Being creative is all about activating your craziness for the good of others. It is all about thinking outside the box. -Olawale Daniel

It’s been a while.

Lately I’ve been working with a bunch of materials that I am putting under my laser cutter. (Birch wood, Leather, Slate, Glass(

Right now it’s really to calibrate and start thinking through some of the generative projects that I’ve been wanting to accomplish.

Strudel

I’ve also been taking the last ~30 days to create little musical sketches using the Javascript library Strudel which has been fun. Some of my favorites have been this, this, and this. Nothing earth shattering but just a great way to keep the creativity flowing.

Interesting Lectures

Every year I post a little about the lunch lectures that are hosted by the future sketches lab at MIT by one of the graduate students of the lab of Zach Liebermann, Jessica Stringham (ig: _thisxorthat). This year the theme was Creating With Nature which is always a great way to get exposed to other artists, technologists, designers in the space. This year the lecture that stood out to me was David Rothenberg as philosopher and musician, he interacted with the nature around him and uses these materials in his projects. One of his projects he plays the Oboe and preforms with the European Starling in Berlin which just brings up questions on how our interactions with the world around us are left unnoticed and could open new worlds of experiencing the living around us.

I’d recommend taking the time to watch as there are a number other speakers such as Jer Throp, Nervous System, and Nathalie Miebach. Not all of these presentations have been uploaded to see but will be up there in due time.

I hope you all have a wonderful week!

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Tutorials & Articles

Icône 2020 - In honour of Vera Molnar

Francesca Franco speaks about a piece she was able to curate with some of Murano’s glass artists and Vera Molnar. I hadn’t come across it and thought more of you all probably would appreciate this as well.

Claycode: Stylable and Deformable 2D Scannable Codes

Claycode is a novel 2D scannable code designed for extensive stylization and deformation. Unlike traditional matrix-based codes (e.g., QR codes), Claycodes encode their message in a tree structure.

It doesn’t cease to amaze what others will come up with. I was looking into what it would take to create alternative QR codes. But this was really fun to see.

Envion

Envion is an ecosystem in Pure Data designed for algorithmic and procedural composition, musique concrète, and experimental sound processing. It includes tools for slicing, dynamic envelopes, texture generation, and multi-channel management.

PureData has been a long standing sonic engine. The following project is a number of templates and components built on top of the sound processing engine of PureData and using sonic elements.

Open Source CDFAM - Aaron Porterfield

In this deeply personal and wide-ranging talk, industrial designer Aaron Porterfield reflects on his path from early explorations with BASIC and Blender to founding F=F (Form Equals Function). Aaron shares how a childhood without video games led to a lifelong fascination with design tools, parametric modeling, and open-source collaboration.

From early contributions to the Blender Foundation and experiments with lattice hinges and origami tessellations to impactful work on custom 3D-printed medical devices, this talk traces the evolution of his design thinking. Aaron walks through highlights including:

Found the following inspirational and thought it is worth sharing this generative design talk from CDFAM. Really appreciated the rigid body lattice work that shows up about 1/2 through the talk. I’ve yet to cut these forms, but its already to be cut as soon as my cold goes away.

Interactive Video Projection Mapping with Three.js

Projection mapping has long fascinated audiences in the physical world, turning buildings, sculptures, and entire cityscapes into moving canvases. What if you could recreate that same sense of spectacle directly inside the browser?

With WebGL and Three.js, you can project video not onto walls or monuments but onto dynamic 3D grids made of hundreds of cubes, each one carrying a fragment of the video like a digital mosaic. Many will surely recognize this effect from Rogier de Boevé’s portfolio, which gained wide attention for showcasing exactly this approach.

Strange Attractors in SVG

In dynamical systems, an attractor is a set of states towards which a system tends to evolve for a wide variety of starting conditions. Consider the pendulum as a simple example for such a dynamic system. Once set in motion, it will gradually lose energy due to friction and eventually reach the resting position again. In other words, the pendulum’s state is pulled towards its resting position - the attractor of the system.

Strange attractors aren’t anything new but the implementation on the Ethereum blockchain is an interesting aspect. i hadn’t come across it but I do find it to be interesting to read through how this is actually produced by the Solidity contract(s).

Hinged Dissections Exist

We prove that any finite collection of polygons of equal area has a common hinged dissection. That is, for any such collection of polygons there exists a chain of polygons hinged at vertices that can be folded in the plane continuously without self-intersection to form any polygon in the collection. This result settles the open problem about the existence of hinged dissections between pairs of polygons that goes back implicitly to 1864and has been studied extensively in the past ten years. Our result generalizes and indeed builds upon the result from 1814 that polygons have common dissections (without hinges). We also extend our common dissection result to edge-hinged dissections of solid 3D polyhedra that have a common(unhinged)dissection, as determined by Dehn’s 1900 solution to Hilbert’s Third Problem. Our proofs are constructive, giving explicit algorithms in all cases. For a constant number of planar polygons, both the number of pieces and running time required by our construction are pseudopolynomial. This bound is the best possible, even for unhinged dissections. Hinged dissections have possible applications to reconfigurable robotics, programmable matter, and nano-manufacturing.

Hinged dissections (here if you want to know way more) are a collection of shapes that are connected by hinges so they can swing from one shape to another. The paper here is more of a geometry problem than anything but has some interesting application to when creating 3D printed works, or any visual work that may provide some inspiration.

Text and Image to World

Spatial intelligence is the next frontier in AI, demanding powerful world models to realize its full potential. World models should reconstruct, generate, and simulate 3D worlds; and allow both humans and agents to interact with them. Spatially intelligent world models will transform a wide variety of industries over the coming years.

So from the company started or founded by Fei-Fei Li who was heavily involved in much of the deep learning research in the 2010s. The work they do is generate 3D world models (think a Midjourney but for entire 3D worlds). I believe right now its just a geometry + texture that is spit out by the model however a number of interesting applications that come from such a model.

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I’ve been trying to release an app in my day job and that has taken quite a bit effort in getting it smoothed out.

Thank goodness that’s done. Now back to some of my many interests.

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We are only a couple people shy of 3000 subscribers to the newsletter!

This is only thanks to you for enjoying the content and learning to use the various tooling out in the market. It is just neat to know that there are that many of you who find using technological tools to create something creative that isn’t all about efficiency and gaining capital.

I’ve been recently experimenting with Strudel (a port of TidalCycles in Javascript) but in the browser. It’s essentially a DSL (domain specific language) in which one can create music.

Its as easy as:

note(”c e g b”).sound(”piano”)

But there are a number of generative elements that can be added which does makes it quite interesting as it sits in my genre of creative coding interests of using randomness as a key component.

Right now I have been trying to revive my “create something daily” and I’m starting that out by creating musical sketches.

NGL - but although my brain wants to create, getting out of the habit of creating and trying to get back into that habit has taken focused effort. I’m still a bit shy but getting closer.

I feel like its a bit like the ascent of an aircraft on a cloudy day. You get to a point and you are doing the work but there is this period of trying to get through the fogginess before you get above the clouds and then the ease of creation becomes more of an extension of one’s being than the practice of it.

These are just more little pieces of ear candy that I’ve been finding to really provide some mental right brain downtime for sure.

For one of the days, I used Strudel to generate the MIDI which is passed into Ableton Live (really for some of the VSTs). I really like the idea of being able to build musical patterns based on a scale outside of just the midi controller.

Anyways, I hope that you all have an amazing week full of new and interesting discoveries.

Peace and stability,
Chris

P.S. What have you been doing lately? Leave a comment!

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Tutorials & Articles

Gilbert: Space Filling

Generalized Hilbert (”gilbert”) space-filling curve for rectangular domains of arbitrary (non-power of two) sizes.

The discrete Hilbert curve is a widely used space-filling curve to map between N-dimensional and 1-D spaces while preserving locality. However, classical algorithms only work for domains whose sides are powers of two.

We present a simple recursive algorithm that generalizes the Hilbert curve to rectangles of arbitrary sizes in 2D, and cuboids of even sizes in 3D.

PyGFX

Pygfx (py-graphics) is built on wgpu, enabling superior performance and reliability compared to OpenGL-based solutions. It is designed for simplicity and versatility: with its modular architecture, you can effortlessly assemble graphical scenes for diverse applications, from scientific visualization to video game rendering.

twigl.app - Phys

So I’ve posted about twigl before.. its a lightweight platform to write shaders in the browser. Its similar to Hydra or Shadertoy without the community aspect built into the site. These are more out of inspiration and I would encourage just looking how “simple” these examples are and provide alot of material to play around with.

#define R rotate2D
vec2 p=FC.xy,q,l=(p+p-r)/r.x*.4+vec2(-.25,.05),n;
float s=6.,h,i,L=dot(l+1.8,l),e=129.;
for(;i++<e;)l*=R(4.96),n*=R(4.8+sin(t)*.05)+rotate2D(t)*.035,
h+=dot(r/r,sin(q=l*s*i+n)/s*4.),n+=cos(q),
s*=1.05;h=.4-h*.26-L;o.rgb+=.5*h-hsv(.1,h*.5,.3);

for(float i,z,d;i++<1e2;){vec3 p=z*normalize(FC.rgb*2.-r.xyy),a=normalize(cos(vec3(0,2,4)+t/4.));p.z+=9.,a=a*dot(a,p)-cross(a,p);z+=d=.01+.3*abs(max(dot(cos(a),sin(a/.6).yzx),length(a)-7.)+1.5-i/8e1);o+=sin(i/6.+z*vec4(0,1,2,0)/5e1)/d;}o=tanh(1.+o/2e3);

Chromatic Abberration w/ SDFs

I’ve been fascinated on shaders for a while as one can produce quite complex looking images without much “code.” From a coding perspective, there is alot that is packed in that makes this also even more fun and interesting.

Similar to the way when you see a painter draw something in n strokes and you just have to wrap you head around how that works.

Toy Fluid Engine

A python library that has used a python Taichi

Until recently I hadn’t really realized how big Taichi in python is or had become. I try pretty hard to keep up with what is out there, and it has become even harder to do so in the last 5 years as platforms diverge and you have to read almost 5 times the amount of content then it use.

Nesting Kisrhombille Tessellation Based Geometry and Forsythia Fractal

Geom_Kisrhombille is a GitHub project focused on exploring the Kisrhombille tessellation through computational geometry and custom rule-based systems for shape manipulation. The repository includes experiments with concepts like “metagons,” which represent the essence of polygons abstracted from their position, orientation, and scale—serving as building blocks for geometric constructions and language-like shape grammars. The project aims to provide a placement system and solver, enabling flexible generation and transformation of geometric patterns based on defined rules, and is positioned as a unique tool for both visual artists and researchers interested in fractal geometry and algorithmic design.

This is a Java based library from a number of years ago. The beauty is just how interesting the geometry merges with the Forsythia Fractal having it generate some really unique and beautiful geometric work.

Sketching for the Future

The ninth edition of the Teaching with Digital Technology Awards, a student-elected program presented annually to faculty members at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology includes MIT Media Lab instructor Zachary Lieberman (Media Arts and Sciences).

Flip Switch - Blender Geometry Nodes

In this beginner-friendly Blender tutorial, we’ll explore how to create a dynamic spin-flip transition using Geometry Nodes. This effect allows you to smoothly switch between two 3D objects—like a torus and Suzanne (the monkey head)—with a rapid spinning motion that hides the transition in motion blur, making it perfect for motion graphics or product showcases. We start by preparing our scene: deleting the default cube, adding a torus and Suzanne, smoothing and subdividing them, and placing them in a hidden collection. We then build a Geometry Nodes network with object inputs, transform nodes, and a switch logic that activates a rotation and flips the object at a specific frame using the scene’s time. To enhance realism, we apply easing with a float curve, use checker textures mapped via custom attributes, and set up Cycles rendering with motion blur and denoising. Finally, we convert the node setup into a reusable group that can be chained—allowing multiple flip transitions across different time ranges and axes. This tutorial not only teaches you how to build an elegant visual transition but also how to structure your Geometry Nodes to be modular and flexible for future creative use.

Physarum Explained

The purpose of this article is to explain techniques that enabled me to make simulations like the one below, along with a lot of other organic looking things. We will focus on algorithmic techniques for artistic purpose rather than scientific meaning.

Just a bunch of beautiful Physarum simulations that really bring out the complexity of these “simpler” systems.

Randomness and unpredictability increasingly shape modern life. Perhaps not always consciously, but it's undeniably present. It seems as though we’ve entered a generative age, where everything—from leadership decisions down to basic truths—feels more fluid than fixed.

Its funny that in the shadows of the shaken snow globe of a world we live in; AI and the infancy of AGI is by its very core stochastic or pseudo-stochastic. It’s strange that wielded stochastic processes can be so powerful.

Reflecting on recent advancements through the rise of Large Language Models like ChatGPT, it's striking that AI now moves beyond mere retrieval of basic facts—like Google—to seemingly grasping context. It can take words that have been written by others and come up with new permutations of those words. For example if you want a poem in the style of Emily Dickinson about the future you get:

The Future — is a Thing — unseen —

That perches — on the Air —

It sings — in Tones — not yet resolved —

But promises — are there —

It tiptoes — past — our Common Thought —

It will not — be confined —

It stirs — the Leaves — of Quiet Trees —

And beckons — from behind —

The captured essence gives AI an appearance of genuine thought and perception, something new to technology until recently.

Similarly, in visual art, we witness AI merging one stylistic approach with another to create something entirely fresh. Take for example.. if I take Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Edvard Munch’s The Scream and highlighting the boy in the prompt you get:

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And it’s fascinating that it get so much of the context of the image, it has the starry night paint strokes, it has the bridge and the long strokes of The Scream, and its just the added context of a boy I’ve added that provides this iteration.

How should we engage with technology that's simultaneously nuanced yet inherently random? We can endlessly generate 100s of images that will have similarities and yet we see the landscape of each of these are different.

