Creative Code-Generated Art | Hacker News Reader

Creative Code-Generated Art

editorx.com

134 pointsdzink38 comments

If you are interested in creative coding but don't know where to start, me and my friend are running Codecember, a month-long challenge to do one code sketch a day: https://codecember.ink

We pick simple sketches & recreate them in p5.js as a learning process. Eventually you remix the sketches with your ideas to create something original.

Our prompts exposes a diverse variety of generative artwork, none of which are too difficult to recreate. Join us for the second half!

I'd like to congratulate you both in your work there. Even if only because I wanted to write my own "Anders Hoff Depth of Field" but could never find the time, so now I have an implementation available to tinker with ;)

There's also Genuary[0] coming up, though your prompts are more fleshed out.

0: https://genuary2021.github.io/

For anyone interested in open platforms for creative art, I've been working for some years on https://ossia.io and we're slowly, but surely reaching a beta of version 3. It's a free & open-source sequencer that connects to things such as Processing, etc... though it's starting to embed correct video & audio capabilities with ISF & Faust support.

Feedback if you're in the field would be immensely appreciated !

How much of the application and how many of the connections are sub 20ms? How many are over 100ms?

> How much of the application and how many of the connections are sub 20ms? How many are over 100ms?

Good question, the core of the execution engine of the application is a synchronous dataflow graph driven by your audio thread most of the time, so if you set a buffer size of 64 that's going to give you the usual 2ms of latency for instance for the actual computations, and for all the audio processing.

Separate threads feed that in external OSC, MIDI, etc... messages through lock-free queues which should be fast, but I haven't done entire round-trip measurements, will do that !

These are promising answers so far, thank you. I look forward to the round-trip results

Looks great! I have been interested in nodal systems for a long time and have developed several. Oasia is a very interesting project.

Creative coding interests me for some time, I'm researching, reading and getting together sources to start and apply to a project.

Mostly inspired by Tim Rodenbröker [1] and Patrik Huebner [2], they both have great techniques and works. There is also awesome-creative-coding repo on GitHub [3], carefully curated list of awesome creative coding resources primarily for beginners/intermediates.

[1] https://timrodenbroeker.de/ [2] https://www.patrik-huebner.com/ [3] https://github.com/terkelg/awesome-creative-coding

If anyone is interested in code-generated art with D3.js, it's something I'm working towards with this book https://datacrayon.com/shop/product/visualisation-with-d3/... less focussed on data visualisation, moreso on using shapes

If anything, it can be fun https://twitter.com/ShahinRostami/status/1306683819655868416

Anyone rememmber Apophysis?

An old school program which spawned the creation of the Electric Sheep screen-saver which was an insane genetic driven shared computer rendering engine!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophysis_(software)

I spent so many hours with this when I was a teenager. I loved it.

Gotta plug https://www.dwitter.net

Come join the community in golfing 140 character demos!

Isn't that demo scene on steroids?

I think in general the demoscene is more heavily weighing technical excellence. Ie the audience is expected to understand and be awed by that, more than the artistic part, though the latter can be important as well.

I also thought demos are supposed to be small self-contained binaries, has this changed?

There are and were all kinds of competitions. The wild category is probably the most obvious one regarding no size limitations, but the generic "combined demo" category which is very often present at competitions is also usually without restrictions (but it must run on the competition machine).

See http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type%5B%5D=wild for wild demos (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCIsIfEOEI8 :)) or http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type%5B%5D=demo for "combined demos"

OHP Mega Demo 9000 is one of the greatest things to come out of the scene.

Fun fact: In the famous HBO "spinning chrome logo" intro ( https://youtu.be/i1NKoMNy5bY ), the sole use of a computer in generating visual effects was to control a servomotor that slid one patterned transparency over another, much like this demo, to create a "starburst" effect (seen just before the logo itself appears).

I would say creative coding is more artsy and less about breaking "the known limits".

When talking about steroids I would claim if so the sceners take them :D

Steroids, no.

Amphetamines (or as I like to call them, brain roids), maybe.

Yeah, I meant it more in a metaphorical sense. I don't think many artists are as dedicated and to some extent extreme as sceners. I think one guy of Farbrausch got a heart attack on a release party. Sceners seem to seek crunch time...

you say that like its a bad thing.

Creative coding is my hobby, and I have gone back and forth with graphics and audio. I started with Processing back in the early 2000s, but I have since moved on to Extempore [1], and more recently, Nannou [2].

I like Lisps, and Extempore has two languages: Xtlang a low-level language, and a scheme for higher-level programming. You run the compiler as a service (CAAS) and you livecode and hotload your changes. You can program music/sounds at the note or DSP level.

I started learning Rust and stopped. Then I started playing with Nannou, and I am making good progress and having fun. The compile times can some times interrupt creative flow, but it is getting better. Extempore is great at hotloading changes.

Some more esoteric but fun experiments are ok/ike [3,4] by John Earnest. They are based on the k programming language. I personally use APL/J, but John has really done a great job here for creative coding and array languages.

Looking at these examples, I guess I am jaded by these types of experiments except the last one (neural network imagery from left screen objects). I saw many interactive things done in the last 15 years with interactive "pets", "creatures", etc. to the point where you had them at malls all over (kids stepping on floor-projected fish to scare them). We had a wall of flipdots or sequins at my last job in 2012 that used Kinects to track people and then silhouetted them in black and white as they moved. The combination of the mechanical dots flipping, and the black-and-white moving image was cool. I forget the company that made it. Not to say it is not entertaining, art, or creative coding, but I find myself looking at a piece and thinking is it strong on art, weak on tech, vice versa, or somewhere in the middle. For me, I like when it is very thought provoking and uses either newish tech or existing tech in a novel, unexpected way.

[1] https://extemporelang.github.io/

[2] https://nannou.cc/

[3] https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok [4] https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok/tree/gh-pages/ike

These are all really cool - walking through Audience must be a wild experience.

One of my favorite examples of this is https://www.mokafolio.de/works/Weird-Faces-Vending-Machine - a vending machine that prints out randomly generated faces.

I working on creative coding space with https://twitter.com/acpustudio

Everything is code, generative art, including IDE, UI and scenes

If you're ever in Tokyo, check out teamlab by borderless. It is absolutely jaw dropping: https://borderless.teamlab.art/

Neil Mendoza [1] does some fantastic work combining art and code/technology, quite often with interactivity.

[1] http://www.neilmendoza.com/

See also Turing Drawings http://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/

Some cool examples are here: http://sanbasestudio.com/gallery.htm

Also check out the stuff at shadertoy.com! A ton of that is high quality art and the things people can do with 100 lines of code is absolutely incredible.

"Used machine learning, optimized algorithms..." well at least the algorithms were optimized!

Much of the linear model family (OLS, 2SLS, 3SLS, GMM, Lasso, Ridge) can be explicitly solved -- sometimes on pain of matrix inversion, but hey.

One correction: the ALGOBABEZ project should be attributed to the duo of both Shelly Knotts and Joanne Armitage.

A lot of this work reminds me of a guest lecture by the photographer Andres Serrano that I saw in college. At one part he showed us some recent work of his from a series titled 'Ejaculate in Trajectory'. While I expect that like Serrano the artists have enjoyed making these I'm not sure what else there is to gain from them.

I can't speak about photography art but in the case of coding art, I've learned a lot about linear algebra and algorithm design by making fun art projects.

I see it as filling out the space of possibilities within computer graphics. E.g., CGI in movies might be more practical and technically difficult, but what else can we do? It's interesting to see the boundaries pushed at least.

Art? Gain?

That page is unfortunately beyond sluggish.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com