I chose George Nees's work "Texture of Gravel" or "Schottertextur"  where he wrote a program in ALGOL and introduced random variables in the program causing orderly cubes to fall into a more chaotic arrangement. Nees's interest in the relationship between order and disorder is clearly portrayed here in this work. This work inspires me because I am interested in chaos within order/ order within chaos in a system and how that looks or feels. This works effective complexity is that it is simple, easy to describe and predict through the program in which he wrote for it. Running it multiple times would give it different outcomes but all predictably achieve the same general composition of the orderly squares descending into disorder.

 

 

link to github

Robbie Barrat created house plant generated sketches using their electrical signals and an arduino. I like how it references nature and generates a aesthetic, unique, and simple sketch. After you attach the electrodes on the leaves, you use voltage readers to read/graph the voltage. "Use template.pde as a base program for your artwork; while in the draw loop, you can get the value of the plant anytime through the variable plantValue (which is a float)." There isn't enough examples of this piece to understand the effective complexity. I think that it is has balanced disorder from the uniqueness of the plants, and I assume that other plants will have vaguely related looking sketches based on the same algorithm.

Quantum Fluctuations by Markos Kay is a generative abstract animation created through a simulation of quantum physical interactions when protons collide. It's an intricate visualization of interactions that are usually observed through very indirect means.

I love how the work is clearly digital, comfortable with allowing the viewer to see digital artifacts, but at the same time, the actions going on are so complex and dynamic that the underlying logic seems very real and tangible.

I'm guessing Kay achieves the piece by tying various types of animations to different events in the particle simulation, and then movement of the particles shapes those animations. He clearly cares a lot about the physical phenomena underlying the visual experience, so the generative algorithm is probably determined heavily by the particle simulation.

Kay creates effective complexity by devising extremely diverse animations to occur at different particle events, then the randomness of the simulation acting on the order of the chosen animations creates the complexity.

http://www.mrkism.com/quantum.html

AARON

AARON is an AI developed by Harold Cohen to create original paintings. Cohen has been developing the same algorithm since 1973. There's a lot of things I find fascinating about this project. The algorithm is really an evolving thing, with a lot of complex parts. It's a little difficult to find information, but it seems that AARON has some simple imperative rules as well as some learning functions. It's amazing how much the algorithm has changed since its inception. At first, it just did line drawings, then color, then more and more abstract shapes. Its most recent works look like a different artist than the early works:

 

 

 

 

 

AARON's paintings, I think, are actually more simple than many generative algorithms, and that's something that I find impressive. They are concise.

Harold Cohen has some articles he's written about AARON on his website: http://www.aaronshome.com/aaron/index.html

Here's a video of one of AARON's older paintings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PA-XApZkso

Inigo Quilez's Happy Jumping (2019) is an incredible project for a few reasons. The project itself is a raymarched shader of a cute character jumping around on a bouncy floor in a surreal landscape. One can easily talk about the impressive technical skill behind this piece. The jumping is believable, the floor bounce is wonderful. What I find admirable about this piece is how whimsical the work is, given the context of the piece. ShaderToy is a host to many technically skilled individuals, a few of which have masters and PhDs in math or physics. This piece breaks a mold of the usual geometric study and invites silliness to an otherwise mathematically focused group. The algorithm behind this piece are available for all to see, but the main backbone is the raymarching algorithm, and movement is done with noise. Inigo has proven that he can easily do photorealism, but lately his sensibility from has time at Pixar has been prevalent in his work. Though infinitely generated, the piece will always be the happy creature jumping along.

View the project in realtime!

 

This week I chose to focus on Leonardo Solaas's work shown at "La emergencia de la imagen" ("The Emergency of Image"), the final show for the Production Marathon Lab 2016 at the Spain Cultural Center in Buenos Aires. Working together with a group of 16 participants, the artist used generative systems to create random and minuscule porcelain sculptures, each with a unique and recognizable body, personality, and/or function. I couldn't find information on whether or not these sculptures were 3D printed or hand-modeled after being generatively designed, but either way I love how a mass society of small beings can be produced with technology.

Click the images below to go to his portfolio.

Procedural Lake Village by Anastasia Opara, 2016

This is an image featuring a series of lake houses that have been generated by a procedure "all the way from silhouette to final texturing*"

Seeing this blew my mind, in retrospect it makes sense that in movies and video games objects would have some generative component to their creation, but I had really never considered this to be something that could be done with so much, I suppose, artistry.

These generated houses have such a beautiful, whimsical, and hand touched and imagined form, texture, and feel. Realizing that this kind of world building can take place in a generative programmed structure is eye opening. The algorithm itself likely works as a generative 3D model with specific constraints and elements such as window, door, walls, roof etc that are matched with specific types of (also generated) textures. This all balances the order and disorder beautifully. The creators artistic sensibly comes through in the style of the houses/the constraints and textures and the natural forms that this algorithm follows.

Link to work