Obviously it is powerful and we will only see more of this coming to us in the form of entertainment for the foreseeable future. Society will likely experience a significant adaptation period as we redefine entertainment and true artistry. There is a thread that it provides tools for anyone, not just those who “made” it to make great content. So democratization of an artist’s ability to do more. In video, it is the ability to let the conception of the artist speak through AI tools which can create yet another step change of creativity for both.

I think of Srinivasa Ramanujan, a great mathematician at the turn of the 20th century who grew up in India. We know that he was gifted with an intellect that very few have had. The only way we would have ever known about it was when he was provided the opportunity to go to England to study at Cambridge that we were able to experience his work.

Now, think if a boy exploding in imagination in a developing country wanted to make a full length film but didn’t have the capital to make something happen, perhaps we will see something entirely new.

Yes we know the large movie studios will use it to make more of it. But when the essence of the human is taken out of the work it will become unfashionable. So even though these tools will get better.. the one thing that they don’t have is the inception of thought.

No AI today can make something from nothing.

For an AI to experience life, we have alot more work on the experience and emotional chaos that has to happen inside the network. Perhaps when we are generatively generating foundation models on completely synthesized datasets then maybe we can start thinking of them as sentient.

"If we hesitate to call an organic, complex system like a tree 'sentient,' how will we grapple with recognizing sentience in digital, generative systems?"

These are whispers.. ghosts in the system that emerge as hallucinations or e “digital” glitches within the system.

But per chance we get to this idea of sentient beings, even then would this be a digital species?

Would it not be simulating their own “ideas” which are completely independent from the ideas of men?

This is where we are far in the future from any proper of AI enslaving people. Yes people will enslave themselves. We see that with addictions and irresponsible use of technologies; but that has been happening since the beginning and to make the technology responsible for the irresponsibility of humans is a bit silly.

Yes controls and safety is a very real and necessary pursuit. We need stop lights to control traffic.. we need a legal systems to keep people accountable.

But the agency of any digital system at this point is just a loop.

Let me know what you think about these things as I for whatever reason am curious about other viewpoints in this wily generative world we currently live in. Well I hope you all have a great week!

Chris

Tutorials & Articles

Shaping Light

As it turns out, post-processing is great entrypoint to enhance a 3D scene with atmospheric and lighting effects, allowing for more realistic and dramatic visuals. Because these effects operate in screen space, their performance cost is decoupled from the underlying scene's complexity, making them an efficient solution for balancing performance and visual quality. At the end of the day, when we work with effects, we are still just drawing pixels on a screen.

Maxime Heckel's site has appeared in this newsletter many times. He's not only a master at explaining complex concepts clearly, but his site also features clean, interactive design. This represents how great web content should be presented. In this article, he covers GLSL, Three.js, and browser rendering.

Automating & Recording OSC with Ableton

This is an in-depth walkthrough of OSC Automator, a Max for Live device I created to enable automating and recording OSC with Ableton Live.With this tool, you can use Ableton’s powerful timeline and automation features to control any OSC-compatible software — including TouchDesigner, Synesthesia, Resolume, Unreal Engine, Processing, p5.js, and more.

It’s a tool to checkout for sure as it is a nice accessory for real time media artists.

Visualizing Sound | Are.na Editorial

“One of the great things about visualizing sound is how many of the elements and principles of design you cover …” A deep dive into how artists like Travess Smalley and Daniel Lefcourt explore translating sound and music into visual notation.

Sound and visualizing it is always a fascinating think to look through..

algovivo · Junior Rojas

“algovivo · an energy‑based formulation for soft‑bodied virtual creatures … no forces, just energy functions …” A simulation framework (C++/WASM/JS) that models soft-body creatures using energy minimization instead of conventional force physics.

Morphing | Observable (Jo Wood)

“For animations that morph between pairs of shapes we can use the Flubber library to do the hard work of calculating the intermediate shapes …” Interactive notebook demonstrating smooth shape morphing with the Flubber library.

WebGPU Fundamentals

“A set of articles to help learn WebGPU. Basics. Fundamentals · Inter‑stage Variables · Uniforms · Storage Buffers · Vertex Buffers; Textures.” A comprehensive tutorial series on modern GPU programming via WebGPU, from basics to advanced techniques.

WebGPU, though still quite new (not in like the AI new sense but in the more internet standards) it will eventually replace much of the WebGL1/2 as the newest accepted standard. Now how soon, that only comes as people use it but the following is a great resource that you should go through if interested in graphics programming for the browser.

Imagine.Art (AI Art Generator)

An alternative to places like Midjourney but have some fascinating styles that bring some interesting work to the foreground. Check it out as it also has a number of other options other than text to image such as image to video, text to video. If you want to use it and provide credits for experiments, use the following link.

Unit (Visual Programming Language)

It is heavily inspired by Live, Data Flow, Reactive, Functional and Object Oriented Programming paradigms. Formally, units are Multi Input Multi Output (MIMO) Finite State Machines (FSM). A program in Unit is represented as a Graph.

The Unit Programming Language was developed in close junction to the Unit Programming Environment, which is a Web application built for easy composition of new units. The environment is designed to feel visual and kinesthetic, giving the perception of Direct Manipulation of Live Virtual Objects. The Unit Programming experience is minimalistic, ergonomic, mobile, and can be performed through a variety of input devices, and editing can be partially expressed through Drawing, Gesture and Voice.

The design of this work; it has a bit of a sci-fi feel to it making it and reminds me of Lingdong Huang’s work as well.

Let me know what you think!

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In the Age of Ideas the barrier to entry exists more in our minds than it does in the real world. - Alan Philips

Hi All!

Yes it’s been a little bit. 👋

Welcome, new subscribers! It’s wonderful to see you all finding value in this newsletter, whether you're here to learn, relearn, or discover new techniques.

I’ve closely followed developments in machine learning and deep learning for several years. In fact, these fields sparked my initial interest in data science, as I was fascinated by the tools that could themselves learn and adapt.

At the same time, I'm also an artist. For a long time, these two interests existed separately for me. When Google introduced DeepDream around 2015-2016, I began closely tracking its progress. However, early implementations like DeepDream and initial explorations into transfer learning felt distinctively removed from traditional artistic methods.

Interestingly, over the past three years, I've found myself increasingly caught between my creative instincts as an artist and my analytical interests as a data scientist. This tension—this sense of internal conflict—has sparked curiosity in me.

In the upcoming newsletters, I'll be exploring this tension more deeply: why does it exist, and is it justified? Additionally, I believe it’s valuable to document how artistic inquiry in these realms differs from traditional practices. Both fields require unique skill sets, yet instead of mastering physical materials like brushes and paint, one must grasp mathematics and programming paradigms—proxies for traditional artistic tools.

To start, I've assembled a set of questions designed to clarify these differences. Using these questions, I've created a chart to help track and better understand how these technologies diverge and intersect. I look forward to sharing these insights with you.

These questions are going to be the basis on which I write further. But I’ve been coming up with other questions to ask when trying to identify these differences.

• What is the artist’s relationship to unpredictability or randomness in the creative process?

• What does the audience perceive the role of the artist?

• Where is the boundary between human and machine agency?

• What technical limitations shape artistic choices?

• How is originality defined and maintained within either art form?

Of course these are much more philosophical questions but the importance to understanding intent is an element to consider as much as the aesthetical or

Well I hope you have a wonderful evening or morning. Oh and also a great start to your week!

Chris

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Tutorials & Articles

Aurelia – Procedural Jellyfish

A sibling project from the same author (softbody) , Aurelia synthesizes ethereal jellyfish by sinusoidally contracting a hemisphere “bell” mesh while GPU-based verlet chains animate tentacles. All textures, volumetric lighting, and even the pulsing iridescence are generated on-the-fly in GLSL/TSL shaders, making it a textbook example of fully procedural creatures rendered via WebGPU.

Tutorials & Articles

Claude + Blender

IA new tutorial shows how to bridge Claude Sonnet with Blender via the open-standard Model Context Protocol (MCP), using Siddharth Ahuja’s open-source Blender-MCP add-on. Over 15 minutes the presenter demonstrates three workflow wins—voice-driven procedural shoe design, hands-free scene housekeeping, and instant pipeline plug-ins—before finishing with a hands-on installation guide.

I am of two minds, on the one hand I don’t care that people don’t have to work as hard as in the past to get interesting results. Yet at the same time I’m excited to know that more tooling has been placed into the hands of people. It is counter intuitive, yet to think that anyone could actually model something is exciting. The process here is quite interesting; we continue to see new interfaces that will bring either more creativity to the table.

It will certainly be interesting to watch into the future.

The Slang Shading Language and Compiler

Slang is an open-source, next-generation shading language that slots in as a superset of HLSL/GLSL while adding modern luxuries such as true modularity, multiple back-end targets (D3D12, Vulkan, Metal, CUDA, even WebGPU) and built-in automatic differentiation for neural-graphics workflows. The project recently moved under Khronos-Group governance and is leaning hard into “shader-as-ML-kernel” use-cases—complete with PyTorch integration—making it a compelling bridge between traditional real-time rendering and differentiable graphics research.

Writing My Own Dithering Algorithm in Racket

Amanvir Parhar set out to drive a tiny thermal printer called Guten and ended up hand-rolling a brand-new error-diffusion algorithm in Racket. The post walks through grayscale conversion, experiments with Atkinson vs. Floyd-Steinberg, and culminates in a custom kernel that balances speed and aesthetic fidelity—complete with side-by-side Taj Mahal comparisons and full source on GitHub. It’s a fun deep dive into image-processing math illustrated by lots of code snippets and cat photos.

These are always classic algorithms to try and implement. I enjoy seeing it done in different languages but really its the process of getting into the weeks of truly understanding.

Radiance Fields and the Future of Generative Media

In this SIGGRAPH-style talk, a UC-Berkeley research group surveys the explosive progress in Neural Radiance Fields: from NeRF’s original view-synthesis breakthrough to 3D Gaussian Splatting and real-time, text-conditioned scene generation. The speaker argues that radiance-field representations will do for 3-D content what latent diffusion did for images—unlocking end-to-end generative pipelines that treat geometry, appearance, and even physics as optimizable continuums.

Here is a good overview of radiance fields and just a good overview of what the current trends in generative media look like.

Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering Explained

Rune Johansen (of Return of the Obra Dinn fame) unveils a new 1-bit shading trick that deposits ordered-dither “dots” directly in a model’s UV space, yielding patterns that cling to surfaces instead of swimming across pixels. The video demystifies the maths behind the fractal noise look-up, shows Unity demos, and releases the shader under an open-source license for anyone chasing retro-Mono-chrome aesthetics without temporal crawl.

softbodies – Real-time Soft-Body Simulation in the Browser

This WebGPU + Three.js repo demonstrates true volumetric soft-body deformation and self-collision entirely in-browser. A tetrahedral mass-spring lattice runs in compute shaders, while Three.js’s new WebGPURenderer handles draw calls. The README links to a live demo where squishy blobs bounce off each other at 60 fps—showcasing just how far WebGPU has matured for physics-heavy generative art.

Particle Life Simulation in Browser using WebGPU

Ever wondered what happens when you throw out Newton’s third law? This blog ports the viral “Particle Life” model—where asymmetric forces cause predator-prey-style swarms—to the browser. Leveraging compute shaders, thousands of particles interact in real time with adjustable attraction/repulsion matrices, friction, and boundary conditions. The post is equal parts performance diary and playground link, inviting readers to tweak parameters and watch emergent “organisms” evolve.

Having Fun with POPS in TouchDesigner

TouchDesigner’s brand-new Point Operators (POPs) form a GPU-accelerated node family that manipulates points, particles, point-clouds, line-strips and more, folding the strengths of SOPs, CHOPs and TOPs into one modern workflow. n this 38-minute walkthrough the presenter tours core POP

Courage is the belief in self, and the possible ability to prevail in the face of adversity. - Tony Dovale

Another month has already gone by.

Hope you are able to continue plugging away creating or learning about beautiful things.

Personally I’ve been working on the following…

Color Palette Generator

I’ve been working heavily in the browser in my day job and have really been trying to dig into the depths of the browser outside of the normal frameworks (aka Svelte, React) to really get an understanding on the interaction between the browser.

One thing I’ve been wanting to do was create generative color palettes. But first, Procreate.

I’ve been a user or fan since Procreate was released many years ago.

After seeing palettes on Etsy and other sites I thought it would be interesting to recreate this. So I embarked on understanding the file format (zipped JSON file), and then started working to generate color palettes.

It’s a simple site, but it’s been a fun learning experiment. Hope you might find it useful.

Limitations:

• I’ve been still working on the color selection algorithms, they don’t quite work the way I’d like for them to but this is at least a start and generally I’m producing some nice results.

• Image saturation / brightness sometimes works.

• It is only useful on a computer right now.. I haven’t really further refined it for a mobile device.

I’m still working on refining the project.. but it is 80% of the way there and I really enjoy creating this.

Let me know what you think, share your palettes and I’d love any feedback on browsers. I’m using a rather modern computer and haven’t tested it out much outside of my Mac.

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Tutorials & Articles

The Irrepressible Loopiness of Leaf Music

In the unique composition "Leaf Loops," the creator embarks on an innovative musical journey by tracing the perimeter of a leaf and transforming this natural contour into a captivating piece of music. Utilizing a Python script to convert the leaf's outline into data, the composition is crafted by mapping radial distances to musical pitches—longer distances yield lower pitches, while shorter ones produce higher sounds. The piece evolves through various experimental techniques, including different pitch mappings and rhythmic patterns that follow the leaf’s edge. This exploration not only challenges traditional music composition but also merges natural forms with digital technology to create an evolving soundscape that mirrors the intricate patterns of nature.

Much of this is more procedural in nature, yet it show the cleverness that can come..

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3D Words With Some Perspective

If you have ever wondered how to create a 3D model in which two different orientations could create two different words, check this out from a Hackathon over at FormLabs. I had been looking around for a way to make models that will look different depending on the perspective they are looked and came across this.

Generating an infinite world with the Wave Function Collapse Algorithm

This article describes how I generate an infinite city using the Wave Function Collapse algorithm in a way that is fast, deterministic, parallelizable and reliable. It's a follow-up to my 2019 article on adapting the WFC algorithm to generate an infinite world. The new approach presented in this article removes the limitations of my original implementation. I first mentioned these ideas in this Twitter thread.

