# generative art Generative art is art created in whole or in part with autonomous systems, commonly using algorithms, code, and procedural rules to produce visual or other artistic outputs. This is one page of public article previews, not the complete archive. Follow Next page to continue. Summaries are not the original full articles. ## A Review of Generative Art, Blogging, Work, and Side Projects in 2021 DevFeed: [A Review of Generative Art, Blogging, Work, and Side Projects in 2021]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Stanko Published: 2022-03-04T00:00:00Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Stanko Tadić]() Topics: [generative art](), [3D modeling](), [pixel](), [ibm]() Tags: [3d-modeling](), [clients](), [code](), [generative-art](), [ibm](), [pixel]() ### AI overview The author reviews 2021, covering generative art, reduced blogging activity, a redesign of the site from Jekyll to Zola, work with TED and IBM Research, and side projects including 3D modeling, electronics, and a pixel art frame. ### Source excerpt I'm super late with this post, but again, better late than never. I just couldn't find the inspiration and drive for writing last year. Generally, I lacked motivation and wasn't really productive. Generative Art # As for my art, 2021 wasn't as fruitful as the year before, but I did finish a couple of drawings. I'm still very much into it and lately I have found my drive again. AxiDraw, the pen plotter, continues to be my favorite purchase ever. Here are a couple of my plotted drawings from the last year: I wrote a separate post about the creative process behind the last drawing - Breaking down Krypton. Blog # Oh boy, did I neglect this blog last year. I wrote only four posts. But I really couldn't find the inspiration and will to write. Naturally, the number of visits dropped, and it was a little above 90K. The fact that adblockers now block Goat Analytics also had an impact on numbers. Luckily, now I have way more drive to write and keep the site updated. This February, the blog got a redesign that I planned for a long time. I wanted to add "Art" and "Projects" sections, but I kept redesigning it over and over again. Finally, when I decided to switch from JekyllI'll probably cover that in a another post. to Zola I was able to focus and finish the redesign. I did the design myself, using the thing or two I picked up from my designer colleagues. I released it as soon as I had something presentable. It was super bare bones and I'm still tweaking it and adding more personality, but nonetheless, I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned out. Fun fact, you can try my layout debug mode, I kept it in the production on purpose. Work # Last year was productive for my company as a whole. I had the pleasure of working with two clients, TED and IBM Research. In both cases, teams consisted of wonderful people and I feel proud that I was able to help them build and improve their digital products. Side projects # I tremendously enjoy these small pet projects. Generative art was a bi ## Breaking down Krypton DevFeed: [Breaking down Krypton]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Stanko Published: 2022-03-01T00:00:00Z Content type: article Language: en Sources: [Stanko Tadić]() Topics: [generative art](), [JavaScript](), [Tooling](), [browser]() Tags: [ascii](), [browser](), [diagram](), [generative-art](), [javascript](), [tooling]() ### AI overview This article breaks down how "Krypton," a generative artwork, was created. It discusses the author's JavaScript, p5.js, and custom tooling, including parameter controls, browser-history-based iteration, and the use of Voronoi diagrams to generate the drawing. ### Source excerpt This post was originally written for our internal technology newsletter at Work & Co. It is a little bit adapted for web, but the content is almost identical. About a year ago I made this plot. It is called "Krypton"Named by a dear friend and ex-colleague, and I'll try to break down how it was made. The wonderful thing about generative art is that code is just a tool. Thing that really matters is the actual artwork. In this specific case, code is straightforward and relatively simple. But it produces drawings that, in my opinion, look visually pleasing and have a nice sense of depth to them. Tooling # For all of my generative work, I use plain JavaScript, p5.js and a couple of custom-made tools. These tools are often crude, but they do exactly what I want so I don't mind. With each new project I keep adding more features and polishing them. At some point these tools may reach the point where they are presentable. If that happens I'll gladly share them with the world and open source everything. This is how the interface looks. I have an easy way to add controls for image parameters. These controls allow me to tweak drawings with a short feedback loop. Each time a parameter is changed, the image is redrawn and the parameter is reflected in the URL. This allows me to go through