It is simple, but all art starts somewhere. Beginning artists in traditional media normally produce simple (dare I say, bad) artwork their first few years. The important question is what they do next - how do they improve it, how do they make it their own unique expression, what do they do with the resulting work?
Simple is fine. Starting something new is good. Sharing it is how you get feedback and decide where to go next.
I am going to guess that it means there is a thirst for more artist submissions. There is not enough color in the links submitted these days - so the slightest bit of color grabs the attention.
I upvoted this because I want more that is in this vein, though I also don’t think its algorithm is worthless - it is good to start somewhere. (Personally, I find it ‘wrong’ that the Equifax article right now is first! Not that it is unworthy - just that I don’t care to read it.)
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.
Ok, I did this - this is great, there are some 'neat'/'inspiring' things there. A few other questions for you:
* How do I find more hashtags? I would have never found #creativecoding - is it known to be a community or is it just an ad hoc hashtag like #lostinthehashtags (which I just made up - but which has posts!) I guess what I'm saying is - I don't sense that these hashtags are a community - or are they?
* As 'neat'/'inspiring' as these are, they are mostly only (very small) images and (very short) clips. I ultimately can't see myself using Instagram or Twitter much because you just kind of skim and can't go deeper. They lack the 'hypertext'. (This is similarly to the OP's trouble with this post just being a simple 'box algorithm' - where do I go for more?
* Most of these look like art I've seen on t-shirts or album covers. Dating back even to the seventies. It is still beautiful and remarkable - but I can't help but wonder: Where is innovation happening in tech+art?
I will say that I do follow a lot of things happening in vaporwave - any idea what else is happening out there? Thank you for your time, HammadB. I am eager.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the demoscene yet, because that is literally the most prominent intersection of programming and art (both in the traditional and programming sense.)
Visit pouet.net and watch some demos for inspiration. Some of them have appeared on HN too:
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.
A bit of searching and I found a series of backgrounds called PROPAGANDA[0] generated entirely using FOSS software from the early days. They definitely take me back to a different time. That might be what you are thinking of.
Why? It’s easy to understand, and easy to appreciate. I agree that there’s not much content, but that also means there’s not much commitment to seeing it and enjoying it.
There is a great difference between people with a computer science background who try to generate art with programs and artist who try to use algorithms to generate art. There are many people of the first kind, but a few of the second kind. I advice you to study the works of people of the first kind, before you present your algorithms as art. For example, have a look at http://www.pstruycken.nl/EnWorkaImgList.html with work s of one such artist. (It is only about halfway the page that the first works made with computer programs appear.) Take notice of his colour use.
Can we please stop this "only artists are allowed to make art" nonsense? The lady of the lake didn't come out and bless special individuals as "artists" and the rest of us as foolish undeserving heathens.
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.
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.
Honestly, most things that are labeled "art" do not impact my thinking in any way, and even things like Picasso's Guernica looks (to me) like a five-year-old attempting to do art.
Look into some of Picasso’s earlier art, and his later art makes more sense. You can find drawing he did as a teenager which are fantastically perfect drawings. Seeing that made me understand him better—he didn’t want to be stuck in a tradition that he mastered as a child.
Yes definitely! The funny part is that the inspiration actually came from after a visit to an art exhibition where one of the paintings was just a few randomly colored boxes.
That sparked the whole, well if this is selling for x thousand $$$ maybe, we can generate something similar? I encourage you to play with it and see if you can somehow lock the colors so they are slightly more harmonized.
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.
The Code Golf StackExchange had a "make an image with all the colors" challenge (challenge spec'd 15-bit colors, a bunch of people did the full 24-bit, 16-million colors) that gave some pretty cool "art": https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/q/22144/176
The code behind them is a Python abomination (because it was really about the experiments and parameterized/randomized algos.
The biggest challenge for me was testing different theories and then being able to capture/remember the details of which algo variation produced which image. If my code were properly abstracted I could embed the parameters in the image; but currently, each image is only ever generated once, and it will never be re-generated.
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. :)
2-6 posts a day isn't very active. I'm active myself on it but besides one other user who posts and comments and a mod, it's practically a ghost town. I wish it was more active. It's the perfect sub for my GIF AI tool. https://gif.com.ai
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 96.7 ms ] threadSimple is fine. Starting something new is good. Sharing it is how you get feedback and decide where to go next.
I upvoted this because I want more that is in this vein, though I also don’t think its algorithm is worthless - it is good to start somewhere. (Personally, I find it ‘wrong’ that the Equifax article right now is first! Not that it is unworthy - just that I don’t care to read it.)
* How do I find more hashtags? I would have never found #creativecoding - is it known to be a community or is it just an ad hoc hashtag like #lostinthehashtags (which I just made up - but which has posts!) I guess what I'm saying is - I don't sense that these hashtags are a community - or are they?
* As 'neat'/'inspiring' as these are, they are mostly only (very small) images and (very short) clips. I ultimately can't see myself using Instagram or Twitter much because you just kind of skim and can't go deeper. They lack the 'hypertext'. (This is similarly to the OP's trouble with this post just being a simple 'box algorithm' - where do I go for more?
* Most of these look like art I've seen on t-shirts or album covers. Dating back even to the seventies. It is still beautiful and remarkable - but I can't help but wonder: Where is innovation happening in tech+art?
I will say that I do follow a lot of things happening in vaporwave - any idea what else is happening out there? Thank you for your time, HammadB. I am eager.
indeed, also look up "new media art". Also, obligatory https://www.openprocessing.org/
... and obligatory self-promotion - I work in the field on a sequencer for creative coding : https://ossia.io
Visit pouet.net and watch some demos for inspiration. Some of them have appeared on HN too:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11848097
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14164907
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_%28desktop_backgrou...
BUT on that same note, I've actually done something similar but hopefully a bit more organic here: http://mondaysoups.ca/daily/029.html
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.
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.
No, hard work at aesthetics, vision, and talent did...
That sparked the whole, well if this is selling for x thousand $$$ maybe, we can generate something similar? I encourage you to play with it and see if you can somehow lock the colors so they are slightly more harmonized.
EDIT: Oop, that was on the workshop.rs page you link at the end.
The code behind them is a Python abomination (because it was really about the experiments and parameterized/randomized algos.
The biggest challenge for me was testing different theories and then being able to capture/remember the details of which algo variation produced which image. If my code were properly abstracted I could embed the parameters in the image; but currently, each image is only ever generated once, and it will never be re-generated.
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. :)
Spirolaterals - easiest and simplest to start with, but can make beautiful structures
I suggest playing around in the chrome or ff console once inside if you've got JavaScript chops.
Some of the best :
https://imgur.com/uTZzuba https://imgur.com/qGgo9ik https://imgur.com/mPtuLkz https://imgur.com/kaNkhT8 https://imgur.com/FN1BgNx https://imgur.com/mBTSPcD https://imgur.com/8LdcFn5 https://imgur.com/vzttkax https://imgur.com/mHJd0hr
If there's a more active generative art forum I'd love to hear about it.
The crazy edge of machine art. It's a small community. There's no getting around it.
/r/generative is the superior
https://whitney.org/Exhibitions/MaryCorse