Generative Gifts, Plotters, and Symmetries
Generative Arts Weekly #008
"The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding." - Leonardo da Vinci
Good morning friends,
We are but a couple of weeks away from Christmas, having officially rung the bells of another Christmas season. It is far from the traditional in-store experiences of long lines snaking through the store and popping out at the seams. This year, across the globe, our storefronts have transitioned to the internet. And there are some great advantages to it.
It has boosted the creativity of many who have taken to creating things at home and selling them through their online platform.
Performances
May it be through musical performances through online live streaming platforms such as Twitch or Youtube.
Digital Products
Not to mention the number of artists that have gone and added their work to the blockchain to be sold and traded on the web. I have yet to figure out exactly how it all works, but I hope to provide a meta-write of the crypto scene.
Physical Products
Several artists are selling their pieces through smaller shops creating generative works that are being printed.
And some are generating their work in ceramics, 3D printing, and other materials.
Then there are sales happening with a sales platform through Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
All that to say, even though this year has been a downer, it has led to a swelling of commerce through the internet due to either the loss of jobs or simply the fact that shopping has become (for the most part) a virtual event.
Make sure to check everyone out above if you need any last minute gifts for your loved ones! If you have more shops and people recommending, pass them on to me, and I'll try to put together another list of shops together.
Also, I sent this out earlier this week, but I have a giveaway that will be occurring on Christmas! Check it out!
Anyway, as always, I hope the following digest brings value to your week and that you will enjoy it.
Best Wishes and Happy Holidays!
Chris
Inspirations
🖌️ Unconventional Media
These were posted on Twitter in November 2019. This month, I tried using analog synthesizers (uno), modulating delays with Perlin noise. Also, I changed the color of the editor (Emacs). I think it's nice.
Featured Artist
Holger Lippmann
I come pretty straight from visual art. started painting as teenager, did evening courses, studied at the art academy Dresden and did my diploma for sculpture. then i was 2 years master student, studied post graduate in Stuttgart, Paris and later moved to Brooklyn, New York, where i attended a first computer graphics internship at the institute of technology, NY.
When i came back to Germany in 1994, i moved to Berlin, right in the middle of the electronic music boom, i started pretty radically to work with computers (only), i knew I’d have to make art in the the same way as the music i was listening to was made. i spent another year learning about multimedia design at Cimdata Berlin. since then, none of the fascination of working with software and internet based networks has abated. i never felt any reason to move back to paints and traditional artistic work.
📸 Generative Graphics
Rotating Cylinders: Spline Surfaces from Tensor Products
I received emails from some readers of my previous Game of life on spheres post, asking about the detailed explanation of the code, which I would really love to do. But before going into sphere case, I think it should be more intuitive to get a feel of tensor product spline surface through simple circle and straight line. So here is it: a simple walkthrough, along with a bunch of rotating concentric cylindrical patches to showcase the outstanding 3D performance when we use BSplineSurface instead of, say, ParametricPlot3D.
In this post, the user uses the Wolfram Language, which is a different way of creating the above work.
🏛️ Exhibits / Installations
Weird Type AR
This week I want to highlight just an app that has been built for iOS. It isn't necessarily a physical place, but the app gives the user the ability to create a physical location or exhibit their work in their own homes. Please check the app out!
🔖 Articles and Tutorials
Swirled Session
Early in November, Daniel Piker (aka @KangarooPhysics) suggested that a group of people could get together online, and each create a short segment of animation, arranged so that all the start and end frames are identical. We could then assemble all the segments into one long loop and enjoy each others’ work. The idea was based on loops that I had been posting on Twitter for fun, under the hashtag #swirlysquaresunday, and for that reason I called the group project Swirled Series.
100 Days with Plotters
On Oct. 1st, 2019, my first Axidraw plotter arrived. I was looking for some motivation to try it out, and it happened to be Inktober. The rule was simple: create something every day and share it. Filled with enthusiasm for my plotter, I decided to give it a try. My expectation was not high because repetition was not my forte. Despite trying many similar habit-building challenges in various topics (painting, sketching, workout, drink more water, you name it), I could always found excuses to let them go.
Creating Snowflakes for Continuous Plotting
The tool has a couple of UI elements; the left side lets you select what size you want the plot/SVG, I always default to A3, the right side has all the settings. When you first arrive everything will probably be continually changing, the fastest way to stop that is to click the autoRedraw off.
Zach Lieberman @ TAAALKS 2020
Zach Lieberman is an American artist, coder, educator and the co-founder of the School for Poetic Computation based in New York City. His school explores the intersections of code, design, hardware, and theory, with a particular focus on artistic interventions. Zach creates artwork through writing software and is a co-creator of OpenFrameworks, an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding. His main focus is how computation can be used as medium for poetry. The outcomes of his works vary from experimental drawing and animations to performances and installations that amplify human gestures in different ways.
Observable & Creative Coding
After my first tests trying things randomly with partial results, I decided to read the Five-Minute Introduction and Observable's standard library (I should definitely have started there 😅). I discovered that Observable provides several tagged templates to render HTML, MarkDown or LaTex, as well as one for SVG that can be used this way.
Books
The Symmetries of Things
Start with a single shape. Repeat it in some way—translation, reflection over a line, rotation around a point—and you have created symmetry. Symmetry is a fundamental phenomenon in art, science, and nature that has been captured, described, and analyzed using mathematical concepts for a long time. Inspired by the geometric intuition of Bill Thurston and empowered by his own analytical skills, John Conway, with his coauthors, has developed a comprehensive mathematical theory of symmetry that allows the description and classification of symmetries in numerous geometric environments.
Attached is a list of books that are devoted to the generative arts