
The Game of Life – Emergence in Generative Art - hardmaru
https://www.artnome.com/news/2020/7/12/the-game-of-life-emergence-in-generative-art
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tomxor
I think showing the (very small) source code as they have with the first
example is key to allowing new people to appreciate these. Because we are
exposed to so many amazing computer graphics art these days, but most of those
take many man hours and are assembled with massive amounts of complexity and
computation driving them. Essentially they are brute force art, people
imposing their will on the visual output.

What's impressive with generative art like this is how minimal, effortless and
elegant the process that created it is. And what i find interesting about it's
natural origins is how the process of creating it is far more biased to
exploration than forcing output from your own mind.

Shameless plug... although CA are one of my favorite things, I find attractors
better for generative art, you get a lot for very little code (although I
understand them far less than CA):

    
    
      Abstract:
      https://www.dwitter.net/d/15329
      https://www.dwitter.net/d/15367
      https://www.dwitter.net/d/17223
      https://www.dwitter.net/d/17272
    
      Planet by mapping the same technique:
      https://www.dwitter.net/d/17271
    

These are all < 194 chars. To see the code for the "eval(escape(unescape..."
ones just replace eval with throw.

If I was to ever print something like this I would put the source code
directly in the picture itself, seeing that is part of the art for me.

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Artnome
Great advice on sharing the code to help see how much complexity can come from
very little code. Most of these artists open source their code. I will try to
add in links to the code - great idea!

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tomlockwood
I'm working on some game of life stuff, too! May interest some of you:
[https://lockwood.dev/automata/2020/03/28/bruteforcing-
beauti...](https://lockwood.dev/automata/2020/03/28/bruteforcing-beautiful-
cellular-automata-rulesets-with-golang.html)

~~~
Artnome
Very cool! Love the introduction of random rulesets!

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tomlockwood
If you want to collaborate on anything, I'd love to!

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FrozenSynapse
Ive tried doing a 3D Game of life a week ago in Blender [https://youtu.be/xEu-
YKq91-A](https://youtu.be/xEu-YKq91-A)

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MrLeap
Pretty bizarre! Just a few hours before this article got posted I was brushing
up my compute shader skills and the first thing I wrote was Conway's Game of
Life on a 4096x4096 texture.

baader-meinhof is in effect.

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Meidor
I've made a, bit nausea inducing, maze cellular automata implementation that
maps as a texture onto a rotating cube a couple weeks ago. Planning to add
colors and different polygons later.

Maybe making it so it restarts the growth phase when the polygon is almost
filled because the slow growing seems most interesting to me:
[https://gen.har.ink](https://gen.har.ink)

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glaberficken
Wow, that creates all sorts of optical illusions for me. After the cube faces
are filled I see massive waves sweeping across the faces and sometimes the
cube vertices seem to expand and contract distorting the cube and turning it
inside out.

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coldcode
I also do generative art, although mine is not based on the game of life and
incorporates some non generative elements. In fact I spend too much time
making art and not enough completing the website to showcase it. Digital
allows for a wider spectrum of art than can be achieved by brush and canvas
alone, although admittedly you can create things no one likes either with
great ease.