iterations using the browser history. To make navigation through the history easier, for each unique combination of parameters, I generate a random color and ASCII face. That is why my browser history looks like this :) Voronoi diagram # I use Voronoi diagrams a lot in my drawings. So much, that I'm sometimes trying to avoid them, to make sure I'm not limiting myself to a single algorithm. Voronoi diagram takes a collection of points, and then partitions a plane into polygons, where each polygon's edge is right in the middle of two points. It sounds like a lot, but if you study this image, it should become clearer. For a more detailed explanation you can check out the article on Wikipedia. Gener ## Libraries I use for generative art DevFeed: [Libraries I use for generative art]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Stanko Published: 2022-02-28T00:00:00Z Content type: article Language: en Sources: [Stanko Tadić]() Topics: [generative art](), [JavaScript](), [Randomizer](), [plotting](), [WebAssembly](), [Data structures]() Tags: [generative-art](), [javascript](), [plotting](), [programming](), [random](), [webassembly]() ### AI overview A curated list of JavaScript libraries used to create generative art, organized into categories including randomness and noise, geometry, vector fields, 3D, spatial data structures, Axidraw, and other tools. The author selected the libraries based partly on performance and describes their practical uses. ### Source excerpt This is going to be a very straight forward post. Just a list of JavaScript libraries I use in creating my generative art. And I really mean I use (and abuse) them. All of them are used in multiple of my drawings. I'll include couple of photos under the respective libraries. I finally settled with these libraries after trying several other alternatives for each. Performance was one of the key factors (especially as generative work can get brute-forcy sometimes). Huge thank you to all people who created and shared these wonderful tools!Also, as a rule of thumb, when you find a good library, you might want to check author's GitHub profile. In the most cases you are going to find more useful stuff there. That is exactly how I found some of these. Categories: Randomness and noise Geometry Vector fields 3D vector line engines Spatial data structures Axidraw Other Randomness and noise # seedrandom # In generative programming it is super important to be able to repeat the same output. As randomness is heavily involved, we need a way to repeat random values. That's where seedrandom steps in as an excellent seeded random number generator. random-words # For random number generator seeds, I like to use real words instead of randomly generated strings. This library is a simple dictionary of couple of thousands english words. simplex-noise # Fast implementation of Open Simplex noise. poisson-disk-sampling # When you need a random collections of points in space, Poisson sampling is a great tool. It gives us much more natural distribution than just using random values. Geometry # js-angusj-clipper # This library is a lifesaver. For all your polygon clipping and offseting needs. And it is super fast as it is implemented in WebAssembly. voronoi # Sometimes I think I use Voronoi diagrams too much in my work. Anyway, this library efficiently computes Voronoi diagrams. robust-point-in-polygon # For figuring out if the point is inside of the polygon. I tried a couple of other libraries ## I redesigned my site DevFeed: [I redesigned my site]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Monica Dinculescu Published: 2021-06-24T00:00:00Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Monica Dinculescu]() Topics: [Website](), [generative art](), [Web Components](), [HTML](), [JavaScript](), [Jekyll](), [GitHub Pages]() Tags: [components](), [generative-art](), [github-pages](), [html](), [ibm](), [javascript](), [jekyll]() ### AI overview The author explains why they redesigned their personal website: they were publishing fewer blog posts, wanted to showcase generative art, and replaced an outdated emoji custom element with a simpler implementation. The site continues to use Jekyll through GitHub Pages without a build step or minification. ### Source excerpt The last time I changed something big on my site was 3+ years ago. I was really into gradient rainbow text and IBM Plex Mono. It was a mild increment over whatever I had before, which was just a cleaned up and colourful version of Left from like 6 years prior. Anyway, what I'm saying is: this website had hella split ends. Here's the before and after: ↓ But also, why? I used to write a lot of blog posts, so my website was very blog focused. Originally the home page was just a listing of posts with some copy sprinkled in. As the pandemic hit, I started writing fewer and fewer posts, so having the one post of 2020 show up as a listing was ridiculous. On top of that, this year I started focusing a lot more on making generative art and I thought it was sad I wasn't showing that anywhere on the site! The beauty of generative art is that you can just keep generating it over and over again, and my site was a long white column of text. No more! git diff Ok so hear me out, this looks bad and that's because: it is bad. One cute thing my old site had was a custom element. You pressed it and got a rain of emoji. Brilliant. The problem is that I wrote that in like 2017, and used the well deceased v0 version of the web components spec. As a result, it had a gazillion dependencies (rip bower_components) and polyfills and ancient trash. 