Blog: #generative-art

As schoolwork starts to wind down, I’m finally starting to make progress on the creativity tools and HCI explorations I talked about back in September. This week I’ve also realized that graphical tools for art and design are what I want to focus most on. (I do still intend to explore textual interfaces, but they’re on the backburner for now.)

In the spirit of working in public, then, Cirque is a small WIP web app I’m building for making patterns via circle packing:

This is very much a rough initial MVP. You can tweak some settings, generate new patterns using a simple circle-packing algorithm, and export SVG (with the turbulence/displacement filters enabled by default), but that’s it. Some of the features I’m planning to build next:

• Replace the settings text box with, you know, good UI (I’m also excited to explore color picker design here)
• Add the ability to manually place both circles and anticircles (so artists are able to create intentional negative space)
• Add a way to programmatically set the circle colors (probably via something like shaders, so you could say all circles smaller than a certain size get one color and the rest get another, or circle color is dependent on position or something else)

I’ve also thought about moving the circle packing code from JavaScript to Rust, to be able to play around with WebAssembly, but it seems overkill, at least at this point. (Instead I think I’ll plan to Rust and WebAssembly on the graphical type design tool I want to build.)

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• Jim Nielsen on cheating entropy with native web tech — the simplicity here speaks to me
• Chris Coyier on simple and boring web work — same kind of thing, and the minimalist in me eats this stuff up (though I think certain types of apps do warrant using the more complicated frameworks)
• Anne-Laure Le Cunff on Umberto Eco’s antilibrary idea — yes, yes, this ten times over
• Robert Hodgin’s Meander project — lovely work
• Brian Eno on forward momentum in creativity — this seems wise to me and rings true to my own experience

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• Jim Butcher on scenes and sequels — good writing advice
• Justin E. H. Smith on whether birds are dinosaurs — which is apparently a somewhat heated debate? (I had no idea)
• A raycasting engine made in Factorio — one of the wonders of the Internet
• Tyler Hobbs on flow fields in generative art — hoping to use this technique someday
• FAQs on protecting yourself from Covid aerosol transmission — recommended

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Playing around with generative orthogonal cubes, just for fun (which probably means I’m avoiding my actual schoolwork, now that I think about it):

I wrote a Python script to generate the cubes as SVG polygons and then went through my usual filter/texture routine.

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New artwork: Before the World Was II.

It’s (in my opinion) a much better execution of Before the World Was, which used a quick DrawBot script that didn’t pay much attention to placement.

This time, working off the Generative Artistry circle packing tutorial, I wrote a Python script that places all the circles so there’s no overlap, then outputs an SVG with the turbulence/displacement filters I wrote about not too long ago.

For comparison (original on the left):

I also went with a slightly less saturated background in this new version, and I put a little bit of texture on the circles themselves to make it feel slightly more painterly.

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• A Gentle Intro to Assembly with Rust — really liked this (I’m a sucker for assembly, even though I never actually use it) (though I need to find a way to change that)
• WindowSwap — see the view out people’s windows around the world
• Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing newsletter — how I found WindowSwap
• Generative Artistry tutorials — generative art tutorials on things like circle packing
• ZIL and the Z-Machine — fascinating technical look at Infocom’s engine for Zork

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