Wave collapse functions is heavily used in games but you can see the power by which this can produce quite complex looking content.

Introduction of Graph Search Algorithms

Graph search algorithms let us find the shortest path on a map represented as a graph. Move the blob (start point) and cross (end point) to see the shortest path found by the A Algorithm*:

The next article in the series starts here.

Somewhat more Physically Based Rendering

The page was originally based on a primer of PBR (Physically Based Rendering) using Unity as the primary example. However, since I found that almost all of the main concepts are explained in detail in implementable forms on LearnOpenGL.com, I have rewritten the page so that you can run all the samples in a browser. As a result, this page has become pretty much a visual summary of what I have learned from LearnOpenGL.com. Most of what is written on this page is also described in more detail in the links.

NeuralSVG: An Implicit Representation for Text to Vector Generation

Vector graphics are essential in design, providing artists with a versatile medium for creating resolution-independent and highly editable visual content. Recent advancements in vision-language and diffusion models have fueled interest in text-to-vector graphics generation. However, existing approaches often suffer from over-parameterized outputs or treat the layered structure --- a core feature of vector graphics --- as a secondary goal, diminishing their practical use. Recognizing the importance of layered SVG representations, we propose NeuralSVG, an implicit neural representation for generating vector graphics from text prompts. Inspired by Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), NeuralSVG encodes the entire scene into the weights of a small MLP network, optimized using Score Distillation Sampling (SDS). To encourage a layered structure in the generated SVG, we introduce a dropout-based regularization technique that strengthens the standalone meaning of each shape. We additionally demonstrate that utilizing a neural representation provides an added benefit of inference-time control, enabling users to dynamically adapt the generated SVG based on user-provided inputs, all with a single learned representation. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations, we demonstrate that NeuralSVG outperforms existing methods in generating structured and flexible SVG.

Unfortunately the code has yet been posted for this project. However I can find this to have many interesting uses not to produce images, but raw materials that then can be further iterated.

Art with a Blender Python Script

This tutorial dives into the art of Blender Python scripting to create dazzling generative visuals. You’ll learn how to wield the power of code to transform Blender’s workspace—setting a pitch-black backdrop, switching to the Cycles render engine, and crafting perfect square resolutions. From dynamically positioning cameras and lighting to conjuring up a mesmerizing particle system with wild turbulence effects, the tutorial delivers creative sparks at every step. The pièce de résistance? A custom Shader node material that makes particle strands glow with a radiant, artistic flair. Packed with tips for optimizing your script and making it reusable, this guide is your gateway to coding jaw-dropping art.

Creating Generative Artwork with Three.js

Develop a dynamic, generative artwork using Three.js and grid systems, inspired by Lygia Clark’s minimalist geometric designs.

Thought this is a through and well thought out tutorial with alot of code and live examples making it well work the time to read.

Events

Following are some events across the world that are specific to graphics and coding..

• VISIGRAPP 2025: International Joint Conference (Porto, Portugal) - February 26-28

• PerGraVAR: Second International Workshop on Perception-driven Graphics and Displays for VR and AR (Saint-Malo, France) - March 8-9

• EUROGRAPHICS 2025 (London, UK) - London, UK - May 12-16

• GMP 2025 – International Conference on Geometric Modeling and Processing (St. Louis, MO)

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Your impact in life is a memory that lives forever thus be creative in positivity. - Oscar Auliq-Ice

Happy New Year! 2024 flew by for me quicker than I thought it would but I can’t really be upset with it. :)

I hope all of you have an inspiring year.

My desire for all of you to continue to be creative and learn. I hope you all to be an effective influence with understanding and patience to those around. I know that life can seem overwhelming and at times upside down. Life is simply change moving forward.

2024 Achievements

• Finish a masters program in Data Science from University of Colorado @ Boulder (Go Buffs)

  • It’s been on my bucket list since college.

• Learn some of the tooling in computational design

  • Spent serious time in Rhino3D, Houdini and Blender to really start figuring out how to create these tools from scratch.

  • I’m plagued with many interests

• Met some of the generative art original generative artists such as Frieder Nake by celebrated the generative art movement

• Started my own generative art framework for my own quick iteration called Selkie

Other things I’ve found interesting:

Favorite Fiction: Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang

I appreciated the science fiction of the work. Not only did it have eastern philosophy interweaved within it. It also did a great job at envisioning what multi-planetary civilization could look like.

Favorite Audiobook(s): The Lord of the Rings (Narrated by Andy Serkus)

Narrated by the voice of Gollum in the movies, it is just good to hear his range of characters through his voice and then one who is heavily intertwined into the culture of LOTR it was on point.

Favorite Non-Fiction: The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger

As I love new worlds and universes, I find that this book opens up a new world and highlights the great complexities and breadth of life we have yet to understand.

Favorite New TV show: Alone

I appreciated the science fiction of the work. Not only did it have eastern philosophy interweaved within it. It also did a great job at envisioning what multi-planetary civilization could look like.

2025 Goals

• Get back to producing art daily.

  • Working on school, full time job, art, newsletter and just simply playing with new technology did slow down my art making in 2024. I’ll be doing more of it this year.

• I’ve been working off and on this year working on 3D printed generative designs that I intend to further work on refining. Details have been spread throughout the last year in the newsletter.

• Improve my skills in teaching and creating tutorials

  • I’ve spent alot of time over the past 6 years reading tutorials, working through samples, and reading code. So I need to start distilling what I have in the back of my mind. One as a practice to continue to learn deeply but also to continue to document the interesting work and methods.

• Figuring out what to do next with the newsletter

  • I love a good long newsletter and so I am not a huge fan of TikTok content though it seems to be what people learn. I think some of it is due to me being an elder millennial I suppose lol. But I also think depth cannot come from quick. However I want to continue spreading the work that is digestible. I have created an audio version of this newsletter using AI so lets see what you think and if it is work pursuing.

Alright, that is enough about me. I hope you all have a great start of the year. Start making some small habits (Atomic Habits is a great read for this).

Much love,

Chris Ried

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Genuary2025 is here!

I guess I’ve now been participating for 4 years now in Genuary and always enjoy the challenge. Sometimes I get all of it done. Sometimes very little but it is still a wonderful experience either way.

I’ll be posting my favorites starting next week.

Tutorials & Articles

WebGPU: Compute Shaders Crash Course

This video provides a comprehensive overview of how to utilize WebGPU and compute shaders for machine learning tasks on the web, such as training a simple neural network to recognize handwritten digits. The tutorial covers the essential concepts and tools for working with parallel GPU computations, starting from basic matrix operations and progressing to the implementation of a neural network.

No-engine 2D Rendering in 600 Lines

The tutorial provides a deep dive into creating a 2D game renderer using Odin and Circle, focusing on shaders, vertex buffers, texturing, font rendering, and performance optimization. It emphasizes the importance of understanding low-level graphics concepts and applying them directly to game development rather than building an overly complex engine.

This is just a great opportunity overview.. though it is using Odin which is a newer language from the JangaFX team.

Colorify Rocks

Create stunning color palettes instantly with AI. Enter any keyword or theme to generate the perfect color combination for your project.

Love the design and thought you might enjoy playing with it.

Making a Better Particle Simulation in C++

The speaker successfully builds a particle simulation from scratch, learning key concepts like verlet integration, vector math, and collision detection, while overcoming performance challenges and optimizing the simulation. The process highlights the importance of breaking down complex problems, understanding the physics involved, and applying computational techniques like substepping and grid hashing to improve performance. The project serves as a valuable lesson in real-world programming, moving beyond competitive programming to create interactive simulations.

I am always a fan of using C++. I think there is something about really knowing how something works by building it from scratch.

I Tried Making a Real-Time Painterly

The video demonstrates the creation of a real-time painting shader that’s inspired by van Gogh’s brush strokes and impasto technique. It uses procedural algorithms, color manipulation, and lighting effects to capture the painter’s expressive style. This shader is then applied to games through ReShade, transforming the game footage into an artistic, painterly effect. The process is a cool mix of coding and creativity, showing how technical problem-solving can bring an artistic vision to life.

TouchDesigner Particle SOP

The video walks through creating a dynamic particle effect in TouchDesigner using various techniques to generate a visual display. It begins by creating a sphere and particles and progresses through adding various visual elements like textures, lighting, and forces to create a more dynamic and engaging effect. The shader makes use of noise, forces, and different types of forces like radial and directional forces to animate and interact with particles.

Smaller Than Pixel Art

I started making this video awhile ago, but I ran out of steam half-way through. Nevertheless, I forced myself to finish it. I hope you get something out of it. I also hope that it still applies somewhat to the current state of computer screens, but I may be too out of date.

Fun little video that really is more inspirational.

Spectulative Size: Exploring Perception Through Sound Scaling

This video explores an experiment where the perceived size of an object is influenced by the sound it produces when slowed down. The experiment compares the sounds of two wooden cylinders of drastically different sizes—a large 60 x 3 cm cylinder and a small 4 cm x 2 mm cylinder. The small cylinder is slowed down by a factor of 15 to match the fundamental frequency of the larger one, and the video shows how their sounds evolve when analyzed

More of a technical video, but it is really interesting to see how the pitch of an item changes from one size to another. It is worth the listen. Also, please check out his content as he really dives deep into ultrasonic sound capture and other really fascinating dimensions in sound.

Slime Sim WebGPU

I made this slime mold simulation to learn more about WebGPU and compute shaders. It's essentially a recreation of Sebastian Lague's coding adventure (albiet with fewer features).

I’ve seen very little use of WebGPU in the creative coding community.. but this will be a helpful standard to learn.

Differential Growth using Blender

People have always been attracted to organic forms, as is evidenced by an endless number of various design elements found in human craft and art since prehistoric times; the “Mother Nature” has always been a source of inspiration and symbolism for people throughout the globe. The desire to contemplate and reflect upon the organic processes seems to be an inherent part of human nature.

This is pretty impressive and I would definitely recommend working with this if you are interested in doing work in Blender.

Events

Following are some events across the world that are specific to graphics and coding..

• VISIGRAPP 2025: International Joint Conference (Porto, Portugal) - February 26-28

• PerGraVAR: Second International Workshop on Perception-driven Graphics and Displays for VR and AR (Saint-Malo, France) - March 8-9

• EUROGRAPHICS 2025 (London, UK) - London, UK - May 12-16

• GMP 2025 – International Conference on Geometric Modeling and Processing (St. Louis, MO)

If you want to see a more full calendar here I have a page on Notion. I’ll try to keep it up this year.

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In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious. - Viktor E. Frankl

Happy Holidays! I hope you all are enjoying the people around you.

Part of my holiday fun was plot for a number of friends and I want to give you the ability to use the same and find a snowflake that you like by going to the site below.

Generative Snowflakes

A few of my favorite are above. Just use the create snowflake button to generate outputs. If you like them, just download the SVG and you can do whatever with it. Fun tip… take it into Inkscape or Illustrator and you can have fun tranforming the paths.

Hope you have the best of holidays!

Chris Ried

Tutorials & Articles

Giving Personality to Procedural Animation using Math

It's been a while since the last video hasn't it? I've made quite a bit of progress since the last update, and since one of the things I worked on was some procedurally animated characters, I decided to make a video about the subject. In particular, this video highlights the entire process from initial motivation, to the technical design, technical analysis, and game design considerations.

This is fun way to take movement and bring life to it. It’s a great lesson to really take in and some of the teaching tools were created using Manim which is a great teaching tool.

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Visions of Destruction: Exploring a Potential of Generative AI in Interactive Art

This paper explores the potential of generative AI within interactive art, employing a practice-based research approach. It presents the interactive artwork ”Visions of Destruction” as a detailed case study, highlighting its innovative use of generative AI to create a dynamic, audience-responsive experience. This artwork applies gaze-based interaction to dynamically alter digital landscapes, symbolizing the impact of human activities on the environment by generating contemporary collages created with AI, trained on data about human damage to nature, and guided by audience interaction. The transformation of pristine natural scenes into human-made and industrialized landscapes through viewer interaction serves as a stark reminder of environmental degradation. The paper thoroughly explores the technical challenges and artistic innovations involved in creating such an interactive art installation, emphasizing the potential of generative AI to revolutionize artistic expression, audience engagement, and especially the opportunities for the interactive art field. It offers insights into the conceptual framework behind the artwork, aiming to evoke a deeper understanding and reflection on the Anthropocene era and human-induced climate change. This study contributes significantly to the field of creative AI and interactive art, blending technology and environmental consciousness in a compelling, thought-provoking manner.

As far as it goes, generative AI is the emergence of a new form of creating. Some of it is exciting and perhaps one might be worried about further implications. The following paper is an interesting use case on creating installation art and using generative AI to extrapolate alternative outcomes and universes. It’s worth a look at.

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Marcin Ignac - Variable Design

At Variable.io we design and develop data-driven artworks and generative branding systems that constantly change. How do you balance staying accurate to the data and brand story whilst maintaining artistic freedom? In this talk, you will learn about Variable’s approach, the power of constraints in design, the importance of building your own tools, and when to let algorithms roam free in search for the true shape of data.

Marcin Ignac (creator of Nodes) talks about his tools and the spectrum between data visualization and generative art.

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Creative Coding for Geometric Art

I recently designed and coded a generative geometric art program that has surpassed my initial expectations as to the nature and variety of the abstract geometric art I would be able to create when using it. I'd like to share with you this adventure in creative coding and the evolution of this generative art program. To that end, this article is written primarily for those who have an interest in the creative coding aspects of generative art and my own software development process.

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Understanding Godot Light Shaders and Light Calculations by Implementing a Toon Light Shader

In Introduction to Shaders, we discussed the two most common shader types: Vertex and Fragment. Godot offers another function to override: the Light shader. In this tutorial, we’ll see what we can do with this shader. To do so, we’ll have to look into how light is generally calculated in real-time 3D environments, how to implement this ourselves, and how to make changes to it to get a toon shader with uniform colors and hard edges.

