Brian Pt.1

Conception

I was driving home after work on a Friday while listening to Jazz. I had only gotten 4 hours of sleep the night before and made the sensible decision to skip lunch and instead drink 5 cups of coffee. In my delirious state the fast and violent sounds forced images of abstract paintings into my mind. I wanted to be surrounded in a womb of abstract paintings.

Execution

I don’t have the time, attention span, or spare cash to learn how to paint so why can’t this be a technical problem. I will train an AI to do it for me. I need to build 3 things.

• A programmable canvas that can read and write paintings in the form of brush movements.
• An AI that will formulate and iterate batches of commands for the canvas based on settings and a genetic algorithm.
• A way to provide feedback to the AI as to what is a pass or fail and group artwork.

Plus some self-imposed restrictions:

• Canvases are 400px by 300px
• Components in the canvas can be strokes or irregular polygons with varying magnitudes of curves and fills.
• There may be 1–5 base colors.
• I will name it Brian.