Algoraves, Weird AI Art, and Generative Tools
#045 - Creative Coding / Generative Arts Weekly
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If it doesn’t fit comfortably within your heart, let it go. - Toni Sorenson
Well, it’s been a little over a month since the last newsletter went out.
The time seems to fly so quickly.
I have collated the links from the last 40+ newsletters in one place to be more accessible. Right now, they are just a Markdown page but hopefully will give this a little more structure.
I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!
Chris Ried
📰 Happenings
Eyeo Festival - June 14 - 17, 2022
School of Poetic Computation - Multiple Courses
Anderson Ranch Art Center - Multiple Classes
Processing and Laser: Creative Code to Wood Panel - June 27 - July 1, 2022
Drawing with Machines - July 18 - 22, 2022
🖌️ Unconventional Media
The Weird and Wonderful World of AI Art
The world of Artificial-Intelligence generated art has exploded over the last twelve months. In January 2021, OpenAI released two models that changed the game: DALL-E and CLIP. These models showed what might be possible by generating visual art from text-based prompts. The release of DALL-E and CLIP kickstarted a new wave of work in AI art. Digital artists organized on Twitter, Github, and Discord developed tools for prototyping and generating art. For the technically proficient, artists shared their work in the form of Colab notebooks. For those without coding skills, art can be created through new websites and tools that allow you to harness the power of these deep learning models without writing any code.
Dan Cooper: Archive
The use of computers in contemporary art is a new phenomenon which links the scientists’s laboratory and the artist’s studio. Computer graphics is the recently developed technique of creating visual images with computers. — The Promise of Computer Art: An Artist’s Perspectivce
📸 Generative Music
In this film, we meet a community of artists who are harnessing algorithms to make live and improvised electronic music. "If music is a form of code, then perhaps code can be a form of music." Algorithms drive the way we see, hear and interact with the world. And these days, there's a growing backlash against them. But "algorave"—short for algorithmic rave—offers a different way to harness these mathematical formulas. Algorave artists sit behind a laptop while their keystrokes are broadcast onto screens or walls around them, laying bare the mechanics behind the music. They run processes that create the sound in realtime, allowing for a truly live, improvisational and unpredictable form of electronic music.
Yorkshire Sound Woman Network
On December 5th 2015 Joanne Armitage and Shelly Knotts delivered a workshop on live coding for Algoraving. Watch the film to find out more, and also to discover why this was an all-women workshop. The event was hosted by The Yorkshire Sound Women Network and funded generously by the AHRC Live Coding Research Network. Facilitated by The University of Huddersfield department of Music and Drama.
🚤 Motion / Music
Dreaming Shapes
My attempt in replicating Inconvergent’s ever so beautiful works on depth of field (DOF). His article explains how to take a point in 3D space and apply a faux depth of field effect.
I’m not using WebGL. The graphics use only 2D canvas.
The shapes (lines, squares, or triangles) are created within a 3D space with random rotations. Then, each edge of the form is interpolated into points. DOF is applied on each of these points, resulting in more issues. Finally, these points are drawn onto the canvas using color with some alpha value and random pixel size.
🔖 Articles and Tutorials
Molecular Nodes
Molecular Nodes provides a convenient method for importing structural biology files into Blender, and several nodes for working with atomic data inside of Blender's Geometry Nodes.
Blender's Geometry Nodes provides a powerful interface for procedural modeling and animation. It is currently limited in its ability to read any structured data file as input, which isn't a 3D mesh. Molecular Nodes bridge this gap by providing an interface for converting .pdb and other file types into meshes that are usable by Geometry Nodes.
An Algorithm for Irregular Grids
Grids, in their various shapes and forms, have been an important backbone for my sketches since I started creative coding. I’d go as far as saying that grids are a prominent generative art archetype that sits at the foundation of many works. Two influential examples from an early generative art period would be Georg Nees’ 1968 work Schotter (german word for Gravel) and Vera Molnár’s 1974 artwork (Dés)Ordres (french word for (dis)order):
🔨Tools
TactileJS
TactileJS is a Javascript library for representing, manipulating, and drawing tilings of the plane. The tilings all belong to a particular class called the isohedral tilings. Every isohedral tiling is formed from repeated copies of a single shape, and the pattern of repetition is relatively simple. At the same time, isohedral tilings are very expressive (they form the basis for many of the tessellations created by M.C. Escher) and efficient to compute.
3Vial Engine - Python Graphics Engine
The engine is in its early days, but there are some very interesting and have the node style of work.
Palett.es
Palett.es is an elegant way to create colors that can be used in various cases. I love using tools like this as I explore color variations. Some do it with paints, some in procreate, and then some useful tools such as this.