23906 lines of trash to be exact. Gooood riddance. The added 1580 lines are a bit of a bore: 100 of these are this post. another 300 is the HTML Ipsum from CSS tricks because I'm always scared I'm going to break a style on some ancient post. 300 lines of JavaScript for the header art that I don't minify because I'd like to be able to read this in the future to fix whatever mistakes past Monica made, and I don't have a build step set up. I'm still using the Jekyll that comes out of the box with GitHub pages and I am never looking back. the rest is actual code that I touched! There was some really horrifying markup on the project/talks/tem ## From JavaScript to paper: a linocut adventure DevFeed: [From JavaScript to paper: a linocut adventure]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Monica Dinculescu Published: 2021-04-28T00:00:00Z Content type: article Language: en Sources: [Monica Dinculescu]() Topics: [generative art](), [JavaScript]() Tags: [art](), [generative-art](), [javascript](), [paper]() ### AI overview The author describes creating generative art inspired by tree rings and translating the result into a paper linocut. The process combines observations about how tree rings record a tree's history with JavaScript-generated patterns and physical carving. ### Source excerpt One of my favourite kinds of art to make involves taking nature and seeing it as simple shapes. Buildings are cubes, flowers are circles, hills are curves. Shells are spirals. Tree rings are weird circle bois, and they are some of the best. I've wanted to make a generative art of a tree ring for a long time, but everything I made kept sucking (scroll to the bottom if you don't believe me. Shit was bad bad). I finally made something I like, I thought it might be neat to write a little bit about The Process™, since it involves both JavaScript and murderous little knives. Let's talk trees My friend Kyle has a ranch, and in the summer he lets his friends fulfill the burned out millenial dream of having no cell signal and sleeping in a tent. He has infinitely many trees, and sometimes he lets me do a craft with some of the trees he chops down. I'm "currently" (read: I started last year and I'll probably finish in 2026) making a side table. I also made these coasters: Trees are rad, yo. Young trees have very regular and evenly spaced rings because much like human children, they haven't had a lot of life to live. However, as trees get older, they get jobs they don't like, have to start making dinner every night, start having back pains from literally just being trees and their rings get wonkier. Here is what I'm making my table from: Trees can grow unevenly because of droughts or insects or capitalism building shit where it shouldn't. They get visible scars from forest fires. You can map the entire life of a tree (and tbh, of everything that was happening around the tree) by looking at its cross section. There's something called a ghost forest that indicates at some point, something happened (like an earthquake), which caused salt water to rise, killing all the trees that lived there. Here's a photo (ref) of a knotty tree (heh heh) that has fire scars: So you know, if you want a tree ring, you can't just draw some concentric circles and call it a day. Generate some tree r ## Week 10: Generative Art, Linocuts, and Personal Updates DevFeed: [Week 10: Generative Art, Linocuts, and Personal Updates]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Monica Dinculescu Published: 2021-03-08T00:00:00Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Monica Dinculescu]() Topics: [generative art](), [meetings](), [Instagram]() Tags: [generative-art](), [hobby](), [instagram]() ### AI overview A personal weekly update covering pandemic fatigue, experiments with Barnsley fern generative art, an exploration of linocut printing, caring for a puppy, reading, television, and finding a weekly drawing prompt. ### Source excerpt I took the whole week off because I was very tired of life. It's the year anniversary of the last time the world was normal and it's bringing me down. Between covid and immigration delays it's looking very 50/50 on whether I can attend my closest cousin's wedding this fall in Romania, and I'm beyond gutted at the thought of missing it. All I can do about it is wait, and that's making the pandemic fatigue worse by a thousand. I made two prints of Barnsley ferns. They looked cool in the