Generative art over the years | Hacker News Reader

Generative art over the years

blog.veitheller.de

231 pointsevakhoury70 comments

Generative art was my first love. By accident, I ended up being a student of the great Frieder Nake (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frieder_Nake) and that changed my future trajectory.

Eventually, this led me to writing my own indie book on generative art with Go: https://p5v.gumroad.com/l/generative-art-in-golang, which led me to a talk I gave on GopherCon Europe: https://youtu.be/NtBTNllI_LY?si=GMePA3CfVQZJq2O7

These were great times, but I think the book is not worth buying anymore. Sadly, AI-generated imagery sort of killed the mojo of algorithmic art for me, and I've been trying to get back to it for the last few years.

> Sadly, AI-generated imagery sort of killed the mojo of algorithmic art for me

I used to (and occasionally still do) make generative art and found this too! Although I'm not really sure why - I still love good generative art and don't really consume any AI generated art intentionally.

I think possibly one of the main things that happened was a lot of online generative art communities got flooded first by NFTs, and then AI generated art. I find it a lot harder to reliably find other people's generative art these days.

I spent a fair amount of time with p5 etc, but the results always felt limited and brittle. You need a lot of complexity before anything really interesting happens, and Processing lacks features like gradient fills that limit what's possible. It helped there were people like Jared Tarbell who (IMO) were way ahead of what most people were doing, and were willing to share their code.

I wasn't unhappy with some of the results, but it was an interesting and frustrating struggle.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/32832718@N00/17951484570/in/ph... https://www.flickr.com/photos/32832718@N00/19868350512/in/ph... https://www.flickr.com/photos/32832718@N00/17952106385/in/ph...

You can push AI in the same way and end up in some unusual spaces, but the quality often degrades when you get there.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fr...

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fo...

> I spent a fair amount of time with p5 etc, but the results always felt limited and brittle.

I wrote a JS canvas library[1] partly because existing libraries of the time (2013) didn't do what I wanted a canvas library to do. Things like animated gradients and patterns, etc. I'm still working on the library today - so thats 12+ years of my spare time gone!

Generative art - such as challenges like Genuary[2] - is a key tool for giving me ideas on how to develop the library further. I keep CodePens of some of my better efforts[3] around as a set of extra tests to check for breaking changes as I fiddle with the library.

[1] - https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas

[2] - https://genuary.art/

[3] - https://codepen.io/collection/RzzMjw

> I ended up being a student of the great Frieder Nake

That is quite wonderful.

> Sadly, AI-generated imagery sort of killed the mojo of algorithmic art for me,

I am surprised you did not specifically mention Nake's provocative writing "There Should Be No Computer-Art" : https://dam.org/museum/essays_ui/essays/there-should-be-no-c...

His argument is still 100% relevant in the age of AI.

I really like generative art. It's part intellectual ingenuity, part aesthetics.

I've only realized later that it had a name, but since I've had my hands on a computer, I've been making generative graphics with code one way or another. First in GWBasic, later in Flash, and more recently in JavaScript.

In my view generate art is art created by an autonomous system. The trick is to balance randomness with intent and to create clever algorithms with maximum visual impact. Nowadays the term "generative" is more associated with AI, and to differentiate it from AI Art, I call it Algorithmic Art now. I wrote a piece about it: https://monokai.com/articles/algorithmic-art-as-a-subset-of-...

And I know NFT's are frowned upon here, but I've always found Algorithmic Art a perfect match for NFT's. Where before I created autonomous systems that ephemerally generated different outputs each run, now you can store specific outputs on the blockchain by just storing the PRNG seed. There are platforms that facilitate this, like Artblocks or Fxhash.

I'm curious about what benefits having them on a blockchain provides, besides proof of ownership?

Generative systems often produce random outputs every time it runs. When run in a browser, an output just vanishes after a refresh and is usually never found again if you haven't saved the PRNG seed.

Using a blockchain, you can store a specific output of your generative system in a way that's definitive and collaboratively agreed upon. If you believe in collecting / trading digital assets, that's a prerequisite for algorithmic systems.

I'm not sure I manage to follow accurately. If you don't save the art you make then it's gone, generative or not. If you do save the output in some way (either by saving the output itself or saving the full information needed to regenerate the output) what is special about doing so on the blockchain vs anywhere else beyond the aforementioned proof of ownership?

