Few Thoughts on the Creative Soul, Cursive Handwriting and Creating Whale Rhythms in Max MSP
#077 Creative Coding / Generative Arts
"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.
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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