end, but they were a bit of a struggle. Barsnley ferns are these super popular fractals that (spoilers) look like ferns, but honestly, fractals in general are not my favourite. These ones come out of 4 equations and 6 parameters which sounds like would open a whole world of possibilities, but it turns out most combinations of values produce absolute trash. Which is fine, but that's not my style of generative art. Instead, I spent all my random numbers in trying to paint the ferns like furry brush strokes and letters I don't think anyone other than me appreciates that 😅. I got deep into linocuts. I've been trying to figure out how to make the things that come out of a computer also come out of my hands, and hand prints can definitely be that thing. Doing the linocut itself is my favourite kind of relaxing; it keeps my hands busy with stabbing squishy things (also see: that time i picked up felting in meetings). I can't believe I haven't tried it before. Also, Frances says that the linocuts I've been doing look a lot like the kind of carving I used to do with my pottery, which is great news because that means I have a *~style~*. As usual, I am undeservedly lucky: one of my cousins, Raluca Iancu is an enormously talented printmaker and professor of printmaking, so I got to text her with questions. I don't think everyone who starts up with a hobby can text a professional in that area and be like "hello I bought 10$ tools and some linoleum, please hold my feelings with your 10+ years of dom ## Week 8: Selling Generative Art Prints and Running an Online Store DevFeed: [Week 8: Selling Generative Art Prints and Running an Online Store]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Monica Dinculescu Published: 2021-02-27T00:00:00Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Monica Dinculescu]() Topics: [generative art](), [Software](), [stripe](), [OAuth](), [JavaScript]() Tags: [generative-art](), [javascript](), [oauth](), [software](), [stripe]() ### AI overview A personal weekly reflection about opening an online store for generative art prints, selling out of two kinds of prints, and using BigCartel, Stripe, and PirateShip for ecommerce and shipping. It also briefly covers fitness challenges and painting on an iPad. ### Source excerpt This week was entirely consumed by the fact that I opened an online store to sell generative "art" prints. Art is in quotations here because I have a deeply unhealthy relationship with calling anything I do art, or myself an artist, but we don't have time to for a therapy session right now. It went really great. I sold out of 2 kinds of prints! People who weren't just my friends put it orders! My first customer ever was Mariko, which is absurd because she should've gotten a free print without even asking based on the kilograms of gacha she's brought me from Japan, but of course she was also the first one to see the tweet about the store because that's just the kind of friend she is. (this paragraph is really niche and boring, skip it). Every once in a while I use a software that blows my fucking mind. E-commerce is generally NOT this experience btw, because it's all integrations that are 90% magic and 10% wonky af. Like, my store is a BigCartel store (big fan!), but the site itself is a bit flaky so sometimes Things Will Happen™ (like pages won't redirect, the theme editor will just panic, javascript is a prison). Stripe was like 95% magic and 5% "the oauth flow didn't redirect well For Reasons™ so I had to do it twice". I don't even know who was at fault there. Anyway, PirateShip is a thing that prints USPS labels and it was 120% magic. People wrote their addresses in their orders in my store; I clicked a single button on the PirateShip site, which imported those addresses, made shipping labels, made customs forms for the international orders, formatted all the labels for my label printer to print AND emailed all the customers their tracking numbers. And charged me 0 extra dollars. PirateShip, I don't know how you make your money but you are an absolute gem and I love you. The post office gentleman even commented on how together my shit was. Frances and I had a FitBit active minutes challenge and I WON by like 32 minutes (aka extremely close). Zach was also in some ## Week 6 DevFeed: [Week 6]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Monica Dinculescu Published: 2021-02-08T00:00:00Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Monica Dinculescu]() Topics: [generative art](), [App](), [codex]() Tags: [app](), [codex](), [generative](), [generative-art]() ### AI overview A personal Week 6 update covering media commentary, Britney Spears's conservatorship, generative art and self-doubt, a trip to Arizona, and trying geocaching. ### Source excerpt I skipped week 5 because all I did in the panna cotta was watch 3 seasons of "how to get away with murder". It's a terrible show and I'm not ashamed of it. What is up with that star codex thing? I can't believe there was a cult of assholes in tech I