Category: Generative Art

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Generative Art

Bitfastness 2

Data-driven programming allows a lot of the work to be moved from the code to support files. This makes programs easier to maintain and re-implement, and so more bitfast. Lispers claim Lisp is a file-format as well as a language (S-Expressions), and ontologies are often expressed in Prolog. A language that is a way of structuring data might be ideal.
Pseudocode listings, or implementations in languages simple enough to read as pseudocode (Lua) would also be robust. Harold Cohen’s verbal descriptions of AARON’s production systems would allow re-implementation in any programming language, but some accuracy would be lost without the supporting data.

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Generative Art

Screensavers

Screensavers are contemporary cabinet art, with all the negative associations that brings. But if they give the viewer work to do they need not necessarily be kitsch.

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Generative Art

Chordinator

Colour scheme generation by software seems to be as random as everything else (see Tim Head’s work). Colour theories are cultural products and random colour is no exception. For random colour to be interesting the viewer must either see some intention into the work, or enjoy exercising their taste unchallenged. A program that works with colour in a directed way would be more interesting.
This program would colour chords to aesthetically satisfy a set of technical or referential demands, making colour schemes that have a relationship to external conditions (visually referential, expressive, social) using a set of discrete colour spaces, a colour ontology, an emotional ontology, a compositional ontology, a relational slipnet and a set of referential palettes (natural colours, city colours, clothes colours, human colours, art colours).
Valence the ontologies and start building, weigh colour proportions and relations, vary colours and backtrack to get things right for each set of conditions. Colour graphical microdomains with the colours. Start 1D (stripes) then go to 2D.

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Generative Art

Graphical Microdomains

High Modernist art is full of graphical microdomains. Its grids, stripes, spots and simple geometries are much easier for programs to work on than an impressionist canvas and allow useful activity to be demonstrated without having to build a general visual parser first. Stripes are particularly useful as they are effectively one-dimensional, making relationships between each element much simpler for a program to manage.

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Generative Art

Bushomatics

VCS games were produced under the Cold War, and later under Reaganomics. What would the same games look like if they were produced under The War On Terror?

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Generative Art

Bitfastness

Programming in Perl or Java is the conservational equivalent of painting with household gloss. For software, conservation means being able to run the program. Targeting specific systems or fashionable languages (Windows XP or Perl) will not immediately cause problems beyond limiting distribution, but when the targeted hardware starts breaking and the system or language used is no longer current or even maintained, work is left unexhibitable.
In the worst case, decades from now, software artworks will be completely incompatible with contemporary systems and they will have to be remade from source code. The language used should therefore have shown longevity and be easy to re-implement. To make it suitable for programming in the first place, the language should be expressive and should be Turing complete.
The oldest languages still in widespread use are FORTRAN, Lisp and COBOL. Lisp is the most general-purpose language of the three, but the current Lisp standard (Common Lisp) is too complex to be easily re-implemented. There is however a more lightweight version of Lisp available called Scheme. Scheme is easy to implement yet powerful enough to use for real-world programming. Scheme interpreters and compilers are available for most operating systems, and a Java-cross compiler (KAWA) is also available.
Archival quality (“bitfast”) code should use well-commented and well-structured Scheme, with LIDL (a portable library suite) and a CLOS-like (object-oriented) library if required. Graphical and other interfaces should be written as needed, kept as simple as possible, and thoroughly documented. The code, its documentation, the libraries, the language standard and sample output in a raw format (also documented) should be provided on archival CD. These measures will make software art conservation a more realistic prospect than it is for much currently produced work.
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Generative Art

Is It Hot In Here Or Is It Just Me?

The role Rosalind Picard ascribes to emotion in limiting search in “Affective Computing” is played by ‘temperature’ in Douglas Hofstadter’s programs from “Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies”.

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Generative Art

Figurine/Groundhog/Figment

Most AI art producers begin from a model of child art.
Children’s art is knowledge-based, figure based, and emergent (unplanned).
In contrast, an “adult” (professional) figurative artist is observation-based, balances positive and negative space, and works on the composition before the content of the work.
A program that worked in this way would pre-scan the picture plane and tag its elements (pixels or pre-generated polygons) with relational information:
• close to the edge, centre, top, bottom, left, right
• on the edge of the picture plane
• proximity to other elements
• relative size
• formal qualities (jagged, smooth, triangular, square)
The next stage of the program can then work with a richer environment.
Embody compositional principles: golden sections, horizontal/vertical/diagonal, ground/sky line, etc.
Valence the plane, valence the compositional principles, then build the composition.
Give equal weight to figure and ground, to positive and negative space.
This is a technical exercise, but figure/ground relations are important in art. The boundary or distribution of shapes must be aesthetically interesting in some extra-aesthetic way. This sounds like “No Logo” or philosophy/business theory.
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Generative Art

Simulated Paint Pours

• Screensaver?
• Algorithmically simulate paint pours.
• Flow & topography.