit: This is what I mean:
[https://pastebin.com/r0n19jZa](https://pastebin.com/r0n19jZa) (Well, except
that I inlined functions, and that may be considered bad style.)

------
throwaway4666
Obligatory inconvergent plug, one of the titans of generative art:
[https://inconvergent.net/](https://inconvergent.net/)

------
monkeydust
Nicely done. Question, what type of generative art could one create (as a
newbie) if they wanted to embed something personal into the nucleus of it? Say
for example birth dates of everyone in their family...

~~~
OnACoffeeBreak
My immediate thought is use the birthdays as seeds for the random number
generator, and then whatever you do has the birth dates as the nucleus of the
generated art.

You can also generate a shape or a path for every family member modifying a
parameter with each member's birthday.

~~~
monkeydust
Nice idea on random seed. Txs

------
GuB-42
Does the demoscene count?

Especially in sizecoding and shaders, if you want any kind of detail, you need
procedural generation. Common techniques include fractals and Perlin noise,
but there are many others, in 2D and in 3D.

------
Smoosh
Somewhere around 1980 I wrote a Mondrian picture generator for the VIC-20. It
was pretty good as I recall. I was going to submit it to a magazine, but never
did. I wonder what happened to that cassette?

------
agambrahma
Love this. Every few years I feel I want to get deeper into it, but ... never
get enough time commitment behind it.

Recently been wondering if _Mathematica_ would be a good way to do this.

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snorkel
Checkout the lolwut command in Redis
[http://antirez.com/news/123](http://antirez.com/news/123)

------
mavsman
This is amazing. I'm very interested and just downloaded every episode to my
phone on Spotify.

------
blahblahblogger
I like things like this, anyone have any similar to share?

~~~
polytely
I really like Dan Shiffman's processing tutorials [0], they cover a lot of
stuff you can use in your creative coding. he also wrote a book called "the
nature of code" which is alse awesome [1]

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4066MndcyCk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4066MndcyCk)

[1]: [https://natureofcode.com/book/](https://natureofcode.com/book/)