Just a way to use both shaders in game development using Godot.

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Controlling Blender with Voice using LLM

Experimenting with Googles' new Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental to control Blender with my voice!

This showcases the innovative use of tools like LLMs (Large Language Models) to create intuitive and creative user interfaces. Leveraging these tools allows us to explore novel ways to interact with software, such as voice-controlled operations in Blender. This approach highlights the potential for enhancing user engagement by making tools more accessible and adaptable. Understanding and implementing such integrations can offer exciting opportunities for developers and creatives alike to push the boundaries of technology-driven interactions.

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SplashSurf: Surface Reconstruction Library

splashsurf is a tool to reconstruct surfaces meshes from SPH particle data. The first image shows the visualization of a set of particles from an SPH fluid simulation from SPlisHSPlasH. The particle radius is 0.025. As the rendering of a fluid should not look like a ball pit, a surface mesh has to be reconstructed from this particle data. The next image shows a reconstructed surface mesh of the fluid produced by splashsurf with a "smoothing length" of 2.2 times the particles radius and a cell size of 1.1 times the particle radius.

The reconstruction library is written in Rust and it got me just interested in looking further into the information.

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Books

Generative Art with JavaScript and SVG (2024)

A caveat before we begin: generative art, and creative coding more generally, can become an all-consuming addiction. “Just one more iteration” is a refrain you might hear from those unfortunate artists caught in its thrall. Creatives craving that next generative hit mixed with just the right amount of randomness.

The purpose of this book is to deal out this computational devilry in small doses, in a clear, logical fashion, so you can approach this topic safely and with your sanity intact. We will encounter organic forms borne of mechanical precision, unpredictable swathes of color cover our screens, lines and shapes flocking together in impossible harmony, and see complex structures emerge from simple rules. This is the essence of generative art, where not all is in your control.

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Good Afternoon Friends,

Saturday I spent most of the day simply using the plotter and plotting various gifts but also to send out. A week ago, I had written a little L-system algorithm in Javascript and exporting the results in SVG using Paper.js. Generally L-Systems will be used to create trees, leaves, and other rule based. I used it to build snowflake like creations. A great book available online about how and what can be done with these systems is called The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants that I had pointed out in the very first issue of the newsletter here. It’s free online so I would highly recommend checking it out if you haven’t yet seen it.

I hope you have a great week!

Chris Ried

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Tutorials & Articles

Writing a puzzle generator in Elm

Randomly generating puzzles is a nice problem for beginners and tinkerers, so I wanted to write up the approach that I came up with. I'd love to hear from you if you attempted to do something similar, especially if you came up with different solutions.

I used Elm, because it has a nice way to produce SVGs, and it happens to be the frontend language I know best.

Though I never have used Elm for any creative purposes, the article does a great job on providing code and image examples on creating their own puzzle generator.

Btw, if you are looking for any gifts with a generative spin and don’t have access to a laser cutter, Nervous Systems has a number of interesting puzzles gift ideas you should check out.

Interpreting Sensor Data for MIDI Velocity in Max

This is an answer to a discord of Philip Meyer. The question was asking how can one take sensor data and convert it to MIDI data in order to to create some interesting use cases in Max.

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The Physics of Butterfly Wings

Some butterflies have shiny, vividly colored wings. From different angles you see different colors. This effect is called iridescence. How does it work?

It turns out these butterfly wings are made of very fancy materials! Light bounces around inside these materials in a tricky way. Sunlight of different colors winds up reflecting off these materials in different directions.

How I learned to Speak Human

What happens when a computer science major steps out of MIT and into design, business, and leadership? In “How I Learned To Speak Human After Leaving MIT :-),” I’ll share how leaving the Media Lab in 2008 set me on an unexpected path—from advocating for the arts with the STEAM movement at RISD to navigating venture capital, startups, and industries of all scales. Does being a multidisciplinary “hybrid” thinker and doer enhance or limit one’s career prospects?

How I really think this resonated so much because it resonates many of the quotes I highlighted in the last newsletter.

Belousov-Zhabotinsky Reaction

Great overview of the tutorial creating the BZ-Reaction in p5… you can learn alot about the simulation of the reaction here.

Wodinak - Creative Developer Profile

Really this is a site that has alot of interesting frontend techniques built into it and definitely thought it is worth highlighting the experience. I have to say that Antoine Wodniack has some incredible motion graphics experience to make the following happen.

Skia Canvas

Skia Canvas is a browser-less implementation of the HTML Canvas drawing API for Node.js. It is based on Google’s Skia graphics engine and, accordingly, produces very similar results to Chrome’s <canvas> element. The library is well suited for use on desktop machines where you can render hardware-accelerated graphics to a window and on the server where it can output a variety of image formats.

The following is actually an interesting alternative to things like p5 or processing for it’s ability to work outside of the browser and being able to use it in the browser.

Mathematicians Discover a New Kind of Shape That’s All Over Nature

How few corners can a shape have and still tile the plane?” mathematician Gábor Domokos asked me over pizza. His deceptively simple question was about the geometry of tilings, also called tessellations—arrangements of shapes, called tiles or cells, that fill a surface with no gaps or overlaps. Humans have a preoccupation with tessellation that dates back at least to ancient Sumer, where tilings featured prominently in architecture and art. But in all the centuries that thinkers have tinkered with tiles, no one seems to have seriously pondered whether there’s some limit to how few vertices—sharp corners where lines meet—the tiles of a tessellation can have. Until Domokos. Chasing tiles with ever fewer corners eventually led him and his small team to discover an entirely new type of shape.

Book: Generating Sound and Organizing Time

Generating Sound & Organizing Time is about the astonishing things you can do—and the insights you can find—when you work at the atomic sample-by-sample structure of digital audio.bWhether you are a musician, sound designer, composer, or an experimentalist interested in creating music and tools to generate and modulate audio, our aim is to reveal how working at the sample level is not only easier to reason about, but also far more open to demystify and unleash the immense possibilities of digital audio signal processing.

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Every story follows a pattern. - Seb Reilly

Happy Weekend!

So I wanted to highlight a few passages / lines from the book “The Art of Critical Making” RISD on Creative Practice. The book was a recommendation by a fellow lover of the arts and thought it might be good to highlight some thoughts on the idea of making and art. I highlighted passages, many were validations on thoughts Ive had but find hard to articulate. Others were novel ways to think about things.

• Possibilities are tests of endurance, and one must be willing to do something over and over again until it is right or until something else is discovered. But how will we know what “right” is or what discovery looks and feels like? To begin, two main constants must be addressed: one involves identifying and observing underlying rules; the other involves breaking them. (Groundwork, Hirst)

• Objects brought to life by a maker return the favor, not only by fostering confidence and vitality but by sharpening personal identity and adding meaning to the experience of consciousness.” (Groundwork, Hirst)

• Creativity arises out of the tension between the rules and imagination. (Groundwork, Hirst)

• The other constant in the work of art and design is a willingness to break the rules once they are understood—maybe even those that we establish for ourselves. (Groundwork, Hirst)

• Those who are willing to just start making something no matter where those steps are leading will go much farther than those who timidly walk a direct line, because every step of the journey amounts to something. (Groundwork, Hirst)

• The impulse to draw is not to capture appearance so much as a demand to animate thought. Thus drawing is always beyond perception, the other side of perception. (Conversation: Drawing, Phillips)

• “critical thinking, the ability to process and evaluate information while challenging assumptions and employing multiple ways of knowing; and critical making, the process of creating things by altering materials and giving form to ideas.” (Thingking, Dunnigan)

• Most works of art do not reveal extensive information at first glance. Instead they appear as puzzles, complex bodies of information that don’t quite make sense. One way to start to derive meaning from what we see is to assign language to form, to name what is visually apparent, exercising observational skills.” (Object Lessons, Blythe)

• Thinking evolves and becomes much more concrete through that kind of back and forth. You read. You come up with an understanding of what you’ve read. (Conversation:Materials, Dobson)

• A symbol is a story that represents a larger idea or belief. Such “stories” can be as brief as a simple mark or as complex as an overarching identity system that brands a complex organization or corporation. (Graphic Design, Storytelling, and the Making of Meaning, Hitchcock)

• Through the practice of talking about your work, you say things you didn’t know you were aware of. It’s important for students to know that talking out loud is another way of thinking, and that new thoughts come out through that process. (Conversation: Critique, Sutton)

• Innovation requires thinking and doing at the same time about things we haven’t imagined yet. (Acting into the Unknown, Sharma)

These ideas serve as foundational principles for creative thinking, problem-solving, and developing new perspectives.

Art is often dismissed as an unproductive pursuit.

Many have implied that "there is no value in the practice of creating."

Yet the highlights above reveal fundamental practices that extend far beyond a basic "art" degree.

There are unique ways to interpret and evaluate our surroundings that help us see things differently.

This requires looking beyond the obvious and concrete.

It's about diving beneath surface-level understanding.

While sometimes making is simply about the end product, we often miss the full scope of what we're examining.

Consider bird watching—if you're not familiar with it, you might simply see a bird by its color.

It's a brown or black bird, or maybe you know it's a cardinal.

But when you look deeper, you discover countless varieties, colors, patterns, habits, and behaviors—an endless well of detail.

The same applies to an artist's object and design thinking. There's much more than just technical skill with materials. It's about the process of creating from scratch with a developed idea, illuminating the benefits of seeing things from new perspectives.

Hope you all enjoy some of the following links.

Hope you have a wonderful week!

Chris Ried (generatecoll)

Tutorials, Articles and More

Bitframes

Bitframes is an open source artwork encoded in 32 bytes of data, inspired by punched cards and early computer art. Mint your designs to the blockchain for a small fee, and help crowdfund a documentary film that preserves the history of generative art.

This is a worthwhile crowdfunding project that will document the history of generative art. I'm confident it will be handled with great care.

To participate in the project, you can contribute to the crowdfunding campaign that supports the documentary's creation. Matt (the artist) will select 32 tokens—16 will be distributed through a raffle, and the other 16 will go to the top donors.

Another one of the projects Matt DesLaurier has worked on with Kjetil Golid and Andreas Rau was Patterned Language.

Pattern Language

In Pattern Language, the rich traditions of weaving in Balestrand, Norway meet the technology-driven reality of 2024. Traditional weave patterns drawn from the archive of the Norwegian Travel Museum are juxtaposed with computer icons inspired by 1980s graphical user interfaces and woven into imaginary, computer-generated tapestries.

CMajor - Sound LIbrary

Cmajor is a programming language for writing fast, portable audio software.

You've heard of C, C++, C#, objective-C... well, Cmajor is a C-family language designed specifically for writing DSP signal processing code.

Creating music with code happens all the time. There are many other languages, frameworks that make this happen. But this one is specifically for just music and may just be what you need to start testing it out!

Neuron Fractal

Neuron fractal structures using the new shortest edge path node with geometry nodes in Blender. In this tutorial, learn to create procedural growing fractal tree-like shapes using this node along with edge paths to curves geometry node.

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Pixel Art Color Palettes

The Lospec Palette List is a database of palettes for pixel art. We include both palettes that originate from old hardware that could only display a few colors, as well as palettes created by pixel artists specifically for making art.

These palettes are really fun to see and just look over. The above image is one of my favorites as its bright and simple.

Two Dimensional Packing

Initially, I thought this was quite a specific problem, but it happens to have industrial impacts too. How many ads can I fit on this newspaper page? How many shapes can I cut in this piece of wood? How many packages can I fit in the back of a delivery van? Thus, the 2D packing problem has been studied academically too.

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This technical article explains how to efficiently pack multiple boxes into a defined space. This packing technique appears frequently in generative art and is particularly useful when working with grid-based layouts, such as website photo galleries.

Shaded Relief Maps in Blender

This guide will help you prepare DEM data using QGIS in order to render 3D looking shaded-relief maps in Blender.

As you have seen from my last couple newsletters I’ve been spending quite a bit of time digging deeper into Blender. Here is another tutorial on creating maps, data art, data visualization using yet another tool.

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Generative Art with Grid

The grid package provides the underlying graphics system upon which ggplot2 is built. It’s one of two quite different drawing systems that are included in base R: base graphics and grid. Base graphics has an imperative “pen-on-paper” model: every function immediately draws something on the graphics device. Much like ggplot2 itself, grid takes a more declarative approach where you build up a description of the graphic as an object, which is later rendered. This declarative approach allows us to create objects that exist independently of the graphic device and can be passed around, analysed, and modified. Importantly, parts of a graphical object can refer to other parts, which allows you to do things like define rectangle A to have width equal to the length of text string B, and so on.

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Speaking of grids and 2D packing, here is a piece on using R when creating procedural / generative work.

Plant

Plant is a toy language for "branching" drawing. See example or how to write Plant code. It is useful for drawing things like plants.

This specialized language makes it easy to create branching and fractal-like patterns. It shows how developers can build a design system that generates exactly the visual effects they want.

p5.plotSvg

The p5.plotSvg library allows the p5.js creative coding toolkit to generate SVG files specifically tailored for path-based vector output devices like the AxiDraw pen-plotter. Note that p5.plotSvg is not a general-purpose library for importing, exporting, optimizing, or rendering SVG files in p5.js. The p5.plotSvg library is known to be compatible with p5.js v.1.11.1.

And as everyone might already know, Golan Levin (website) released the following package for those of you who use p5. I have yet to use it, so let me know if you like it.

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Art cannot save the world, but it does help you understand the world inside of you. - Krist Pauwels

Good evening or morning depending on what side of the earth you are waking to read my shenanigans.

I hope your week is going well and that I can bring a couple minutes of interesting finds in the following entries.

This week, I've applied some of my recent learnings to implement 3D work I've been eager to explore for nearly a year. Currently, I'm experimenting with Blender as a templating tool to understand how I might develop a growth algorithm and create something intriguing that I can later code from scratch. I still have much to learn about materials and their proper production in Blender. This will help me grasp the components, which I can then break down even further.