didn't know about. I'm obviously not surprised they existed, there's an asshole under every rock in tech; I'm just surprised I didn't know about it. I'm a person in the know! I have an invite to Dispo! I watched the #freebritney documentary and I think that a) the concept of a conservatorship for a grown ass 40 year old woman is fucked and b) her dad being a mysoginistic asshole is 80% of the reason she's on one. Nobody put Kanye in a corner when he was going bonkers; we let him run for president and bought his shitty 20 minute long album to make fun of it and talked about how he prolly needs to take his meds but oh well, famous people amirite. But if a woman goes a bit bonkers and in the process shaves her head (we all know women aren't allowed to shave their heads), then suddenly she needs to be in a legal monetary prison for life? Rich people waste their money ALL the time, why is she the different one? Makes you think. I also think it's the cherry on the cake that because her dad is "managing" her estate she is essentially paying both for her lawyers to try to help her, and for the opposing lawyers to try to screw her. I've been working on a lot of generative art. This is good, because I'm making things and I want to open a store so people can put my things on their walls, but bad because when I make art and keep looking at it I end up violently hating it, and that spirals out of control into a "everything I do is basic and derivative" mood which tbh makes me feel like shit. I had a nice chat with @mrmrs who is 100x more talented than me but feels similarly about his art sometimes, so I felt very seen. We drove to Arizona this weekend. We are still doing nothing but now it's nothing around cactuses and the desert. I' ## A 2020 Review of Generative Art, Blogging, Analytics, and Working From Home DevFeed: [A 2020 Review of Generative Art, Blogging, Analytics, and Working From Home]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Stanko Published: 2021-02-01T00:00:00Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Stanko Tadić]() Topics: [generative art](), [Google Analytics](), [Open Source]() Tags: [art](), [generative-art](), [google-analytics](), [instagram](), [macos](), [monitor](), [open-source](), [windows](), [working-from-home]() ### AI overview A personal review of 2020 covering the author's progress in generative art and pen plotting, changes from Google Analytics to GoatCounter, blog traffic and redirects, and working from home. ### Source excerpt 2020 was a hard one. I started writing this post in December, but I couldn't make myself finish it. The whole situation with COVID made me anxious at times and I didn't really have motivation for my side projects including this blog. But I won't focus on bad things, everyone had a tough year, so let's try to stay positive. Generative Art # I had one huge positive this year - I got into generative art. My fiance likes to say that I woke up on the first on January and started drawing some triangles. Triangles were super naive, but I'm super happy with my progress and these are some of my creations (all pen plotted): Special thanks to Vladimir Mitrović who was the only person I knew doing generative art. When I reached out, he selflessly helped me start with the whole thing. Be sure to visit his website as he is doing amazing stuff. I already wrote about my generative work a little, but I will create a separate site section for my artwork. Meanwhile, you can see the most of my work on Instagram. I'm super thrilled that people like my art enough to hang it on their walls. All of my work is done with pen plotting in mind. I'm using AxiDraw SE/A3 by Evil Mad Scientist and I love everything about this machine. Pen plotting is something that I want to write more about in the future. Blog # This year I neglected the blog a little. Mostly because I was focused on generative stuff, and I was doing that instead of writing posts. The pandemic didn't help either. I removed Google Analytics in favor of GoatCounter, a simple open source web analytics which are not tracking my readers. Even without writing much, I had more visits than in 2020. But you can see the drop in May, about the same time I removed Google Analytics. Coincidence or not, I can't say. The second drop happened in early December, as I moved posts under /blog prefix but screwed up the redirections. I can only hope search engines won't derank me too much because of that. People are still not sticking around after re ## Metaballs DevFeed: [Metaballs]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Stanko Published: 2020-02-06T00:00:00Z Content type: article Language: en Sources: [Stanko Tadić]() Topics: [generative art](), [creative coding](), [Graphics](), [coding](), [Algorithm](), [implementation](), [render]() Tags: [algorithm](), [art](), [coding](), [computer-graphics](), [creative-coding](), [exploration](), [generative](), [generative-art](), [graphics](), [implementation](), [projects](), [render]() ### AI overview A project