Programming abstract art

If you're eager to find more "creative coding" type works. Going on instagram and using hashtags like #creativecoding are a great way to find amazing work. Also twitter is a great source of absolutely mind-blowing artistic work that leverages technology. I've spent far too much time just browsing all the amazing stuff out there.

This reminds me of that old slashdot-era wallpaper site that all the Linux geeks used for backgrounds. The patterns were tiling and textured like mineral surfaces. The names were arbitrary combinations of words. Someone help me out here.

By choosing to make art, you become an artist, so in that sense only artists _do_ make art.

This isn't art, though. Art isn't functional, art creates thought and emotion. Art has thought and emotion behind it. Code can make art, but there has to be a genuine artistic intent behind the code.

At best, this is design, but in reality this is a code snippet that generates random boxes.

>The lady of the lake didn't come out and bless special individuals as "artists" and the rest of us as foolish undeserving heathens.

No, hard work at aesthetics, vision, and talent did...

If I would write a program that produces random text and I call it a science fiction generator (as in science fiction everything is allowed), would you not tell me to go and read some real science fiction stories before making such a claim?

There is no clear definition of who is an artist and who is not. It is also something that depends on the context and can even change over time. You are not born an artist, but some people, usually over time, are recognized as artist. Take for example Van Gogh. He did not go to art school and during his life time he was not recognized as an artist. He was too much ahead of his time. It was only after his death that the genius of his paintings was recognized. But would you call a program that imitates his style (using neural networks) generating art? Probably not, because it is just imitation. There is nothing new or insightful about it. It does not impact our thinking in any way.

When I showed above mentioned artist http://www.iwriteiam.nl/BYOB2017.html he commented that the colours looked horrible to his eyes. (Later, I created a faster changing version: http://www.iwriteiam.nl/BYOB2018.html .) Just recently, I developed a version that works with a static colour palet: http://www.iwriteiam.nl/ST8x8FixedPalette.html , but I am not very satified with it, after I discovered how hard it is to create a colour plate. I have never mixed any colours and never experimented with it, but I have realized that I do not master the art. The said artist does like the animation and he would like to cooperate with me to make it a joint work. He has cooperated with other software engineers for his art projects.

Thanks. Like I said, the code is truly unpleasant to see. But I can summarize the concepts that create images like these.

It boils down to some number of iterations, where each iteration is addition of some shape (having some properties) to the canvas.

Those properties include the type of shape (dot, line, polygon), size, position, and color.

The number of iterations, along with the type of shape and its size determine the density of content on the canvas.

The other properties have their obvious effects.

The magic, if there is any, is in choosing ranges of acceptable property values (randomly). For example, if you make every property be a random value between the min and max acceptable for that property, you generally end up with some variation of noise. It's not really artistic in my opinion.

So what I did was play with narrowing ranges of acceptable properties, especially tying those ranges to the previous values of the previous shape (that was drawn on the previous iteration). Position is the best example. The first iteration would have no previous shape, so its position would be randomly somewhere on the canvas. But the next iteration would some random distance from the previous one, within a range that itself might have slightly randomized boundaries. That would result in clustering... which is generally pleasing, but ultimately monotonous. So I would provide some % chance of a "break out", such that the new position could be totally random rather than related to the previous.

I applied the same concepts of managed, previously-related randomization of value ranges to the other properties of the shape being drawn on the given iteration. For color, I might have it vary only one channel of the RGB, and only a small amount. But again, I would have a low % chance of a completely random/new color. And one of my favorite little additions was the complementary color chance. Once in a while, the next drawn shape would be close to the complementary color of the previous shape.

Finally, since "tuning" the randomization boundaries and exception chances was a bit tedious, I added a layer of similar randomization behaviors to the boundary rules themselves. That means that some images could be total chaos, and others could theoretically just be a single blob of garbage in one spot of the canvas.

Like a "good" photographer, I let it generate hundreds of images. Then I chose some that I thought were compelling. The rest went in the trash.

I have considered training a NN against famously popular and unpopular paintings, hoping to teach it how to recognize art that other people would like. Then I would setup a pipeline of generate-judge-keep/delete-repeat processes that should churn out abstract art that would make me famous and finally prove my value to the world. :)

Least active? What are you talking about. There's a steady stream of posts. New stuff every day.

If there's a more active generative art forum I'd love to hear about it.