You might wonder, "Why not just be content with what you have?" That's a bit too sensible, of course. There's a special intent behind making something. Creating from scratch allows you to infuse your own flavor of quality or simply approach it differently.

Damsel in Distress

I came across this photograph a couple of weeks ago, and I must say there's a melancholy sense to it. It also reminded me of the displacement pattern similar to a scene in the movie Blade Runner, where water caustics aren't distorting the image but definitely provide a mood. (See the following video on how to recreate it.)

The artist describes the piece as:

Everyone has an urge to save a drowning woman—but some women don't wish to be saved. Laurence Demaison is one of them. Dozens of times, she has "drowned" herself, for the cause of art. "Autoportraits," a show of Demaison's photographs, will appear at the Galerie BMG in Woodstock, beginning May 22.

There's something oddly distorting (no pun intended) that creates a sense of something missing.

When we obscure reality and let it become opaque, we hide or lose the reality of the self, making us want to see or project the ourselves in its altered form. I believe it was Freud (it's been a couple of years since I've taken a psychology course) who first introduced the concept of defense mechanisms and how we use projection and repression when dealing with our true selves.

This altered view sometimes is a way to keep ourselves protected from becoming hurt and vulnerable. It also is a way to insure that the turbulence of other’s doesn’t become one’s own problem.

Yet it isn't just a form of defense. Clifford Geertz, an anthropologist, discusses a similar concept:

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun

Geertz speaks of these webs of significance—those we align with or befriend, but also the projection we display of ourselves. We desire our significance to be perceived in a specific way by those around us.

Why all this psychological musing? Well, I believe it's always valuable to consider the purpose behind any piece we create. Sure, we can depict water simply as water, but often there are deeper meanings behind our creations.

We might not even be aware of the symbolism in what we create, yet we instinctively know there's a purpose driving our creative choices.

On that note, how does one replicate such a distortion? Here are a few places to start with.

• Rendering Real-Time Caustics in WebGL

• Screen Space Refraction

• Water Displacement in P5 (video)

• Water Walkthrough using Shaders

• Seascape (Shadertoy)

This will give you the patterns you might want to use to warp an image. But here are a few implementations to get the image above’s effect using a method called domain warping.

• Domain Warping Sketching

• Domain Warping (Iquilezles)

• Domain Warping in Unity

On that note, I hope you find some interesting articles and links!

Till next time!

Chris Ried

P.S. Let me know if you have suggestions or interesting content. Send it my way!

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Mathematik, Grafik und Programmierung

This website serves as a comprehensive repository of captivating chaotic systems, meticulously curated by Meier. Visitors will discover an extensive collection of information regarding chaotic attractors, ranging from the well-known Lorenz attractor to more obscure systems. The site offers detailed explanations, mathematical formulas, and visually striking representations of these complex dynamical systems. For those interested in the intersection of mathematics, physics, and computer graphics, this resource provides an invaluable opportunity to delve into the mesmerizing world of chaos theory and its applications.

The Generative Part of Generative Art

Part of the creation of the Craft Lab brand has involved generative elements. I have always been interested in them, and a community platform built for design engineers felt like the perfect opportunity to explore and enforce my experience with generative art.

The Engineering Behind Vector Networks

This post can be thought of as an introduction to a really interesting problem space, and as a resource for people interesting in making use of some aspects of Vector Networks for future applications. I hope it succeeds in providing value to both developers being introduced to new concepts and ideas, and to designers interesting in learning more about the tool they know and love.

Blender Shader Nodes

This video is quite lengthy (1.5 hours long), but it's an excellent resource for anyone wanting to understand how shaders work without delving into the complexities of GLSL or C++. If you're new to coding, these languages can be overwhelming (although the Book of Shaders is a great resource). I highly recommend this video if you haven't coded much. The presenter demonstrates how lights, materials, and environments work by building them in Blender's node shader system.

Hex Glitch

After examining the creations made in Blender, which are truly impressive, I find Blender to be "easy mode" when it comes to digital 3D creation. While one can accomplish a great deal with it, looking at a piece like Hex Glitch—written from scratch in GLSL—is a different experience altogether. It's astounding to realize that with careful thought and relatively little code, one can be truly stunned by the work of ignius on Shadertoy.

DimensionX: Create Any 3D and 4D Scenes from a Single Image

this paper, we introduce DimensionX, a framework designed to generate photorealistic 3D and 4D scenes from just a single image with video diffusion. Our approach begins with the insight that both the spatial structure of a 3D scene and the temporal evolution of a 4D scene can be effectively represented through sequences of video frames. While recent video diffusion models have shown remarkable success in producing vivid visuals, they face limitations in directly recovering 3D/4D scenes due to limited spatial and temporal controllability during generation. To overcome this, we propose ST-Director, which decouples spatial and temporal factors in video diffusion by learning dimension-aware LoRAs from dimension-variant data. This controllable video diffusion approach enables precise manipulation of spatial structure and temporal dynamics, allowing us to reconstruct both 3D and 4D representations from sequential frames with the combination of spatial and temporal dimensions. Additionally, to bridge the gap between generated videos and real-world scenes, we introduce a trajectory-aware mechanism for 3D generation and an identity-preserving denoising strategy for 4D generation. Extensive experiments on various real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that DimensionX achieves superior results in controllable video generation, as well as in 3D and 4D scene generation, compared with previous methods.

When seeing how we continue to progress from the first DreamGAN tech from 2017 to diffusion in 2024. It is just an interesting continued progression not just for the innate technical feat of what it can do, but just the idea of replicating or mimicking the functions of our brains is wild. Just to understand how much computation our brain has to do in order to sense or perhaps prebuild an understanding of what is just around the corner is definitely powerful and scary all at the same time.

Abstract Nature of Type with Creative Coding

A ‘forme’ is a tight arrangement of type set inside a locked chase for letterpress printing. Regulated by the constraints of its metal framework and underlying grid structure, the spacing, kerning and direction of its letter blocks are “strictly limited by the process”: a quality inherent to the long-established method that Anthony Burrill sees as one of the things that makes it so interesting. Like many traditional disciplines however, its interest can also lie in a deconstruction of set methods – a bending of the rules.

Inverse Kinematic Procedural Animation

Learn how to program a robot limb using inverse kinematics. We step through the coding for the cyclic coordinate descent algorithms, one of the simplest approaches to inverse kinematics. Great for robotics and procedural animations.

Moss Voltaics

This project is the exploration how moss could be used as a source of renewable energy. Mentioned emerging technology is called biophotovoltaics (BPV) which uses the natural process of photosynthesis to generate electrical energy. Photosynthesis is a process by which plants and algae convert carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into organic compounds using energy from sunlight. The plants use these organic compounds (like carbohydrates, proteins and lipids) to grow. When the moss photosynthesizes it releases some of these organic compounds into the soil, which contains bacteria. The bacteria break down these organic compounds, which they need to survive, liberating by-products that include electrons. By providing an electrode for the micro-organisms to donate their electrons to, the electrons can be harvested as electricity. These electrons are captured by conductive materials inside the prototype.

KMUTT Learning Center

According to the KMUTT Roadmap 2020, the university is aspiring to be one of the world class universities in the area of science and technology. For the Learning Innovation, the design by MAB Studio (Achawin Laohavichairat) used biomimicry as a natural inspiration to make the building harmony with the context. The building became a new transition of the university to transfer people to go to each building and to create the structure that can show the potential of the engineering because that is an image of the university, the biomimetic strategies that integrate form, material, and structure into a single process. We try to observe and study the behavior of natural form. The structure is derived from the geometry of an infinite array of the structure. The structure in the building is a light weight structure. There is main circulation in the building and each program was designed along the main circulation. There are three dimensional structures as a space truss module those transfer the load to each other. The structural module was created by a natural pattern.

This is a project from back in 2012 but I find it inspirational and interesting to continue to see how natural structure inspires the architecture

Events

ITERATIONS 2024 - Creative Coding Symposium

How do recent technological developments empower makers to generate new creative avenues? How is the creative coding landscape going to evolve in the coming few years? These questions will be explored during the creative coding symposium ITERATIONS.

With a focus on inclusivity, we invited a group of creatives from different creative coding niches. This edition will focus on four themes: developing design tools (in the browser), sustainable computing, world-building, and creative education. We will explore them through presentations, performances, interactive sessions, and workshops.

Books

Nature of Code

What if you could re-create the awe-inspiring flocking patterns of birds or the hypnotic dance of fireflies—with code? For over a decade, The Nature of Code has empowered countless readers to do just that, bridging the gap between creative expression and programming. This innovative guide by Daniel Shiffman, creator of the beloved Coding Train, welcomes budding and seasoned programmers alike into a world where code meets playful creativity.

If you haven't read the previous edition of this book, it's worth your time to do so. It's an excellent resource for understanding how to build natural (and unnatural) systems using code. I've always loved this book because it distills all the wisdom Dan Shiffman shares in his The Coding Train YouTube series into one comprehensive guide. The most notable update in this new edition is the switch from Processing (a Java-based language) to the p5.js JavaScript framework.

Don’t let the daily routine kill your creativity. Remember who you were before you got that job. - Morr Meroz

Good morning!

Again, I still want to thank you for all of the support you provide.

As you will find, this edition is a bit more 3D modeling and Blender heavy. This isn’t always the case but it has been one thing that I have really wanted to get more proficient in. Since I haven’t spent near enough time I’ve been taking some time working with Houdini and Blender to see what it will take to do the same in other frameworks like Three.js and OpenSCAD.

Granted my ultimate goal is to finish a project that will involve some generative sculptures and mixed media that I will eventually get down once I have it right.

But just for fun, here is just one of my many little experiments…

Birdcall Identification using Deep Learning

In the wooded area behind our house, we've been trying to identify the type of owl we've been hearing over the past year. We often hear it in our dining room while playing Wingspan. Last week, during my research, I discovered a neural network called BirdNet that can identify bird sounds using a dataset from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

I placed an H3-VR sound recorder outside overnight to capture audio throughout the night. After collecting 10 GB of sound data, I analyzed it using BirdNet to identify the bird species that might be present in our backyard.

Unfortunately, I didn't capture any owl sounds that evening. However, I did record blue jays and yellow-bellied sapsuckers. In this section of the spectrogram, you can clearly see their distinctive sound signatures.

Well if you zoom in a little closer.

The model (BirdNet) itself definitely needs more fine tuning but I do know from the sound that the bird makes.

Since I have the pipeline together manually I still need to write a few scripts that will extract the points from the audio and display them simultaneously. That way I can really verify some of the sounds from a larger set.

Anyhow, that might be more than you wanted to know about but I find the intersection between nature, technology and science to be such a beautiful place to be in.

Peace!

Chris Ried

Tutorials & Articles

From Lamps to Lungs

Nervous System's presentation from CDFAM Computational Design Symposium in NYC is an exploration of their collaborations with scientists in the realm of 3D-printed organs. They show how science inspires their art and design work which then feeds back into their scientific practice. The cycle continues as their work on organs contributes to their recent large scale public artworks and vise-versa.

Nervous System has been an inspiration for many years. Their aesthetic blends parametric and computational design with influences from nature. In this presentation, they apply their skills in a functional way, which is definitely worth watching. I'd recommend checking out their Patreon for more insights into their work.

PabloNet

The debate about whether internet-fitted AIs can be creative always seemed besides the point to me. Making art is hard. My view is that art is about surfacing the inner world, and only in part about skill. It’s unfortunate that art selects so strongly for skill. Can we decorrelate the two? It seems so. Cheap interpolative*creativity used by 8 billion non-artists surely surfaces new views of the world.

More AI driven, but being able to mix the creative and AI together to inspire alternative experiences. Do check them out!

Interactive Motion Design using Unreal Engine 5.5

unreal engine's new motion design tools are incredibly fun, especially paired with everything else the engine has to offer. here's a little interactive toy created with some cloner/effector systems, using some of the new features in 5.5 (color! torii!), as well as a fully procedural music system running in-engine.

a primary effector moves around with the left stick and triggers, and switches between different modes when face buttons are pressed. the main cloner system also tilts with the right stick. svg import is really easy—i brought in a bunch of svg icons, extruded geometry, and dropped them into a cloner rotating around the scene, all very quickly.

Max 8.0 Released

Max 9 introduces significant enhancements across multiple domains of the software. In the Jitter realm, it introduces specialized geometry structures for efficient vertex manipulation and new jit.fx objects for effects and compositing, along with improved UI objects for interface building. The audio capabilities have been expanded with ABL objects that interface with Ableton Live Suite devices, a new loudness~ object for EBU R 128 standard measurements, and jweb~ for integrating web browser audio into Max. The coding environment now features the modern JavaScript V8 engine, enhanced codebox functionality, and a REPL interface. Patching workflows have been improved with features like the Patcher List View and Illustration Mode, while user interaction has been streamlined through integrated OSC support, modern HID input handling, and enhanced parameter connection capabilities. The update also includes improved documentation and a modernized preferences interface with syntax coloring for better readability.

Max is a powerful node-based visual and audio platform for creating computational experiences. Despite its versatility, it remains underappreciated outside of sound design circles. While primarily used by audio experimenters, Max offers extensive capabilities for visual artists as well.

Lorenz Attractor in Python and Blender

Lorenz Attractor in Blender - Visualizing the Lorenz Attractor in 3D using Blender & Python

A quick tutorial on how to produce a visualization of the Lorenz Attractor using Python code in Blender.

If you are brand new to Blender I’d recommend the Beginners to Blender course by Blender Guru here. But I’ve also attached the code that he uses so you can try it out and further iterate:

Definitely check it out… It provides alot of perspective on how the Blender coding libraries work.

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4D Objects In Blender

Making fractals in Blender is possible since Blender 3.3. I find the 4D Julia shape very interesting and beautiful, so here's how to make it too.

The following is more of a tool that has been created by the creator of the youtube channel Bad Normals.

