Why generative art is awesome
Science and art have been at loggerheads for as long as history itself. The rational brain cannot understand the abstract expression of its artistic counterpart, and the bias is whole heartedly gifted back. It’s this conglomeration of the duality of logic and subjectivity, control and randomness that makes generative art so…well, cool.
As designers we are famously detail-oriented control freaks, worrying about alignment issues, vociferous about the deviation of elements 2px to the left or right of the way we had intended them to be and custodians of structure, order and coherence.Here I am, enamored by the gloriousness and unpredictability of generative art, quite at the polar opposite end of the spectrum.
This prospect of losing control and using code to make something that isn’t ‘supposed’ to be a part of a defined system is amazing. In many ways, writing a piece of code to generate art is like mimicking nature. It’s like designing only the root, and letting the tree take its own beautiful, chaotic, organic form, which multiplies and takes a life of their own. Code can be like poetry, ambiguous and abstract, and that fascinates me no end.
I tried to dapple in generative art back in college, but couldn’t persist and practice. As with all forms of art and all tools, one needs to spend hours learning and creating to gradually get better. It’s one of those areas, that I would still like to explore, and writing this might just propel me to look through my old hard drives and dig out material that I’d worked with before. Here’s some of that amateurish old stuff:
My primary tool of choice was Processing, a free, great and easy to pick up creative coding environment with a thriving community of like-minded people and lots of great literature to help out newbies.
For those interested in the field, there are a lot of people and design firms to draw inspiration from, and some great books like this and this. Listing down some of my favorites:
Individuals: Marius Watz, Karsten Schmidt, Moritz Stefaner, Joshua Davis
Collectives and studios: Onformative, Field.io, Lust.nl, Nervous system, Stamen
