Data Art: creating artworks in R
We have been hearing a lot about AI-generated art lately, but this week I am interested in exploring how curious humans use data to create generative art (and have fun).
The inspiration comes from last week’s talk at the University of Auckland Ihaka series. These lecture series are named after Ross Ihaka, the Kiwi (rock start) statistician who co-created the R programming language along with a gentleman called…well, Robert Gentleman (yes, there’s a link between them being called Ross and Robert and the fact the language is called R). Anyway, I digress.
Data scientist Danielle Navarro talked about what she calls unpredictable paintings: abstract pieces created in R. From Voronoi tessellations (used in fields like computer science and chemistry) to Perlin noise (algorithm used to generate random-looking but coherent noise patterns), Navarro shows how the mechanics of data wrangling tools can be used as a digital paintbrush for creating beautiful abstract works.
Creating generative aRt
- Start by getting inspired and seeing what’s possible. The Data to Art project and the #Rtistry hashtag on X are a great starting point for exploring current R artworks by data scientists and R enthusiasts in a range of fields.
- Explore the aRtsy package
You can read the Medium primer on aRtsy by Saúl Buentello linked below, or explore the aRtsy package documentation on CRAN for more details on the various visualisations you can create. An added bonus: the package generates a random visualisation every day: you can browse a collection of them on X and Mastodon.
- Sign up for the Generative Arts / Creative Coding newsletter for weekly updates
- Play around with randomly generated data or popular datasets by applying various techniques to commonly used plots.
Enjoy and share the results in next month’s, #Codevember Challenge!