On Painterly Shaders

Writing a shader that can reproduce the look and feel of aquarelle, watercolor, or gouache to obtain a more painterly output for my WebGL scenes has always been a long-term goal of mine. Inspired by the work of very talented 3D artists such as @simonxxoo or @arpeegee, the contrast between paintings and the added dimension allowed by 3D renderers was always very appealing to me. On top of that, my recent work with stylized shaders to mimic the hand-drawn Moebius art style emphasized not only that obtaining such stylized output was possible but also that post-processing was more likely than not the key to emulating any artistic style.

Blend Illustrative Compositing

Although some of this is more design driven, if you are a beginner understanding the render process is critical to realize how 3D rendering can produce interesting and unique ways that produce images such as creating a watercolor like scene in Blender.

Pushing the Frontiers of Audio Generation

Speech is central to human connection. It helps people around the world exchange information and ideas, express emotions and create mutual understanding. As our technology built for generating natural, dynamic voices continues to improve, we’re unlocking richer, more engaging digital experiences.

Over the past few years, we’ve been pushing the frontiers of audio generation, developing models that can create high quality, natural speech from a range of inputs, like text, tempo controls and particular voices. This technology powers single-speaker audio in many Google products and experiments — including Gemini Live, Project Astra, Journey Voices and YouTube’s auto dubbing — and is helping people around the world interact with more natural, conversational and intuitive digital assistants and AI tools.

This is just an example of the continual progression of audio generation. I find it worthwhile to pay attention.

Always thankful for your support!

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The muse is the mystic force, but you are the master. - Adrienne Posey

Hey there my friends!

First off, welcome all you new subscribers! Thank you for showing interest in one of my passions and celebrating it together.

As for the rest of my fellow readers,

I hope you have been productive and creating fun and interesting things! I’d love to hear about your experiences and experiments.

Personally…

I’ve finished off my masters… finally! This is a bucket list that I’ve been wanting to finish up.

That being said,

Source: C. Lavender

We recently lost Lillian Schwartz, a pioneering figure in the field of computer-generated art. Her innovative works have been exhibited globally, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) proudly houses several pieces from her early career. Schwartz's groundbreaking collaboration with Bell Labs, spanning from 1969 to 2002, was crucial in exploring the intersection of art and technology. During her tenure, she developed techniques that manipulated electronic visual effects to create artworks, pushing the boundaries of digital expression. Her contributions extend beyond visual art into the realms of film and animation, where she utilized computer algorithms to transform perceptions of motion and color. Lillian Schwartz's legacy continues to inspire a new generation of artists and technologists, cementing her status as a seminal figure in the evolution of digital art.

In “The Artist The Computer 1976” Lillian speaks about her process and one can really get a sense of her aesthetic and also her philosophy on creating.

I hope all of you another wonderful week!

Chris Ried

Tutorials & Articles

Fractan - Computer Architecture based on Fractions

Fractran is a computer architecture based entirely on the multiplication of fractions.

This intriguing article explores what the author describes as an unexplored field of computation. Using prime numbers as registers, the language features a fascinating syntax that's challenging to understand—which adds to its appeal.

How does it work?

So think of prime numbers as the DNA of other numbers. We use those as variables.. their factor or exponent is going to be the variable input.

The number 144 can be broken to:

which ends up being

Using these properties of fundamental building blocks of

So take for instance if we wanted to add two numbers together.. say 4 + 2 so we start out with:

var_2 = 4
var_3 = 2

So mathematically we get

Now if we factor that out we now do the following

• 144 x 3/2 = 216 which factors to

• 216 x 3/2 = 486 which factors to

• 486 x 3/2 = 729 which factors to

  🤯  since we hit an odd number we assume the computation is complete.

It's a fascinating and unconventional way to compute. This method of adding numbers opens up possibilities for further interesting discoveries.

From an artistic standpoint, this approach offers a fascinating way to constrain one's creative toolkit, potentially leading to the development of uniquely compelling and significant concepts.

• Esoteric.codes has a great starting article on it here

• Also here is Conway talking about it back in 1996

On that note about esoteric and interesting… 100Rabbits

100 Rabbits and their story is just something that I have to highlight every couple years as I just find them to be really unique and special. Also check out their video.

Theatre.js

Theatre.js is an animation library for high-fidelity motion graphics. It is designed to help you express detailed animation, enabling you to create intricate movement, and convey nuance.

Something that I have highlighted throughout the years have been tools that artists have made in order to empower other artists with more limited coding skillsets to create exciting tools. Note to self, I do want to eventually come up with either a newsletter issue that highlights the newest in the space of tools created for creators.

3D Differential Growth in Blender

Inspiration - on using differential growth in Blender. The author does provide a blender file for $ if you want to further explore the method. But… challenge yourself and see if you can recreate it.

Mitosis in the Gray-Scott model : writing shader-based chemical simulations

The Gray Scott Model of Reaction Diffusion is an interesting instance of emergence. By simulating a small chemical system that involves only a few components and reactions, complex and mesmerizing patterns appear.

Obsessed with Cuttle: Parametric CAD for prototyping, producing, and procrastinating

One of my primary creative outlets this year has been playing with the CNC laser cutter1 at my library’s makerspace. It is the first CNC (“computer numerical control”, i.e., computer-programmable) shop tool I’ve gotten comfortable and fluent with: while I’ve worked informally with plenty of manual shop tools for wood and metal, I’ve never previously bridged that programming/shop divide.2 Unsurprisingly, it is SO. MUCH. FUN.

GLICOL

Next generation computer music language

Just another language to check out to create some

1 Year of Learning Shaders

Found this to just be nice to see someone put this much effort in documenting their learning efforts and how to go about really taking on a seemingly difficult learning task. Definitely inspirational.

Books

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects (A Fiction)

In the year 2082, a curator looks back at the twenty-first century, offering a history of the era through a series of objects and artifacts. He reminisces about the power of connectivity, which was reinforced by such technologies as silent messaging—wearable computers that relay subvocal communication; recalls the Fourth Great Awakening, when a regimen of pills could make someone virtuous; and notes disapprovingly the use of locked interrogation, which delivers “enhanced interrogation” simulations via virtual reality. The unnamed curator quotes from a self-help guide to making friends with “posthumans,” describes the establishment of artificial worlds on asteroids, and recounts pro-democracy movements in epistocratic states. In A New History of the Future in 100 Objects, Adrian Hon constructs a possible future by imagining the things it might leave in its wake.

Do take some time and check the following book out.. it has some really fascinating ideas and concepts that are fictional but have potentials to becoming something real so I would recommend checking it out and reading it.

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New ideas are like babies, beautiful, ugly and not finished yet. - Max McKeown

Good morning / evening to all of you who continue to read this newsletter! I am so grateful that there are so many of you who also find generative art and creative coding an interesting fascination.

Thinking about the above quote for a couple hours and the following thoughts came from it.

I don’t know about you.. but life just keeps moving quickly. I remember days before 2020 that seemed to take much longer. Now every week goes quicker than the last. Some days a blink, and the day is gone.

Yet upon reflection, I suppose that is part of growing older.

Perhaps one’s brain gets used to knowing that every day is similar to the last.

You wake up, drive to work, work.. drive home. and its already 7 PM.

It’s like clock-work.

I wonder if the perception of time becomes compressed. The normal becomes just intuitive and second nature.

The brain loses interest and goes into autopilot.

The model doesn’t have as much to train on as it once had; and thus the the conscience experience of the everyday world becomes more autonomous.

Yet what is set.. doesn’t mean one needs to stay in place.

Experience is driven by doing. Injecting new experiences into the system in order to learn.

Specifically I’d imagine a hard task provides the brain a run for its money.

It’s good for the ole model to churn some butter.

even though it’s hard on the arms..

… but eventually the finished product comes out and becomes a delightful treat.

I do imagine that kids provide some of that challenging learning. (or at least that is what I’d imagine) These little learning machines aren’t easy tasks yet there is a progression of learning that occurs throughout the life of a parent.

Perhaps the brain, simply doesn’t stay engaged after the kids have fled. Life becomes “too similar” and why perhaps divorce rates increase post kids. There isn’t enough new.. (granted what do I know..)

Perhaps the remedy is simply commit to hard we experiences where one continues to learn.

Even when its messy and unfinished.

Alright. enough of me ideating.

Hope you enjoy some of the links below that I’ve found over the past month.

Much love,

Chris

What do you think? Leave any comments down below.

Leave a comment

Alright..

Just because I am curious.

Articles and Tutorials

Atypography

Art movement that graphically represents traditional writing systems in an unconventional way, creating an authentic design that remains readable while concealing text signs at first glance.

Atypography conceals textual content initially but can be deciphered by anyone with time. Reducing glyphs to minimal forms that are widely applicable.

No universality, no atypography

My oh my.. there is so much interesting stuff going on here. I always have found cryptography very fascinating.

Fluid Dynamical Drawing Canvas

A great POC usage of the web browser to create interesting creative drawings and using both the position of the window and speed at which it is dragged across the screen. There is also camera interactivity that will also provide signal to manipulate the canvas.

Mathematical Sculpture

I think about math constantly, and I see and look for math in everything around me. Geometry in particular fascinates me, and I delight in discovering hidden patterns even in the most mundane of objects. By transforming often-overlooked household items into elaborate, mathematical sculptures, I hope to share this sense of excitement, curiosity, and beauty that a mathematical outlook has instilled in me. Maybe I'll even be able to learn and teach some math along the way.

Procedural Animation

This video is a tutorial/explanation for a simple procedural animation technique I recently learned about. Essentially, it's animation rigging using a 2D chain simulation. I provide an animated explanation of the technique, then showcase a few animals I animated with it.

Stipple Effect

Stipple Effect is a pixel art editor that supports animation and scripting. It is designed to facilitate a variety of workflows and to encourage rapid, iterative creation of video game art assets and other types of artwork.

SE was made by a solo indie game developer with the needs and skill sets of other indie devs in mind. It is lightweight and simple to learn and use, yet allows for considerable depth and complexity. SE has a feature-rich scripting API that can be harnessed for the automation of otherwise tedious and repetitive tasks.

Designing Wildlife

An insightful overview of the artist's workflow for creating the wildlife soundscapes called Biota. Using Ableton, he designs a project that generates random, naturalistic audio. The artist delves into his generative techniques, explaining how to achieve randomness through note chance, velocity deviation, and pitch randomization. He also incorporates random modulation, such as wind sounds, using Phaseplant.

Some of the resources he uses to generate Cricket Chirps or just wanting to learn more about soundscape ecology.

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Also if wanting to use IRCAM which has some interesting

RAVE Neural Symthesis in Max

RAVE is a deep learning model—specifically, an autoencoder—that can be trained on sound files to create interesting extra-terrestrial sounds. Some of those This tutorial demonstrates how to use Max to run the model.

Normal Map for Pixel Art

I found this to be an interesting technique to get better lighting on pixel art. Essentially the artist draws a normal map to help introduce a spacial aspect. Definitely could see an interesting use case for a transformer

MediaPipe for Dummies

MediaPipe provides cornerstone Machine Learning models for common tasks like hand tracking, therefore removing the same developmental bottleneck that exists for a host of Machine Learning applications. These models, along with their excessively easy-to-use APIs, in turn streamline the development process and reduce project lifetime for many applications that rely on Computer Vision.

3D Gaussian Ray Tracing

Particle-based representations of radiance fields such as 3D Gaussian Splatting, have found great success for reconstructing and re-rendering of complex scenes. Most existing methods render particles via rasterization, projecting them to screen space tiles for processing in a sorted order. This work instead considers ray tracing the particles, building a bounding volume hierarchy and casting a ray for each pixel using high-performance GPU ray tracing hardware. To efficiently handle large numbers of semi-transparent particles, we describe a specialized rendering algorithm which encapsulates particles with bounding meshes to leverage fast ray-triangle intersections, and shades batches of intersections in depth-order. The benefits of ray tracing are well-known in computer graphics: processing incoherent rays for secondary lighting effects such as shadows and reflections, rendering from highly-distorted cameras common in robotics, stochastically sampling rays, and more. With our renderer, this flexibility comes at little cost compared to rasterization. Experiments demonstrate the speed and accuracy of our approach, as well as several applications in computer graphics and vision. We further propose related improvements to basic Gaussian representation, including a simple use of generalized kernel functions which significantly reduces particle hit counts.

TouchMapper

Using Touch Mapper, you can easily create custom outdoor maps for any address of your choice.

If you're interested in 3D printing maps, this tool provides the STL files necessary for creating intriguing projects. It's definitely worth exploring.

Nothing kills creativity faster than a wall. -Eric Weiner

First off thank you for continually finding this newsletter interesting! I continue to see growth and I greatly appreciate it! Also thank you so much for the continued support.

Creation and Letting Go

Part of the process of being an artist or creator, is letting go of one self.

Many times figuratively, sometimes literally. Like Piero Manzoni' Canned Excrement or Andy Warhol's Oxidation Paints.

To let go as an artist is giving oneself a way to take in my surroundings, culture, history, intent. Like a child that gives way to his imagination. This thread of conscious "loosing oneself" becomes the process of generating a treasure map.. one's own journey.

This stream can also be a bit like chewing cud.. when a cow eats grass, they will rechew their food as part of their digestive system. It can be

a slow.......... and tedious....ly methodi.......cal mar.......................ch.

It is the influences, life circumstance, experiences that make up the "tones" and characteristics as their raw materials which shape into the creative work of an individual. These materials provide the foundation of using skills and explorations to synthesize and concentrate this journey into a medium in which they can express themselves.

Now back to the map...it isn't a map that leads to a prize (fame, money, prestige), but it is a journey.

It's the journey to reinterpret, struggle, through a process of finding the pinnacles where their intent resounds with the material in which they work.

An artist's output can sometimes be a bottle of angel's tears.

Letting go of oneself is the process of letting "driving forces" create.

Yet there are greater hinderances..

Having the burden of "pleasing" people with your creation can become a powerful deterrent.

Now I'm not saying that when hired for a specific job, one should be in the business of pleasing people.

But when it comes to art.

The art must go on.

Personal Note:

I was able to spend a couple days in Berlin and geek out with a bunch of artists and generative enthusiasts.

It was an experience worth cherishing.

