Generative art, creative coding, procedural design

Examples of praxis
- Landscapes
Praxis yourself why don’t you?
I praxis myself
References

Those names in order of decreasing highbrowness and increasing financial viability.

Either way, it means, more or less, “using algorithms to make pretty things instead of your hands” which I like to think about as designing artists as an artform. If you’ve seen a CGI film in the last 20 years, you’ve seen techniques that approach this. Flocking, L-systems, agents, evolutionary systems, a-life, pattern formation and so on. My interest reflects my High Art, pontifical sensibility. But video games are totes sick too.

Missing: prehistory of such art, early software art and pre-computer algorithmic art. Check out a better source such as Neil Jenkins’ excellent garden of forking paths for some pointers.

Examples of praxis

Discretization in Geometry and Dynamics motivates sweet mathematical graphics as a side effect See the various sub-projects. There are also image collections:
- Films, including The discrete charm of geometry
- Discretization image gallery
Bridges
The goal of the Bridges Organization is to foster research, practice, and new interest in mathematical connections to art, music, architecture, education and culture.
The American Mathematical Society Math Imagery Gallery
populist procedural design is lead by the computer games people, e.g. the procedural design reddit.
the 1998tastic generativeart.com and its attendant 1999tastic generative art forum
make art not apps
abandoned art by zenbullets
postspectacular
precious forever
Creative applications
icarus
Daniel Jones
Jonathan McCabe
Ollie Bown
Bob Jarvis
runme is also an echo from another time:
…a software art repository, launched in January 2003. It is an open, moderated database to which people are welcome to submit projects they consider to be interesting examples of software art.
(mostly) textual state of the art: emily short
Data is nature
Mitchell Whitelaw and his amazing teeming void

Landscapes

Praxis yourself why don’t you?

I praxis myself

pattern machine, my live electronic AV ensemble (see also my soundcloud)
feral, my generative iphone app for imaginary mechanicotropical jungles
synestizer

Maybe I should also do generative art with neural networks.

References

Boden, Margaret A., and Ernest A. Edmonds. 2009. “What Is Generative Art?” Digital Creativity 20 (1-2): 21–46.

Boulanger-Lewandowski, Nicolas, Yoshua Bengio, and Pascal Vincent. 2012. “Modeling Temporal Dependencies in High-Dimensional Sequences: Application to Polyphonic Music Generation and Transcription.” In 29th International Conference on Machine Learning.

Bown, Oliver. 2009. Ecosystem Models for Real-Time Generative Music: A Methodology and Framework. Ann Arbor, MI: MPublishing, University of Michigan Library.

———. 2011. “Experiments in Modular Design for the Creative Composition of Live Algorithms.” Computer Music Journal 35 (3): 73–85.

Brown, Paul. 2003. “Generative Computation and the Arts.” Digital Creativity 14 (1): 1–2.

Ha, David, Andrew Dai, and Quoc V. Le. 2016. “HyperNetworks.” arXiv:1609.09106 [Cs], September.

Holtzman, S. R. 1981. “Using Generative Grammars for Music Composition.” Computer Music Journal 5 (1): 51–64.

Lehman, Joel. 2007. “Evolution Through the Search for Novelty.”

Lehman, Joel, Jonathan Gordon, Shawn Jain, Kamal Ndousse, Cathy Yeh, and Kenneth O. Stanley. 2022. “Evolution Through Large Models.” arXiv.

Lomas, Andy. 2014. “Cellular Forms: An Artistic Exploration of Morphogenesis.” In SIGGRAPH Studio, 1–1. ACM Press.

Monro, Gordon. 2009. “Emergence and Generative Art.” Leonardo 42 (5): 476–77.

Rohrmeier, M. 2011. “Towards a Generative Syntax of Tonal Harmony.” Journal of Mathematics and Music 5 (1): 35–53.

Sorensen, Andrew, and Henry Gardner. 2010. “Programming with Time: Cyber-Physical Programming with Impromptu.” In ACM Sigplan Notices, 45:822. ACM Press.

Steedman, Mark J. 1984. “A Generative Grammar for Jazz Chord Sequences.” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2 (1): 52–77.

Whitelaw, Mitchell. 2005. “System Stories and Model Worlds: A Critical Approach to Generative Art.” Readme 100: 135–54.

———. 2006. Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life. The MIT Press.

———. 2010. “Space Filling And Self-Constraint: Critical Case Studies in Generative Design.” Architectural Theory Review 15 (2): 157–65.

Whitelaw, Mitchell, Mark Guglielmetti, and Troy Innocent. 2009. “Strange Ontologies in Digital Culture.” Computers in Entertainment (CIE) 7 (1): 4.

Zhang, Jenny, Joel Lehman, Kenneth Stanley, and Jeff Clune. 2023. “OMNI: Open-Endedness via Models of Human Notions of Interestingness.” arXiv.