What Is Generative Art? (2022)
amygoodchild.com
amygoodchild.com
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This was peak generative art from its time IMO. Was available as a screensaver for Windows 98 (can still download from archive.org and works on windows 10). https://www.kurzweilcyberart.com/aaron/static.html
So I started doing some prints where I’d use code to create generative art, then use this as the inspiration for my own lino and screen prints.
I really like the idea of code making a thing that is then put through a “human filter” to give different interpretations of the starting point - sometimes rougher and less refined than what I was generating. I think the idea of only having control over parts of the process also appeals to me.
Make a bunch of sequential images
Put them together with ffmpeg (which is free. You just do a command line command and specify the dir with the image files. You can also specify fps, quality etc)
Voila, it's an mp4 or whatever
https://i.imgur.com/U9MPrIc.jpeg (Stormy Sea)
https://i.imgur.com/olUOws7.jpeg (Rolls)
https://i.imgur.com/c8FIM8f.jpeg (Hell Eyes)
https://i.imgur.com/rSmCAT9.jpeg (Gold Sculpture)
https://i.imgur.com/kCG3g1H.png (Many Worlds)
https://i.imgur.com/5gPx9QE.png (Circles)
https://i.imgur.com/8oOogNX.png (Telescope)
https://i.imgur.com/lw7HP5k.jpeg (Forest)
https://i.imgur.com/2okI9da.jpeg (Conversation)
https://i.imgur.com/w1cQDcO.jpeg (Lava flow)
Simple randomness can create some "embellishments":
Logistic maps can also be used as random note generators:
This video (How to make Brian Eno style Generative Music // 20 ideas & tools // Ableton, Eurorack, Modular, VCV) is also worth watching:
So it's generative in the way "generative design" is, but not oriented towards optimising for a goal, if that makes sense.
I don't know about Ableton loops but I've met some drummers like this but they are usually not all that popular. So I am guessing that is not what GarageBand is aiming at, in quite the same way. ;-)
Though perhaps that is generative in the sense of optimising towards a goal; I've not used it.
Eno's work was initially done with the Koan and I think he ended up in a sort of symbiotic relationship with the developers. It was a big deal for a while in computer music magazines in the 90s.
You can modify strokes on the fly in a multitude of ways via lua scripts. There's a ton of examples included (boids that follow your brush etc)
There's some nice interplay between scripts and other features (like point and wallpaper symmetry) that makes this a lot of fun to use.
I think one of the founders of Etsy was also into generative art and produced some neat pieces.
https://www.artnome.com/ had some good interviews and posts with artists in this space.
I like the artificial life simulator. I did something similar here https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MftSRf
I love generative art and have been recently trying my hands at it (https://circuiter.abhijithota.me) but I'm not sure if I feel positive about it being generally tied to NFTs. I follow a lot of these amazing artists on Twitter and half of them promote their NFTs. I generally tend to ignore that part and focus on the nice patterns made by computers.
Is there no other way to make this a source of income other than NFTs?
More practically, I bet you could build a decent patronage-style or subscriber-style distribution on top of good generative art, especially if you are releasing often. Incentives like being able to affect prompt or style details could motivate subscriptions or donating at higher tiers.
There are probably other options, like doing the design and tweaking necessary for pulling dozens of images with a consistent theme or character. There's a lot of real work that goes into that process that you could easily justify value/time on. A lot of overlap with existing design roles but more on the craft vs artiste side of things. Depends on what you want to do with it, I guess.
The first example that springs to mind is Nervous Systems: https://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/
It seems to me that the problem you're struggling with is that there is no market for generative art PNGs, which I'd generally agree with. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part NFTs are a gold rush in speculative investing coincidentally often coupled to things which inherently cost nothing to reproduce, like digital images, because for some reason artificial scarcity is an amazingly effective hack for humans.
Making money in art tends to boil down to making something that somebody with money wants, just like everything else. The most successful artists I know recognize it for what it is.