One is of course allowed to care about proof of ownership and the method used to do so if they like :). I just didn't follow the response in context of the question of how it's different from doing the same without the blockchain otherwise.

Unrelated: Kickass you're the Monokai author - I still use that today! Have you ever posted a retrospective about Monokai?

A generative system can produce an infinity of outputs. An art platform combined with a blockchain allows you to store a finite number of outputs from the same system definitively without knowing upfront what the outputs would look like. This forces you to think carefully about your system: it should produce interesting works with each iteration. Some people call this long form generative art.

Regarding Monokai, I’ve written some history about it here: https://monokai.pro/history :)

Yah, I think the question really comes down to: what's so special about a block chain vs any other public record or database?

For example, it's just as easy - and more accessible - to put the code and example configurations with output in a github repository.

The special thing is that it’s decentralized. I know this discussion will not resolve and I’m not a blockchain zealot. I do think it’s an elegant decentralized storage system for algorithmic art where you make outputs definitive and collectible after initiating a run.

I think that's more than fair - "I like blockchain for decentralized proof of ownership more than other methods for the same." is as fine a preference as any other, of course.

Thanks for the history page :).

Of course, "proof of ownership" with generative art isn't, because pure generative art is ineligible for copyright protection (https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-de...).

You’re conflating AI art with algorithmic art. This is the reason why I wrote the article.

You mean images? Art cannot by generated by definition.

This seems, either intentionally or unintentionally, an extremely narrow view of art.

E.g. are the artists who worked on Flow (2024) no longer artists because the resulting images are generated rather than drawn? Most people would disagree, and hold/put forth a very different definition as a result, given even they were already credited as the artists on the piece before I asked the question.

Even the arguments in the courts about AI, which is a very different kind of "generated" output, stuck to showing the outputs can't be copyrighted rather than trying to argue whether the outputs were still art as the problem.

There is no "generative art" by definition. Art cannot be generated. It's oxymoron.

Correct is "generative images". Or "kitsch".

Years ago. I dabbled in generative art. I even wrote a small Forth-like language to control the generation. It's basically controllable chaos with math or chaos within bounding patterns. The results were often unexpected. Some examples: https://imgur.com/a/UjWLy7s

These are really cool!

You may like https://c50.fingswotidun.com/

It's what I doodle with to generate images using a stack based program per pixel.

Every character is a stack operation, you have 50 characters to make something special.

That's pretty neat; some of output are beautiful!

Mine is also pixel coloring at the lowest level. I have a shading kernel in GPU doing the low level work, mainly applying colors recursively like fractal. I got sick of writing shader code so I make a high level language supporting math operations in concise expression that are compiled to shader code in GPU. The main thing is it supports functions. That let me reuse code and build up abstractions. E.g once I get the "ring" pattern settled, it's defined as a function and I can use it in other places, combine with other functions, and have it be called by other functions.

One of these days when I get some time, I'll formalize it and publish it.

This is beautiful. I'd really love to see some serious discourse about the place that generative art should have in our society and about what art really means in today's age of overconsumption.

I'm not sure art is still meant to be a widely shared experience and smarter people than should tackle this idea.

Thank you!

I'm glad people are interested in art discourse and exploring arts in general. Art is a very personal thing. Different people see arts in different ways. Yet there's some recurrent themes time after time.

I got my insight in art in musics and on why people love them so much. Musics and songs are basically repeatable patterns with slight variations in multiple dimensions, in pitch, in beat, in tone, in rhyme, in lyrics, etc. The human mind is a super pattern processing machine, as part of our evolution survival traits. Pattern brings structure, abstraction, and comfort. But strict repetitive patterns bore the mind. Human love patterns, but with variation and imperfection.

The human mind is very good in filling the missing pieces in a pattern, again from our evolution survival traits. Our ancestors could look at the tail of an animal and filled in the blank that it's a tiger hidden behind a big rock. The filling of missing pieces is by experience and learning. It really is the original generative AI.

I believe the variation and imperfection in patterns trigger the mind's filling the blank function, which triggers the generative function, which can run wild generating wide range of imagination. That's why arts can have different reaction from different people as each has their own life experience and thus different generated result.

I think art is patterns with variation, imperfection, and blanks at the most basic level. Computer generated art thus needs to fulfill that basic requirement at the least to be called art.

> I'd really love to see some serious discourse about the place that generative art should have in our society

For me (and many others), the “how” of art is just as important as the “what”, if not more important. There are installations that reflect this, many of which are interactive and allow the observer to become part of the art itself.

