cosiiine

To debate your point, we are absolutely seeing Amazon being flooded by AI books. Any open marketplace is currently experiencing a race to the bottom.

I actually go there every year for a generative art festival. It’s a surreal and awesome spot for sure.

This is a wonderful deep dive into your project. I'm early days on creating pixel art style procedural art systems, and this gives me plenty to think about.

That's not open source though... I would like to release this with a permissive license for humans only. From what I've read, the jury is still out on having your license copied left to the AI companies even when they're training on your information.

"Anonymity on social media has brought a lot of problems and I'm not sure what the benefits are"

Anonymity is a shield against public lynching for communities that are targeted by hate groups such as LGBTQ+ (one example, there are plenty).

I’ve always wanted to get one of these working, but they’re rare, and heavy! That makes shipping expensive.

Agreed 100%. It all comes down to the artists intentions, and plotters have many limitations. My hope for this article was to expose people to other options.

Great portfolio of art btw, thanks for sharing!

You're correct, there are some more sophisticated processes used by specialty printers such as CcMmYK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CcMmYK_color_model). Something like this will use more inks and less halftones, giving better results in some cases.

Or are you referring to other printing methods, say for example silk screening? There, you would definitely select a specific ink to use. It just depends on what your goals are.

I am a fountain pen convert myself, and use them almost exclusively these days for my algorithmic plotter art. This website is a fantastic resource that I’ve referred to countless times.

I’ve even written my take on why they’re such great devices for machine art: https://lostpixels.io/writings/fountain-pens-plotters

I too have gone with fountain pens as my every day pen. There's zero waste with a bottle of ink and a cartridge. I find that the variety of inks to be superior too.

Zed for example will start crawling your home directory and all children if you don’t have a project open. Documents, downloads, etc all uploaded.

As an artist the frustrating thing is I was never asked about whether two decades of my work could be used by for-profit companies to create tools that make my market harder.

That’s not cheating according to the definitions within this article that you’ve commented on.

Procreate is against gen AI on the grounded that it was unethically trained, and has become a vehicle of theft away from artists. They make a distinction between that and machine learning which is a very useful tools.

The AI-Assist tools (Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, etc) want you to be "all-in" and that's why so many people end up fighting them. A delicate balance is hard to achieve when you're discarding 80% of the suggestions for 20% of the productivity boosts.

I think the cracks that ultimately led me to quit corporate IT and pursue being an artist were first formed when leadership insisted that the entire company switch to Teams under the guise of saving $9 a month per user.

I've been using Javascript to generate frame-by-frame animations as SVGs. I composite these into big grids, then use a pen plotter to draw them with ink. Afterwards, I cut them into individual frames and do stop motion animations.

This is first attempt, working on another now: https://www.instagram.com/p/DGdORIKNQ5w/

There's even the concept of "Temporal Dead Zone" in Javascript already which describes the period of time where variables aren't accessible.

I’m on year two of winging it as a professional artist after close to 20 years as a software engineer. Mental health has never been better!

That’s the jamstack in a nutshell. I use DecapCMS to manage some client sites using that exact strategy. It’s always nice to rollback their content issues using git, it’s saved me many hours of headaches.

The only challenge is markdown is not a great store of complex component data IMO.

Author here. For the last 5 years, I've grown my artistic practice as an algorithmic artist. Besides code and math, a key tool I use is a pen plotter. I've developed my own methodology for using fountain pens with these machines and have laid out why and how to do it.

I have tried a number of different things, including selling individual artworks, licensing, commercial projects, and NFTs.

By far NFTs have been my bread and butter. Cringe, I know. But past all of the scams, grifters, and bullshit, there are actually collectors and artists doing amazing and innovative work with code-based art. A lot (but not all) of the bad vibes have found something new to flip a quick buck on, and what's left are passionate folks. Not to mention places like Sothebys, MoMA, Christies, etc.

Why does generative art marry up with the blockchain? Because you can store code on-chain, and you can use the transaction hash to seed a PRNG. This allows the artist to issue a set of unique artworks all generated from the same algorithm.

To see what I mean, check out www.artblocks.io and fxhash.xyz.

I bought a plotter and began using processing, then P5.JS to make things for it to draw. This was really just all for my own amusement and curiosity. Eventually I began selling the drawings I was making on Etsy, and gained some attention by posting regularly on Twitter under #plottertwitter. Now days, that still exists, but the action is also on Discord, Instagram, and Tiktok.

Once I had a little bit of a following, Casey Reas reached out about doing a group exhibition with Feral File that he was curating. That was a big moment. The release was very successful, and I saw that this path could be viable. It took me another year to fully commit to full time art though.

I think just immersing yourself and starting from the ground up is really important. Learn the basics, don't rush it, and educate yourself along the way. Study past plotter artists and pioneers like Vera Molnar and Harold Cohen. Find your style and iterate.

Yup, that's me! And congrats on getting a plotter. That's how I got started on this journey too... I heard about plotters for the first time from HN, bought one, then 6 years later it's my focus.

I decided to leave the world of engineering 1.5 years ago to pursue my passion as an artist.

Although my salary was a very good, competitive US rate at senior level, my artwork brought in more income for 2 years straight. I decided that it wasn't worth burning my candle at both ends any more, especially with a young child at home. Something had to give, and it was the job.

Now I still work like an engineer. I spend 4-5 hours a day programming and 2-3 hours managing my commitments and social media. My artwork is generative, so I use Javascript to build elaborate systems which yield visual artworks.

The stuff I do is much more diverse now. I just spent an hour totally leveling a table I built recently. I needed a custom table for my Axidraw pen plotter, which I use to draw generative artworks.

The pay is nothing, then a lot, then nothing. I'm white-knuckling it. At times it's very scary to not have a steady stream of income. But it allows me to be happy, and that's worth more than any amount of comfort.

You can make art with code and make a living from it. Start looking at generative and algorithmic artists for some inspiration. Owning one of these pen plotters (look at the axidraw and next draw) helps too.

I've been following this acquisition closely, as the new machines look great. There are some new homing features, along with upgraded servos. They appear to be in the assembly phase at the moment and are still targeting "spring".

Plotters fit so well with generative art. I highly recommend considering purchasing one! In fact, I learned about them on HN in 2018, and now using them to make art is my full time job.

I’m so glad you picked up on that! It was my goal to encourage folks to let their curiosity lead them through the experience. I was quite surprised seeing a few people sit down for 20-30 minutes straight just to use the app… my thought was the plotters would be the center of attention. Others even asked if I could release the app for them to use later, which I would love to do at some point.

Thank you! That was actually close to my first idea for this installation. I wrote some code to re-imagine a raster image as a vector, but I couldn't find a way to keep the detail while also keeping the drawing time below 10-15 minutes. That's how I arrived at the MIDI idea.

This and social media and almost always the worst possible representation of an artwork. Crunched, cropped and compressed into an inferior version of itself.

We’ve forgotten how to appreciate digital artworks.