If you really enjoy generative art I think this shouldn't distract from that enjoyment. It's a way to create unique digital outputs that can be owned by collectors (ie its not just right-click saving PNGs), so in a generic sense it's a natural fit. You don't have to get caught up in a crypto frenzy or spend hundreds of dollars to collect NFTs from a generative artist whose works you really like. The author of this article has many wonderful projects available in a reasonable price range (for art) on both Ethereum and Tezos blockchains.
https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/writing/irl-proble...
Buyers know exactly what they're getting and artists get a huge cut of the sales (intermediaries usually take a 1-2% fee). They also get royalties on secondary market sales after the initial "print" happens.
Also, one can extend this thinking to argue that gardens (or mazes) cannot be a piece of art since plants grow by themselves, and it is (to some point) unpredictable. Even in studio photography, there are myriads of random effects - the only way to make a computer image perfectly deterministically is to set RGB to each single pixel manually.
You don’t need to do it manually. A quick and dirty example is to have each pixel’s colour depend on its position on the canvas. Instant gradient, perfectly deterministic, yet you can still be surprised by the colours.
P5.js example (run interactively at https://editor.p5js.org):
function setup() {
createCanvas(256, 256);
noLoop()
noStroke()
}
function draw() {
for (i = 0; i < 256; i++) {
for (j = 0; j < 256; j++) {
fill(i, j, i)
rect(i, j, 1, 1)
}
}
}
I would make a guess that what ended up being exhibited and sold was heavily curated.
I saw an exhibition of Refik Anadol's Nature Dreams last year in Copenhagen, can only recommend to see one of his video installations if there is one near you, they are quite mesmerizing: https://refikanadol.com/works/
https://www.fleen.org/old_generative_art_projects/powerbox_4...
If you describe an activity as an art, you mean that it requires skill and that people learn to do it by instinct or experience, rather than by learning facts or rules.
I always found random abstract generative art to feel a little meaningless. Once I added images as input and started modifying image pixels, such as color and positioning, my generative art become a lot more interesting.
[2] https://available-anaconda-10d.notion.site/That-Creative-Cod...
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Computational-Beauty-Nature-Explorati...
It's a short conference video from Tim Holman, where he breaks down the "toolbox" you need. He shows lines, curves, randomness, repetition etc, and how you combine these simple concepts to make something cool. After that short video you basically have what you need to start experimenting.
https://github.com/terkelg/awesome-creative-coding
...which oddly doesn't appear in the article, but is what immediately comes to mind when I think of "generative art".
Dwitter is also a cool place for generative art meets code-golf, which has been talked about many times before on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=dwitter
If so, there's several ideas at NodeMusic.com
Procedural generation, yes. But art? I don't know.
If a human makes a thing, would people consider it art? Like a car, a shirt? What if a machine makes something that looks like a painting, would that be art?
If we want to protect art and artists, that would be nice to have a stricter definition of art, in my view.
There is 'chaotic' abstract art - like Pollock - and regular examples - like Escher or Vasarely - and many points in between. Why should using a rand function and a line/point shape be fundamentally different?
Photography has a deep and storied history and terminology and humanity emerging from experiments with a medium... That's what gives it life, and gives us things to discuss as photographers. But computer graphics has that same kind of story - thousands of research papers, experiments, and the work of millions of artists using and advancing the tools.
Generative art is a subset of computer graphics and is intertwined in its history. It is far more than artists playing with random numbers, the same way that photography is far more than pointing a sensor and pressing a button. There is an endless history of past attempts to build on, and huge amounts of mathematical and artistic theories to build, in both cases.
If you need help to see this as an art, consider reading Foley and Van Dam, and work to see the development of computer graphics techniques - and their application - as a form of art in itself, where we develop and explore experimental media and subject, without the constraints of physical reality. I believe that by working with graphics algorithms, as an artist and coder, you will see how the artistic and technical beauty of these algorithms combine to create a beautiful and compelling form of art.