And if you extend the definition of “generative”, it can include many other methods, like swinging a paint can with a hole in the bottom over an empty canvas to create random patterns based on pendulum movement. Myself, like many others, recognize the amount of creativity and effort that goes into this type of “generative” art, especially in comparison to others. I also appreciate the creativity and complexity of the grandparent’s generative system.

These are sick. Color, contrast, composition, patterns, etc. Really inspiring stuff. Reminds me how digital art used to feel ~20 years ago.

Fellow generative artist here :waves:

I started out in all the usual ways - inspired by Daniel Shiffman making generative art first using Processing, then p5.js, and now mostly I create art by writing shaders. Recently after being laid off from my job, I actually took my obsession further and released my very first mobile app - https://www.photogenesis.app - as a homage to generative art.

It's an app that applies various generative effects/techniques to your photos, letting you turn your photos into art (not using AI). I'm really proud of it and if you've been in the generative art space for a while you'll instantly recognise many of the techniques I use (circle packing, line walkers, mosaic grid patterns, marching squares, voronoi tessellation, etc.) pretty much directly inspired by various Coding Train videos.

I love the generative art space and plan to spend a lot more time coming up doing things in this area (as long as I can afford it) :-)

> I now have a small library of simulated materials: watercolor washes, dry brush strokes, felt-tip pens, cracked glaze, pencil fills. None of them are physically accurate. I’m not simulating fluid dynamics or anything like that, I don’t need to. They’re impressions, heuristics that capture enough of the character of a material to be convincing and evoke an emotion.

I find this to be a key insight. I've been working on a black-and-white film app for a while now (it's on my website in profile if you're curious), and in the early stages I spent time poring over academic papers that claim to build an actual physical model of how silver halide emulsions react to light.

I quickly realized this was a dead end because 1) they were horribly inefficient (it's not uncommon for photographers to have 50-100MP photos these days, and I don't want my emulator to take several minutes to preview/export a full image), and 2) the result didn't even look that good/close to actual film in the end (sometimes to the point where I wondered if the authors actually looked at real film, rather than get lost into their own physical/mathematical model of how film "should behave").

Forgetting the physics for a moment, and focusing instead on what things look and feel like, and how that can be closely approximated with real time computer graphics approach, yielded far better results.

Of course the physics can sometimes shed some light on why something is missing from your results, and give you vocabulary for the mechanics of it, but that doesn't mean you should try to emulate it accurately.

I read this interview with spktra/Josh Fagin and how he worked on digitally recreating how light scatters through animation cels, which creates a certain effect that is missing from digital animation - and it was validating to read a similar insight:

"The key isn’t simulating the science perfectly, but training your eye to recognize the character of analog light through film, so you can recreate the feeling of it."

https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/dangerous-light

Many years ago I went to a photoshop conference to try and get better. There was a talk about converting color photos to black and white. As a former bw film photog this interested me. Black and white film is a little wierd (some people put red filters on the lenses to increase contrast)

He showed some techniques. I think someone asked a question about the best way, but the presenter got a little ranty and basically said the way that looks best to your eye is the best way.

Yes, that makes sense to me. Black and white film is a very flexible medium - you can make very different prints from the same negative, it has lots of latitude to play with the contrast, dodge/burn, etc, so there’s not necessarily a single “best” interpretation.

And as you point out, at capture time you can use color filters to affect the image; processing too can lead to fairly different results based on what developer you use.

This is in contrast to color film, which I find to be much more rigid and narrow in how it’s meant to look and be processed; one could argue there’s much less range for interpretation from negative to final image (especially so with slide film, which completely falls apart if it’s ever so slightly over/under exposed).

The aesthetics of B&W are super complex and very variable, so the idea that there's a "best" option for a format that covers a huge range of possible effects is indeed unhelpful.

But it's still useful to have some of those effects catalogued and easily accessible as presets. Photoshop doesn't quite do that, which on the one hand makes it hard for beginners to get a good look, but also leaves some space for those who want to go deeper to get more creative.

It is worth mentioning this site when talking about generative art, IMHO.

https://bauble.studio/

And

https://toodle.studio/

Both written by the same guy who wrote the Janet for Mortals book, about the Janet language, which supports both those sites.

I'm really wanted to see if I could combine those tools to make Arabic art inspired generative art. Anyone know of any projects which are doing that? There is a lot of crossover in modern generative art and ancient Arabic art.

