Generative Art

[annis]

While I've been getting some Greek in, for the last few months I've spent more of my spare time churning out software. My programming language of choice is Common Lisp — to technical people that will indicate I have an antiquarian taste in programming languages, too.

In any case, I've recently been working on a library to make producing SVG, an XML graphics format, nicer. Last week I got sick of thinking about alpha masks and marker tags and decided to see if I could convert some NodeBox examples into acceptable SVG. They turned out better than I had reason to expect.

"Generative art" is just a high-brow way of saying I've generated the images algorithmically, both using a random walk process. Here are two of the first algorithm, which I translated fairly faithfully (click for larger — they're PNG files because Picassa doesn't accept SVG at the moment):



When I got to the tendrils algorithm, though, I made a few changes which result in images that look somewhat more organic. They creeped out one of my coworkers:



For any of the random walk generators you're at the mercy of your pseudo-random number generator. Sometimes the nodes march right out of the viewing window — pretty dull. These are just a few that turned out OK.

[Bert]

Most of what you wrote is techno bable to me but I do understand the word -Random-. These pictures look almost to organized to be random.
Neat.

[Lucus Eques]

Very organic! Truly lovely, and worth studying for organic geochemists.

[annis]

These pictures look almost to organized to be random.

Well, the randomness is highly constrained. It's the mix of randomness and rules that give the best results.

[bedwere]

Well, the randomness is highly constrained. It's the mix of randomness and rules that give the best results.

Sorry, I couldn't resist quoting the Bard:

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.

[edonnelly]

These are very cool (especially the second set) and remind me a little of the "light painting" I used to like to do with a flashlight, a dark room and a very long exposure on the camera. (Of course those didn't have the cross-lines that you can see nicely when these are zoomed up and the patterns were never quite as pleasing).