The event was hosted by Herbert Franke’s estate and wonderful partner Susanne in which she dreamt of a way to engage and celebrate the history of 60+ years of artists / scientists / engineers interested in algorithmic art.

Over the two days individuals from these generations presented on early technical challenges and an homage to the appreciation of this question, how does art and science meet.

I’m still digesting from the week and will post more about it in a future newsletter.

Hope all is well!

Many wishes!

Chris Ried

Tutorials & Articles

Images that Sound:Composing Images and Sounds on a Single Canvas

Spectrograms are 2D representations of sound that look very different from the images found in our visual world. And natural images, when played as spectrograms, make unnatural sounds. In this paper, we show that it is possible to synthesize spectrograms that simultaneously look like natural images and sound like natural audio. We call these spectrograms images that sound. Our approach is simple and zero-shot, and it leverages pre-trained text-to-image and text-to-spectrogram diffusion models that operate in a shared latent space. During the reverse process, we denoise noisy latents with both the audio and image diffusion models in parallel, resulting in a sample that is likely under both models. Through quantitative evaluations and perceptual studies, we find that our method successfully generates spectrograms that align with a desired audio prompt while also taking the visual appearance of a desired image prompt.

This again is really interesting way to encrypt data and can be interesting to eventually plug into an artistic practice on how one might embed information and experience it in a different way.

Grasshopper for Beginners - Full 2024 Course

Grasshopper is a plugin built into Rhino3D popular among architects to generate parametric like structures. This is a node based programming and Geometric Nodes in Blender are on its way to have the functionality that Grasshopper does but it’s worth learning if you have any interest in 3D rendering and node based programming.

Personally I think it’s worth just experimenting with as it does help understand different algorithms and how they work from different perspectives.

Survey of Alternative Displays

This article was originally created and hosted on Medium, but its length on a single page made it very unweildy to keep it updated with fresh content. The original was made in 2015, with a major revision in 2022. In 2024 I added a bunch more and reconfigured some categories.

This update will be ongoing and some sections may be more updated than others. Gitbook may not be the final resting place but it seems like the best approach for now.

🌟If you're on Github: This page is auto generated by Gitbook and is more readable at the link here, especially for things like embedded videos.

Bezier.js

The rest of this page explains the Bezier.js API, with interactive graphics to illustrate what a function does. Because what's the point of a library for manipulating Bezier curves if you can't manipulate them? You can click-drag all the points to see how the curves behave under the different functions that can act on them.

This is just an alternative to the bezier curve in libraries such as p5.js; its also a library that can be mixed in with Canvas and SVG libraries

Drawing Machines

An archive of optical/mechanical/automated drawing machines/devices/aids

Plotters in general are thought of as digital devices to draw exactly what the artist provides with SVG points. But mechanical drawing machines have been used to do the same to help individuals draw using motion and draft like features as well.

Motion Graphics With Geometry Nodes

The following session provides an overall coding session to build a procedural motion graphic using only geometry nodes in Blender

Books

Physically Based Rendering

Rendering is the process of producing an image from the description of a 3D scene. Obviously, this is a broad task, and there are many ways to approach it. Physically based techniques attempt to simulate reality; that is, they use principles of physics to model the interaction of light and matter. While a physically based approach may seem to be the most obvious way to approach rendering, it has only been widely adopted in practice over the past 15 or so years.

Much of the book is written in C++ and talking directly with the GPU thus the book is technical. But don’t lose heart, its definitely a read worthy of alot of time and study as it goes into the mathematical models of light and physical rendering.

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"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
— I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

As an artist, or creative technologist or whatever you might want to call it.

(“My life's passion is simply create, tinker, learn..”)

I love to explore for the sake of finding the small moments "the glitch in the matrix" or the "wrinkle in the fabric of time" to document the secrets of the universe that present themselves.

Now these secrets may be only for oneself..

Its similar to the gemologist who digs through dirt in rural places to find that one piece gem or the geisha that shows just enough skin to arouse their patron.

It's when the biologist observes unique behavior in its subject or when stumbling upon new intuition in physics or mathematics.

When you find the reference frequency of a piece it becomes the overwhelming note.

They are but small distillations.. the temporary moment of the sakura where beauty is known and blooms.

Or the solar eclipse at its point in which the entire sun is covered by the moon.

That is what I look for..

At any other point in this cycle of discovery it can be brutal..

• When the drive of the conquering warrior can't conquer enough,

• the deluge of ancient evolutionary pressures stretching the soul

• or the starvation to want to consume paws at the heart..

Yet it is what drives the process of making or experimenting. Sometimes we never get there.. but it is this path.. the Everest, the Hajj, in which a deep satisfaction lies.

Beware of when we have fallen out of tune with our own urge or desire of creating..

It can become easy to give up to the sinister tones of droning monotony to take over. It's easier to fall in love with cultural normality..

Letting our own buckets be filled with mass produced wonder.. because it tickles our prefrontal cortex. Not that these things are inherently wrong .. but rather the giving up of the creative spirit.

Packing up the untold story that was never told.

We watch our radioactive core as the artist self see a shift in our rate of decay change.

The solar storms of our souls become simply polluted with man made material the skylights obfuscate rather than exploding with the energies of the Aurora Borealis.

Living an unfulfilled destiny (even if that destiny is only known by you) can be a dark place.

Well I hope the above thoughts might chive with you all. Let me know what you think. Privately, in the comments below.. wherever as I’d love your feedback.

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I hope you all continue making and exploring…

Chris Ried

Articles, Tutorials and More

Cursive Handwriting in Javascript

A familiar theme for me is dismissing an idea as being too much work and then later finding myself doing it anyway. That’s what happened here. A little while ago I created a block script in JavaScript, thinking that cursive would be too complex. But here I am, two months later, ready to talk about the cursive handwriting I’ve created. There is perhaps a lesson in that but let’s not dwell on it.

As always a huge fan of Amy (specifically) her continual practice of generative / creative coding work so do give it a read.

And for a break, these visuals are simply there for your enjoyment and inspiration.

Oh and if you want to just geek out on trying to recreate the a whale alphabet by Phillip Meyer; check out his channel here as he has all sorts of interesting experiments using MaxMSP.

An incomplete attempt to reproduce the recently-discovered sperm whale’s phonetic alphabet!

Why AI art will always kind of suck

Artificial intelligence has long been hailed as a great “equalizer” of creativity, finally putting the ability to create art in all of its myriad forms into the hands of the tech-savvy. Not a creative person? Not an issue.

“The reason we built this tool is to really democratize image generation for a bunch of people who wouldn’t necessarily classify themselves as artists,” said the lead researcher for DALL-E, which turns text prompts into images. Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, wrote in his book that generative AI will one day account for 95 percent of the work that companies hire creative professionals to do: “All free, instant, and nearly perfect. Images, videos, campaign ideas? No problem.” Or, as another AI startup founder put it: “So much of the world is creatively constipated, and we’re going to make it so that they can poop rainbows.”

Personally I just don’t believe that the human spirit is squelched by generative technologies. It is a product of human knowledge but the spirit, the ability to exist and adapt.

Without that human spirit and pressure to innovate.. I don’t see a future of that without some more major innovations.

Rounded Boxes

We all know that if you chop the edges of a box and round them with a circular chamfer, then the surface you get has second degree discontinuities. That means that the surface normals, which are the first derivatives of the surface, are not smooth. And if the normals are not smooth, then so won't be the lighting either. Indeed, a box with cylindrical edges almost was funny ugly lighting on it.

As any Inigo Quilez article, it is full of shader magic.

2D Rigid Body Collision Resolution

From Mario bouncing off a Goomba to two cars bumping into each other in a racing game, dealing with collisions is such an integral part of most video games that we often take it for granted.

TouchDesigner Event 2024

For me TouchDesigner is much more fun to follow because I then can create some intricate things quickly and then study their effects before then going and trying to reimplement them on my own. Some great presentations by Bileam Tschepe and Weidi Zhang if you don’t have 7ish hours to spend listening.

Oh and if there is anyone that has access to the new alpha of TD.. DM me!

Inspiration

Woolly

While browsing came across the following Blender shader to create wooly textures.

Something very interesting to create with shaders.

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Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive. - Jhumpa Lahiri

First of all! Thanks for continuing to be great supporters in readership and I hope you are always finding something new and interesting to read or learn. I hope that all of these resources I’ve collected over the last number of years are helpful.

Been taking a Deep Learning Masters Class and its been pretty involved though I have to say I’ve learned alot from it and excited to put some of it into practice.

Also been experimenting with a bunch of inks from Birmingham Ink Company out of Philadelphia, PA then taking some images I’ve created using Midjourney and plotting them on the Axidraw using VPype.

All that to say I hope you all are doing well and I miss being more involved in the community. But I am still here and love seeing what you are up to!

Much Love,

Chris

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Articles and Tutorials

Growing digital flowers in Touchdesigner

A 3D tutorial using TouchDesigner to create digital plants, there are three types that are created in this tutorial; Seaweed, Coral and flowers.

Programming Differential Growth

Program amazing, complex, and chaotic patterns via differential growth. Differential growth creates a chaotic system that can be used to model biological processes. Learn about vectors, ArrayLists, and how to program forces in Java (Processing) while creating beautiful, organic images.

Does a really nice job showing how differential growth works and how to implement it in Processing. There are other resources.

Design Against AI (John Maeda)

In this 30-minute 2024 Design and Tech Report, "Design Against AI," the evolving dynamics between AI and design are explored, highlighting the uncertainty of whether to compete with, protest against, or collaborate with AI. The report delves into the complexities and rapid evolution of AI, the significance of computational understanding, the transformation of work influenced by AI, and the crucial role of design in ensuring ethical and fair practices. It also examines the historical context of AI in design, the impact of conversational interfaces, and the importance of critical thinking in this new era. The report concludes with insights on the importance of responsible AI in design and its impact on customer satisfaction, emphasizing the need for a continuous learning mindset in the face of ever-evolving AI technologies.

I hadn’t heard this talk before but apparently it happens every year. I think there is alot of inspiration that can be gained in what Maeda speaks of throughout this lecture.

This happened now a number of weeks ago, but I think that John has a healthy take on AI and creativity in the design space. Worth listening to as a number of interesting products he highlights.

Babylon.js 7.0 Released

Our mission is to build one of the most powerful, beautiful, simple, and open web rendering engines in the world, and we are excited to announce that mission takes another step forward today, with Babylon.js 7.0.

Some interesting new features such as procedural geometry (definitely been digging into this one), Gaussian Splat Rendering, State of Art WebXR support to name among of the interesting new features.

Piet

Piet is a programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings. The language is named after Piet Mondrian, who pioneered the field of geometric abstract art. I would have liked to call the language Mondrian, but someone beat me to it with a rather mundane-looking scripting language. Oh well, we can't all be esoteric language writers I suppose.

Fun and interesting esoteric language that uses colors. The above program prints out the first 100 Fibonnacci numbers.

vvvv gamma 6.0 release

vvvv is a visual-first live programming environment for the .NET ecosystem. Its language VL combines metaphors known from dataflow, functional and object oriented programming.

If you are a C# developer and windows fan, this is the place for you. Think TouchDesigner but different due to its Node based programming systems.

How To Generate Color Palettes for Design Systems

It used to be easy to pick colors for design systems. Years ago, you could pick a handful of colors to match your brand’s ethos, or start with an off-the-shelf palette (remember flatuicolors.com?). Each hue and shade served a purpose, and usually had a quirky name like “idea yellow” or “innovation blue”. This hands-on approach allowed for control and creativity, resulting in color schemes that could convey any mood or style.

It’s a lengthy read, but not only helpful for building design systems but how you may go about create a color palette. Definitely learned some interesting things here.

Strange Attractors

The term 'Strange Attractor' is used to describe an attractor (a region or shape to which points are 'pulled' as the result of a certain process) that displays sensitive dependence on initial conditions (that is, points which are initially close on the attractor become exponentially separated with time). The most famous strange attractor is undoubtedly the Lorenz attractor - a three dimensional object whose body plan resembles a butterfly or a mask. The Lorenz attractor, named for its discoverer Edward N. Lorenz, arose from a mathematical model of the atmosphere [5].

Definitely an interesting thing to read.

AI Movie Hackathon

What kind of space do you call home? Is it defined by the décor and furniture that make living comfortable, the cherished memories with family, the environmental and cultural symbols, or simply a sense of belonging and peace? The short films created during the second MIT AI for Filmmaking Hackathon offer insights into this question. This hackathon, held at the MIT Media Lab on February 17–18, showcased and celebrated the latest advancements in generative AI tools, including image, video, 3D content, music, and voiceover generation

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CREATIVITY IS THE FRAGRANCE OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM. - OSHO

Hello fellow readers and greetings to all who have recently come across this newsletter. I appreciate your support through reading this little newsletter in light of so many other interesting things out there.

So a few thoughts I’ve been thinking about recently …

Individualism is a complex concept with many facets and profound implications for our psyche. The freedom it offers is particularly cherished by artists and those displaying creativity.

Our unique voice—whether it represents our creative expression, legacy, style, or literal speech—is always eager to be heard. However, many struggle to overcome the barriers to public display, often due to fear of criticism or self-doubt about the quality of their work.

Despite these obstacles, a desire for recognition continues to flicker within us. We yearn to be unique, to leave a legacy that resonates, rather than merely shouting into a void heard only by ourselves. But should that be enough?

Who wants their style to be copied? Many artists detest the concept and technology of AI art because it encroaches on their unique style. This sentiment was evident in the Writer's Guild strike of 2023. Artists demand recognition and fair compensation for their work.

At the same time, there's a collective aspect to consider. Think of a national anthem, an artistic movement, or even a sitcom like Schitt's Creek. These shared experiences could be seen as cultural memes or tropes that hint at a deeper collective intuition.

When discussing the collective from a utilitarian moral perspective, it raises the question of how the individual and the group should balance each other. In other words, how can one express their individuality without harming the collective or stifling deep personal expression?

Hope you have a wonderful week and I look forward to be able to increase the frequency of this newsletter soon again.