I hope that after this, you will get endless joy from contemplating computer graphics, the way you get joy from photography. And I hope it will give you enjoyment of the more abstract and experimental side of things, and even the work in image AI, which challenges our identities and livelihoods as artists. Imo it's a very amazing time to be alive as an artist!
I will admit that as a software dev and a former 3d modeller and animator I may be too close to how the digital paint and canvas are made to get excited. Another reason is the infinite number of works that can be produced by machines running the same algorithms, which has an unfortunate effect of turning artworks from an event to mass-produced objects (or renderings on LCD screens). That mass-production aspect removed barriers to entry to become an artist, see the deluge of "abstract art" on Etsy and hundreds of tutorials on how to produce it on YouTube. There just isn't anything special about it. I understand that this is not new, painters are still salty about photography and photographers are not happy about digital distribution of their works on a mass scale without compensation. And I know that mass production of artworks is not new; in the past, master painters or engravers ran workshops that produced works "in the style of" too. Still, there was some effort required to produce such works. I think the perception of generative art suffers from the same thing that makes it possible: ease of access to a lot of compute power for next to nothing.
I spent over 10 years of my life working with 3d graphics and finally went back to photography and recently to film photography. I feel more involved in the process of creation and there is a physical artifact at the end of the process. Once it is produced it needs no power to enjoy it unlike generative art that needs a screen to be seen (some of it can be printed in 2d or 3d).
As for AI, I see it as a threat to all who invested their time and effort into creating business models that support them in the digital domain. That value is being taken away from them now. Technology applied to the creative space has always been about improving efficiency of the creative process and offering new tools, but this time round there is an assumption that all that we create is fair game for the AI companies and that we should accept it while they monetize it. There is no model for the creator to make a living from his creations in the AI space and I think that's dishonest.
Remember, art is fundamentally worthless bullshit that we do because life is miserable and terrifying, and we're obsessive miserable bastards. There's no reason to make it a living, except to enslave artists to the whims of the wealthy. We can just take from the wealthy, instead.
Seize the means of production from capitalists, and you'll be free to be make art without the added misery of having to please bastards with too much money and no real love of the process of art. But continue defining art as having to produce revenue and support the living of artists, and you're just fighting for continued slavery at the hands of the wealthy. I say seize the means instead, using extreme measures if necessary.
https://www.google.com/search?&sca_upv=1&q=yayoi+kusama&udm=...
(Aside: this view seems doubly odd coming from a fine-art photographer. If you've been doing it long you'll surely have met folks who scoff that "it's just clicking a shutter button". Are you not doing something similar here?)
Maybe you're just not looking at the right stuff?
The artist sees it, brings it out.
This is not just another way to draw a bowl of fruit. We're exploring alien country.
Now, digitally-generated images (including photography) is totally ubiquitous.
Generative art is awesome! But it isn't Art art.
My thinking has come around to the idea that Art art is an exclusively human-to-human transaction, and must be imbued with the soul of its creator; the intangibles of style and taste, the ineffable of lived experiences, the errors and happy accidents and imperfections.
Both are art. But Art art can never be replaced by machines, and that's a good thing.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-revenge-liberal-arts-gold...
If you want to say there is an art to prompting, that's fine.
Again, read the article, this ain't about AI
It's kinda annoying, so I wrote this post https://leanrada.com/notes/ai-art-not-generative-art/
But on the other, I often argue that there's literally no hard difference between using a computer and programming one; using this exact idea.
It's also not new. If you've taken any modern art history class before, this is article/website is the same content. Every generation of art/artist tries to justify their existence to the last.
Generative art as a general concept has a long, long history, that we can date back at least to performance events like Musikalisches Würfelspiel in the 1700s.
Following your logic, even photography, cinema, sculpture that is aided by machines and not just scalpels, etc. is not Art art.