write-up about creating Metaballs, a generative art project that combines spheres into organic shapes, slices them, and renders their outlines as vector files. The author describes exploring metaballs, learning about marching cubes and marching squares, using an existing solution, and building tooling for immediate visual feedback. ### Source excerpt I'm all about generative art these days. Today, I present you Metaballs, my latest creation. It is one of those projects that I visualized in my head and managed to pull it off exactly how I imagined it. Somehow I came up with an idea to generate spheres, smoothly merge them to get organic looking shapes, which then I would slice up and render the outlines.I ordered a pen plotter and that is the reason I'm focused on producing vector files. One of the final images looks like this (click on it to see more): Exploration # Not sure how I started thinking about slicing these blobby objects, but I had a clear vision of what I wanted to achieve. At this point I had no idea they are called metaballs. I asked on our company's #tech-creative-coding channel, if anyone is familiar with making something like this, and my colleagues pointed out the term metaballs and marching cubes algorithm. Definition # Wikipedia defines metaballs as: In computer graphics, metaballs are organic-looking n-dimensional isosurfaces, characterised by their ability to meld together when in close proximity to create single, contiguous objects. Which makes them perfect for what I had in mind - generating organic looking blobs. Implementation # The first try # Initially I wanted to implement it myself, but I didn't really know where to start. I had an idea to hack it by overlapping two spheres and calculate a curve between them. By rotating this curve, I would create a tube and merge everything together. It looks ok-ish for two spheres, but I wasn't completely satisfied. And it was impossible do it for more than two spheres. So I gave up early on this idea. Marching on # So I went back to the marching cubes algorithm. After some research I found a wonderful post, which very thoroughly explains implementation of marching squares.Marching squares are the same algorithm as marching cubes, but in 2D. Now I understood how algorithm works, but I gave up on implementing it myself. I was more interested in bei ## Neon, a glowy vector field DevFeed: [Neon, a glowy vector field]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Stanko Published: 2020-01-22T00:00:00Z Content type: article Language: en Sources: [Stanko Tadić]() Topics: [generative art](), [Code](), [Open Source](), [SVG]() Tags: [code](), [core](), [experiment](), [generative-art](), [open-source](), [project](), [svg]() ### AI overview The article explains Neon, an open-source generative art project that creates glowing lines from randomly generated vector fields. It describes how nearby vectors influence each successive point and how the resulting points are rendered as Bézier curves. ### Source excerpt Recently I started playing with generative art. I'm new to the whole thing and I'm absolutely enjoying it. Today I want to show you the first generative art project I'm satisfied with. It is called Neon and you can check it out here or by clicking on the image below. I will try to explain in detail how Neon works, however this won't be a coding tutorial. But it is an open source project, and code is available here. My first attempts # These were very simple and I was just exploring various concepts and tools: Triangles Perlin noise grid Untitled Flow I'm sharing these to show that my initial work was pretty humble. The point is - don't be afraid to experiment with things like this. For me, it was easier than I thought it would be, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Vector fields # After watching Vladimir's talk about his Aesthetic Engine 2, I started experimenting with vector fields. This is an example of one randomly generated vector field: Think of it like it is an air or water flow. If this field was a river and you drop a leaf in it, these forces will take it and carry it around. If we plot the movement of the leaf, we'll get a line. If we draw a lot of these lines, we will visualize the flow of the field. That is the core concept I used with Neon. But for a start let's see how can we draw a single line. Drawing a line # To draw a line, we'll select a random point for its start (we are dropping a leaf). We need to define which vectors are applying "force" to our point. Let's use radial search radius of 1.5 times grid item size. We'll select only vectors that start in this area (nine in this specific scenario). For each one we will calculate a new force vector with the same direction, but with intensity reciprocal to its distance from the point. Meaning that the closer the vector is to the point, it will apply more force to it. Adding up all of these newly calculated force vectors will give us a single vector pointing where our next point should be. Let's draw the