Peace and love,

Chris Ried

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mu Muology - Dark Matters

Created by Jon Butt the µ Muography device is an experimental DIY particle detector, built in his studio during Melbourne’s lockdown over 2020/2021. Engineered using freely available open-source tools, modified electronics and hand-built circuitry, the device detects high speed cosmic particles (muons) as they rain down to earth.

Really interesting project which can or could be used as a way to produce a more pure randomization factor. The webcam they use to detect these particles is an interesting read here. It was part of a larger exhibit called DARK MATTERS with the Arts at CERN.

Generating the Alphabet

My current generative artwork-in-progress includes text, but I don’t want to use a font. In browser based art work, using a “web safe” font could produce inconsistent results, while including a font file would mean a large file size. Additionally, I don’t want a visual element of the project to be something I didn’t create myself.

I’m always excited to see what everyone is up to in the generative art space. Amy Goodchild has posted recently about her adventures in generating readable text.

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Pave

Pave is a environment-agnostic toolkit specialized for manipulating SVG/Path2D curves, which includes creating primitives, calculating positions/normals/tangents, offsetting, and resampling paths. All of the API are provided in a functional programming manner, and the path data is represented as an immutable plain object.

Does heavily use Bezierjs and Paperjs. As an inspiration, but if you create SVG for plotting this might be a library you will want to check into and see if it would fit in your mailbox.

Cables 2024 Release

Cables is a tool for creating beautiful interactive content.With an easy to navigate interface and real time visuals, it allows for rapid prototyping and fast adjustments.

Can I Remake Super Mario World in Godot?

I want to get into game development and learn to use Godot - and coming from a ROM hacking background, I thought it'd be a nice warmup project to recreate Super Mario World in Godot. Will I succeed? You won't find out in this video, because all I really get to is the very fine details of player physics!

Music Blocks

Music Blocks is an interactive Web Application — the interaction is done via basic mouse events like click, right click, click and drag, etc. and keyboard events like hotkey press. The application is audio-visual; it produces graphics artwork and music.

or another application you might want to look into if the Scratch interface is a little too childlike, but sometimes its when we play like a child we come across deep intuition.

NoiseCraft

NoiseCraft is an open source, visual programming language and platform for sound synthesis and music making, with the goal of creating a community for the open exchange of musical ideas. The design is loosely inspired by PureData, Max/MSP as well as other visual programming languages. NoiseCraft is built on technologies such as the Web Audio and Web MIDI APIs, and runs in a web browser. The plan is for the app to remain free to use and ad-free for the foreseeable future. (Github)

Using StableDiffusion to Create a Pointcloud 3D Effect

In this tutorial, we are going to look at a method to simulate a Pointcloud model in Touchdesigner based on a StableDiffusion output.

Just a bit of inspiration on how one might use StableDiffusion in other creative ways.

Airfoil - A Tutorial

The dream of soaring in the sky like a bird has captivated the human mind for ages. Although many failed, some eventually succeeded in achieving that goal. These days we take air transportation for granted, but the physics of flight can still be puzzling.

Really a tutorial on which a number of interesting flight dynamics can be used to generate interesting and satisfying visuals if you take the time.

How Photographs Were Transmitted by Wire (1937)

Dramatization of how photographs are transmitted by wire, an exciting new technology in the 1930s.

I think sometimes we forget how much technology has been around for a long time. It helps to keep us grounded and perhaps motivational in order to help us understand the progress we have made in aggregate and yet at the same time how early the transmission of information has been around.

Books

How To Do Nothing - Jenny Odell

Nothing is harder to do than nothing. In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily.

I found this to be a book that does a great job at taking popular self-help “getting away from social media” and coming up with a different take on why questioning the attention economy from the perspective of an artist. It is well weaved with history and art and has a spattering of undertones about present cultural context and insights from the past to inform how the future might be built.

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Creativity is a continual surprise. - Ray Bradbury

Hello All,

Welcome all who have recently subscribed in the last couple weeks. I am very grateful that you are all excited about this little practice of ours called creative coding. Giving out an email can be unnerving and I hope I never provide unwanted or necessary mail.

The last few weeks I’ve been exploring and connecting with creators across the interspace. I’ve been putting together a little Github Markdown on content creators who are doing creative coding tutorials using various tools. I’ve started with a number of commercial products as some of these I’ve wanted to understand their depth and continue to deepen the well of learning for myself to help where we might have an opportunity to build new tools.

This is in progress, but I hope you can check them out and find either software or projects that interest you to learn new things!

https://github.com/cdr6934/CreativeCodingCreators

If you are a creator and want your info added (or you know of others that would be great), you can create a pull request to be added into a section.

Otherwise, I wish you all a great week!

Chris Ried

Genuary Favorites

There are always so many wonderful entries.. here are a few of my favorites!

Andreiongd - Skeuomorphism / Orr Kislev - Flocking / Lionel Radisson- SDF / Gorillasun - SDFs

Although this was the last day of Genuary, I was able to get a couple entries in this year. Much less than the previous years but it is always great to see the works that are made by you!

Tutorials & Articles

Collision Detection

The collision of objects underlies most game experiences and user-interfaces. Baseball bats collide with balls, zombies bump into walls, and Mario lands on platforms and stomps turtles. Even something as simple as clicking a button (a rectangle) with your mouse (a point) is a collision.

This is a resource to highlight. There is so many use cases of collision detection that I believe you would find great value. I’ve found it most useful in knowing how to effectively circle pack various shapes.

20+ Questions about Licia’s Plotter Painting

Since the start of my plotter painting journey, I have received many wonderful questions about my practice. What plotters do you use? How do you refill the brush? What paper do you use? Why?

I LOVE answering these questions and seeing curiosities turning into actions. But because these conversations often happen over short messages, my answers are shortened, incomplete, and need references.

I’ve been following Licia’s work for years and I’m always have loved the intricate plotting she has done with the brush. Take some time, and really read through it as she has such a great perspective on her art. Also definitely check out Golan’s Drawing With Machines course work as to Licia’s words, “its a treasure trove”

Hypotrochiod

audiovisual artwork unfolds in real time infront of the viewer and explores aesthetics of mathematics throught generative sequence of manipulations with the parametric function of the hypotrochoid

I am a sucker for large screens and immersive experiences. I could easily have a room in my house with a screen like this and watch it for hours.

Veoluz

VeoLuz is an exploration-focused playground and an artistic tool. It attempts to mimic the behavior of photons as they interact with barriers of various kinds − those that absorb light, those that reflect light, and those that refract light.

How to Create a Particle System w/ Emitter in Max

Fedorico has a backlog of many tutorials mainly for Max MSP here. Max is commercial software and so the ecosystem is less accessible; however it’s always great to see other using the creativity in many tools across the board.

Flitter

Flitter is a functional programming language wrapped around a declarative system for describing 2D and 3D visuals. The language is designed to encourage an iterative, explorative, play-based approach to constructing generative visuals. The engine that runs Flitter programs is able to live reload all code (including shaders) and assets (images, models, etc.) while retaining current system state - thus supporting live-coding. It also has support for interacting with running programs via MIDI surfaces.

Bantam Tools Acquires Evil Mad Scientist to Accelerate Development of Next Generation Art and Handwriting Machines

Bantam Tools, the desktop CNC manufacturer that builds exceptional computer controlled machines for innovators, is excited to announce the acquisition of Evil Mad Scientist, the designer and manufacturer of popular computer-controlled drawing and handwriting machines that provide versatile solutions to artists and educators. Dr. Windell Oskay and Lenore Edman, co-founders of Sunnyvale, California based Evil Mad Scientist, will move to Peekskill, New York, headquarters of Bantam Tools, as CTO and COO overseeing technical development and operations.

If you own a plotter, or are considering purchasing one, this news should interest you. Evil Mad Scientist has been producing their Axidraw for several years. Their recent merger with Bantam Tools represents another step forward in their machine production journey, offering more growth opportunities for the Axidraw.

Books

Your Brain on Art - How the Arts Transform Us

We’re on the verge of a cultural shift in which the arts can deliver potent, accessible, and proven solutions for the well-being of everyone. Magsamen and Ross offer compelling research that shows how engaging in an art project for as little as forty-five minutes reduces the stress hormone cortisol, no matter your skill level, and just one art experience per month can extend your life by ten years. They expand our understanding of how playing music builds cognitive skills and enhances learning; the vibrations of a tuning fork create sound waves to counteract stress; virtual reality can provide cutting-edge therapeutic benefit; and interactive exhibits dissolve the boundaries between art and viewers, engaging all of our senses and strengthening memory. Doctors have even been prescribing museum visits to address loneliness, dementia, and many other physical and mental health concerns.

I'm three-quarters through the book. I've always used art as a form of processing issues, leading my brain into a meditative state. Thus, reading this book has affirmed my natural inclinations. I've found it accessible and truly enjoyable!

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Creativity is an intelligent escape from the perceived limits. - Sandeep Kakkar

Thank you for all the new subscribers and a HUGE thanks to those who support the newsletter. I really appreciate it!

Happy New Year in 2024!

Artist as Inventor…

I recently finished reading "Artist as Inventor." Although it's an academic work that requires effort to digest, its arguments stand out. Primarily, it asserts that art has consistently advanced technology, suggesting a kinship rather than a division between the two. It also emphasizes the crucial role artists play in technology advancement through tool experimentation. The book delves into philosophy and culture, offering an alternative perspective to the prevalent art critique that war spurs technological innovation. This viewpoint is drawn from a broad range of historical examples across media arts.

The author starts by establishing an aesthetic perspective and the alignment between art and technology, specifically technological innovation. He then adopts a traditional art history approach, commencing with the Post-Impressionism movement and leading up to the Avant-gardes era. The rest of the book follows the precursors of New Media (e.g., photography, kinetic art, cinema) until it's eventually termed New Media in the 1990s.

From this historical narrative, I distilled the following insights:

Artists shape innovation, leading and unleashing its poetics. The role of the artist is no longer confined to the artistic sphere alone, nor, as was common in those days, to the social sphere more generally speaking.

The author, Valentino, challenges the assumption that artists are merely passive consumers using pre-engineered platforms as mediums for their ideas. Instead, he suggests that artists have significantly shaped and pioneered their early development.

Artists aren’t simply passive consumers using pre-engineered platforms as mediums for their ideas, but have been intrinsic in shaping and pioneering their early development.

This perspective aligns with my views on the intersection of art and technology, although I acknowledge potential bias.

Personally, as an artist and creator, I constantly strive to experiment, explore new concepts, and push boundaries. This trait mirrors inventors'. I believe the difference lies in motivation: artists explore and experiment driven by an inner "calling," whereas inventors aim to solve problems.

Also do not forget!!

Genuary 2024

I look forward to participating in this every year. There is so many interesting ideas that I’ve ended up playing with the rest of the year that comes from these days.

We already have had two weeks of prompts, I unfortunately have only had time for a couple thus far.

Check out of a few of my favorites thus far:

(TL) Day 5: In the Style of Vera Molńar by machine.arm on IG

(TR) Day 8: Chaotic System by jimena.buena.vida on IG

(BL) Day 13: Wobble Wobble by nicolasdnl on IG

(BR) Day 8: Chaotic System by juanrg92 on IG

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Also I think this is an interesting question and would love to hear your thoughts..

You can also comment if there’s more to add.

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Tutorials & Articles

An Introduction to Raymarching

This tutorial guides you through the fundamentals of raymarching and space transformation, providing insight into the endless creative possibilities that this technique opens up.

Livecoding meets Max meets OpenGL: free GLRepl for Max

Take a Max patch and add easy livecoding for it. Work with anything you want, commanding Max from the keyboard – including powerful OpenGL, Jitter, JSON, and JavaScript functions and customization. It’s a live visual tool; it’s a powerful Max customization tool, so it’s whatever you imagine. GLRepl is here, it’s free, and it’s even right in the Max package manager.

Realtime shadow casting on 2D terrain

Shadows have always seemed like a bit of an elusive effect to me but in this video I show you how to create a shader for real time shadows using ray casting for 2D height map terrain. I think the islands created with this method look really cool and I'm excited to share how I did it with you!

Simulating Fluids, Fire, and Smoke in Real-Time

Fire is an interesting graphics problem. Past approaches generally faked it. For example, Lord of the Rings used sprites with lots and lots of smoke (the fluid sim was too expensive at the time, even for movies). Real-time applications like video games have pretty much exclusively used non-physical approaches.

Organ Pipe Physics

The organ pipes belong to the so-called self-sustained instrument family. They transform a continuous energy (the air flow) into a quickly oscillating energy (the acoustic vibration) thanks to a feedback loop. Organ pipes are DC/AC converters!

Organ pipe physics, another wonderful way to explore the world.

Philipp Aduatz

Vienna based Designer Philipp Aduatz (born 1982) creates limited edition functional objects that are highly sculptural in nature. Working with innovative materials and fabrication technologies, Aduatz is very much influenced by scientific matters such as chemistry, physics and material technologies.  His process combines traditional craft concepts and techniques with cutting edge implements such as 3D printing, 3D laser scanning, CNC milling, and Rapid Prototyping. The experimentation with different materials and their behavior is an important part of his research at the intersection of design and sculpture. Greatly influenced by sculptors such as Constantin Brancusi and Tony Cragg, the designer aims to develop a distinct language of form in each of his pieces, encouraging a new discourse between the object and its user or viewer.

Though not necessary creative coding, there are a number of mediums that he uses that will most likely find interesting. Must of his work has an organic feeling that has a bit of a bio-industrial feel.

Books

The Artist as Inventor

Today the media arts not only address the great themes of our times, they inhabit the very media of which they speak. The contemporary is global, but only because of the media that enable globalisation. Those media are almost nowhere apparent in the mainstream practice of art that we see in biennials from Venice to Sao Paolo. The media arts reflect back to us our present condition, and in the archive present us with the ghosts of what we were, and what we failed to become. This book brings the reader into the centre of these strange encounters, introducing us to the rich legacies and futures of the most important arts of the last hundred years. It also looks ahead to the future and asks what happens to the condition of being human within the new constellation into which we are entering?

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