Generative art inspired by Arabic art happens to be a rabbit hole I went down last year and still have my notes on. Research on the topic seems to have waxed and waned sufficiently long ago that the best resources I found have suffered from bit rot, thankfully much of it can still be accessed through the Internet Archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140701114342/http://www.cgl.uw...

https://web.archive.org/web/20180426122308/http://www.wozzec...

Of course the topic is still alive to some extent, but the above 2 "dead" homepages remain some of the best entry points I've found overall.

One of my hobbies back in college was to write fun js fiddles [1]. It was super fun to have the time and curiosity to investigate something. I've been missing it more and more each passing day. I was super curious about generative art, procedural generation... I guess it is a negative term now, with AIs being able to create such complex stuff as video, audio and God knows what else. I was once working on a memes app where users could submit images. I was knee deep in how to identify duplicate images to keep my meme database "clean", so I was investigating cosine similarities... Few months went by and AI can do that better. Thats how ai feel now: AI can do it better, so why bother?

1 - https://jsfiddle.net/u/victorqribeiro

Machines can quickly build repeatable, efficient, 'perfect' clothing - but people still knit.

Art isn’t useful or practical, clothing is.

I have a very nice knife that is absolutely art, and is extremely useful.

A lot of clothes aren't particularly practical. I'd argue that artifacts are more likely to be art if their purpose is more aesthetic than practical. As such, I'd say that some articles of clothing are art (like anything you see on a runway), some aren't (e.g. basic T-shirt), and some seem ambiguous to me (some ties might be art, but some are pretty boring and they don't have much practical use).

I’ve been a fan of Libs Elliott’s generative quilting patterns for years and years: https://pin.it/4Mhpfc5OK

Hmm, isn't that a little like saying "now that we have cameras, no one needs to paint any more!" AIs can generate realistic video and images, but for me the fun of generative art is that it isn't realistic, it has texture, you can get a sense of what kind of patterns it will make, like echoes of the algorithm. Sure, you could probably prompt for some kind of geometric image, but if you asked for a little script that made them, then you could make tweaks and see what happens...

Because the process of creating something is transformative

P5.js is pretty great.

I used it create art, basically taking animal photos and using the dna sequence from that animal to recreate the photo using the 4 letters. (I did four passes using different size letters and layered in Gimp). People seem to like them, and they got into an art:science show.

https://p5js.org/

Coding train has a lot of videos on using p5.js Some of them more sophisticated than the childish iconography appears. It’s pretty fun.

https://thecodingtrain.com/tracks

If you consider the patterns in nature to be art (which I do!), you might enjoy the book "The Computational Beauty of Nature" by Gary William Flake. [0]

The subtitle is "Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation".

It's a wonderful book to own as a physical copy, and the contents are very inspiring for generative art.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Computational-Beauty-Nature-Explorati...

I used to help run an art website and had to figure out how to do taxonomy for art. Imagine if someone asked you to put all art into categories.

One major truth discovered:

Art is always in the eye of the beholder.

> Art is always in the eye of the beholder.

I like to think of fine art as a subjective human expression to stir emotion.

If you enjoy generative art then check out the Reddit group r/generative for daily posts from generative artists on the Internet. There's lots of good stuff there, and much of it is animated.

https://www.reddit.com/r/generative/

One Lab is an Android/iOS app I develop that has quite a few generative algorithms (mostly pixel shaders). You can combine them with the various effects in the app to create your custom generative stack.

Link: https://onelab.ilixa.com/

My Dad and I are doing a generative art experiment with his HP-7475A pen plotter.

I wrote an application called Axo which is a graph-based programming tool that outputs paths to be converted into HP-GL, SVG, or G-Code (we've used this for engraving with a laser cutter). Axo is an homage to Reaktor, Patternodes, ArtMatic & Max, all applications I have enjoyed using.

Here's a gallery of some of the bits I am happiest with so far: https://axo.mattmower.com/projects/mausart/gallery

At some point I want to pair the virtual image with a picture of the real-life plot. Some of the plots look great on nice paper.

looks interesting! I have a few pen plotter, so I'm curious to give Axo a try.

I used to make generative art around 15 years ago as well, seems not much has changed in this aspect (note that this is not generative AI art). A few years later I remember using Processing.js after reading The Nature Of Code by Dan Shiffman as well, fun times. How time flies.

