Spinning Flips, 3D Ceramics, and #GenArtCraft

#063 - Creative Coding / Generative Arts Weekly

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style. - Maya Angelou

Thank you so much to the 41 new subscribers since the last newsletter. I am always very thankful for the support you all show by simply subscribing.

Generative LLMs

Recently (as many of us have been), I’ve been diving deep into creating generative AI models. Specifically, I’ve wanted to see how much I can pull out of ChatGPT, and the results are just fantastic. To think that the entire internet has been compressed into a neural net is just a powerful thing.

And a bit scary.

I am just working through and aggregating some of the exciting uses of ChatGPT.

Here’s one that I think can be incredibly interesting and useful for generative artists:

Prompt: I need a palette of 10 colors in HEX that were popular in 1926

Who knows what exciting work you would get out of it? I am still aggregating a list of creative uses for ChatGPT that I’ll sure of in a future newsletter.

Anyways, I hope you have a wonderful week!

Chris Ried

Who Am I?

Last edition’s Who Am I was… Vera Molńar

A few interesting facts I have written down from reading several different sources:

1. Vera Molnár's interest in geometric abstraction was initially sparked by a book on the subject that she discovered in a library during her studies at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts.

2. Molnár was one of the first artists to incorporate computer programming into her artistic practice, creating algorithmic drawings and paintings that explored mathematical patterns and visual perception.

3. Despite her significant contributions to the world of computer art, Molnár did not own a personal computer until the 1990s. Instead, she used the computers and plotters available to her through academic institutions and research centers.

4. Molnár was a co-founder of the GRAV artist collective, which was formed in 1960s Paris and sought to use art to engage with contemporary social and political issues. The group was influenced by the burgeoning fields of cybernetics and systems theory.

5. Molnár's artworks have been exhibited at numerous international venues, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 2018, the Ludwig Museum in Budapest held a retrospective exhibition of Molnár's work, the first of its kind in her home country.

For this week… who am I?

New Segment: #GenCodeCraft

In the last newsletter, I asked the following question:

And some of you are interested in trying this out. So Sinan from OpenProcessing reached out, and he has graciously provided a way for your submissions to be aggregated on OpenProcessing, and that way, we can collectively try some experiments.

Though it is straightforward for the first week, I am interested in what we can make with the checkbox box.

Week 1: Checkerboard

const drawCheckerBox = (x, y, w, h, n, clr1, clr2) => {
    let w_diff = w / n;
    let h_diff = h / n;
    let cnt = 0;
    noStroke();
    push();
    translate(x, y);
    for (let j = 0; j < n; j++) {
      for (let k = 0; k < n; k++) {
        let clr = cnt % 2 == 0 ? clr1 : clr2;
        fill(clr);
        rect(j * w_diff, k * h_diff, w_diff, h_diff);
        cnt++;}}
    pop();
  };

You will be able to submit right to the weekly challenge on OpenProcessing. Once you have submitted, post your submissions on Twitter and Instagram and tag them with #GenCodeCraft.

Articles and Tutorials

For the latest episode of our How to See series, we spoke with three artists—Kate Crawford, Trevor Paglen, and Refik Anadol—who engage with the ways that AI and machine learning algorithms are demanding new approaches to artmaking.

If you haven’t seen this yet, it is a well-deserved watch. There is much to be said to see how generative AI art has made it into the MOMA.

And speaking of, have you seen the new work from Ali We-Wei?

650,000 Lego Bricks to Recreate Monet’s Water Lilies

Art fans can already build Lego sets of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe screen prints, Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, and Hokusai’s The Great Wave. Chinese artist Ai Weiwei recently took that combination of notable artworks and the popular Danish toy to another level, with a 50-foot-long iteration of one of Claude Monet’s most famous images.

It’s not necessarily creative coding, but I think some computational work has gone into this piece.

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via Twitter

I’ve been really digging the work of Daniel Martin using point cloud and rotating in 3D space.

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Secret Colors of the Commodore 64

In 1991 I was fourteen years old. It would be fair to say I was obsessed with computers. I proudly owned a brown ‘breadbox’ Commodore 64 with an exotic upgrade - an Oceanic 5.25” disk drive:

Growing up, my dad had a Commodore 64, and that was the first time I tried my hand at coding and gaming.

Realistic ceramic materials with three.js

This is the third article in my series about my first long-form generative art project  Ceramics, which is being released in Art Blocks’ Curated collection today! In this article we’re making materials with three.js that look and feel like physical ceramics, it follows on from my first article on making textured surfaces with three.js**.**

Let’s Program Doom Part 1 / 2

I might be the most excited about this video. I really wanted to learn how the original Doom game engine works. l spent a long time learning the basic concepts but created the code myself from scratch and how I wanted to design it. You can follow along or convert this code to any other programming language since I kept it simple in C that draws a pixel at x and y coordinates.

These are great ways to appreciate the work that goes into game design.

Mathematicians have finally discovered ‘einstein’ tile

A 13-sided shape known as “the hat” has mathematicians tipping their caps.

It’s the first true example of an “einstein,” a single shape that forms a special tiling of a plane: Like bathroom floor tile, it can cover an entire surface with no gaps or overlaps but only with a pattern that never repeats.

3D Printed Split-Flap

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been tempted for a couple of years to get a Vestaboard. But it’s a bit pricy. Then, I came across this ingenious way to “build my own,” which I thought, even though time would amount to the same price, would be a unique way of creating it on my own. The software is here.

I’d take on this project, but I’ve been working on a homemade CNC machine to do some interesting generative things with but have yet to finish.

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