Guess it's a good place to show off my generative art library: https://github.com/thekakkun/kanoko

I use it to generate a new wallpaper every time my computer is booted.

generated wallpapers are my fav

though really i just mean changing wallpapers, like https://satelliteeyes.tomtaylor.co.uk/

my thing is a collection of public city webcams from around my state, that get applied to various displays on a cron. i add noise, saturation, etc. sometimes two displays get such a wallpaper that i find the combination lovely

( this is a top/bottom setup https://i.imgur.com/Xc8RdnW.jpeg )

now, this isn't really generative. but i've imagined and toyed with it. splotches of greyscale, or flip that and only splotches of color

i've imagined embedding secrets, whatever that means

My first appreciation of generative art might have been the Streets of Rage 3 OST, even if I didn't know it at the time. Composer Yuzo Koshiro utilized a tool he called "Automated Composing System" to procedurally generate a bunch of random sequences, in an attempt to make sounds that haven't been heard before. He picked the ones he liked the best and incorporated them into the tracks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmV_r_s6JgE&list=PLE1355A8B1...

I'm a generative artist also (https://gods.art). I made a Python starter script for doing generative art: https://github.com/calebmadrigal/truthygraph.py/blob/main/tr..., as well as a web app for making pretty graphs: https://fuzzygraph.com.

https://www.amazon.com.au/Generative-Design-Visualize-Progra... for anyone who is interested in a guided experience of writing this stuff, I have this book. Filled with examples, conceptual explanations (sometimes having someone explain something very simple to you is helpful!) and a lot of nice pictures.

I think there are newer versions of this book, though I haven't tried finding it. It's a hefty coffee table book as-is

The #creativecoding and #genart tags on most social media networks will get you a front row seat to the international generative art community -- it's a very creative crowd!

I remember having some spare time at my first job and being really inspired by Ben Barry's work for Facebook's f8 conference:

https://v1.benbarry.com/project/f8-conference

I ended up learning enough processing to mimic a lot of what he did with the connected dots. It was great.

I'd love to get back into this sometime! Gotta have a reason though...

Reading this makes me want to fire up Processing [1] again. I remember spending hours and days with it in my early twenties. The immediacy of writing a few simple commands, hitting "Run" and seeing graphical output is still unsurpassed and created an almost addictive creative feedback loop that I haven't seen anywhere else yet.

[1] https://processing.org

I’d like to recommend vvvv. It’s a node-based version of C# that is always runtime. The edit-compile-run loop is eliminated so you can tweak both constants and behaviour instantly. For a processing-like drawing interface I’d recommend the built-in Skia library which I think processing is modelled after. VVVV overall is definitely a steeper learning curve, but it’s very powerful as you can use any .net libraries, 3D graphics, shaders and much more. Shaders in particular is a great tool that lends itself to a dataflow representation.

Touchdesigner is more popular and I suppose declarative, but vvvv is more general purpose and similar to the processing workflow. It’s a very weird tool I’ve used for everything between MIDI instruments, live installations, escape rooms, VJ rigs and, well, proc art.

I used to play with generative art but using genetic algorithms. Anyone remembers [0]evolvotron? I made some simple images back in 2012[1].

[0lhttps://github.com/WickedSmoke/evolvotron

[1]https://xcfgeneticart.blogspot.com/?m=1

Been getting into Rudy Rucker, who was funded by the AutoCAD folks to do cellular automata research: https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/.

Autodesk funded some really interesting projects.

> An early phyllotaxis spiral, circa 2016.

What a strange claim. How late is too late to be considered early?

Early work for the author not for phyllotaxis spirals

Looks like equation art, which my best mate used to do a lot of back when we were at university in the mid 00's. Defining formulas for R, G and B values, and then graphing the values and packing them into images. Was kind of fun!

As someone who makes and enjoys generative music I've always wondered what the parallels were like in the visual and plastic arts. This is cool.

Any recommendations for good generative music to check out? I've always loved the idea, but know of Brian Eno's "Discrete Music" and that's about it.

I recommend https://generative.fm/ - the creator also has a nice little intro course on creating generative music systems on Gumroad: https://alexbainter.gumroad.com/l/generative-music-systems?l...

Eno is amazing but can be a little hard to approach; I like as a starting place Omri Cohen, who has a youtube channel that has both his music as well as a lot of examples on how he makes it.

My favorite is Brownian motion fractal art. Something about it just tickles my brain just right

Reply on news.ycombinator.com