Generative Art

Our machines are disturbingly lively,
And we ourselves frighteningly inert
Donna Haraway, Symians, Cyborgs and women

Karl Sims

Artificial life and intelligence has been an area of research on science and sci-fi for decades.
Some artists/engineers researched and worked

on the subject for year. On of those artist who I think he excel on is Karl Sims.
Karl Sims studied computer graphics at the MIT Media Lab and wrote a very interesting Paper on artificial evolution. This paper is very good starting point, a very good overview to approach the subject. “Artificial Evolution for Computer Graphics” by Karl Sims which appeared in Computer Grapics, July 1991,
“Artificial Evolution for Computer Graphics” by Karl Sims

http://accad.osu.edu/~mlewis/Class/mutation.html

However one on my favorite piece, which I think, is amazingly impressive, especially knowing the fact that his worked on the subject were done in the 90’s.

Panspermia

The name refers to a theory that life exists and is spread through the universe in the variety of germs or spores. The all piece put the viewer in the middle of a virtual world of a breeding “extra-terrestrial” life form, and portrays a life cycle of its unusual system.
Attempts were made to bring together several concepts:

chaos, complexity, evolution, self-breeding/spreading entities, and the nature of life itself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgeuRukfZLE

This piece made out of different using random mutations of plant shapes until a variety of interesting structures emerged. This is just beautifully created and thought. This is proof that science can be use in art with a high level of what call aesthetic.
http://www.karlsims.com/panspermia.html

Benjamin Fry

Tendril – A WebCrawler as a system of type Tornado -2001

Flipping through the book “Creative Code” written by John Maeda, I came across a piece called “WebCrawler as a system of type Tornado”. A kind of wriggling typographic creature that grows as it feeds from the web, grabbing new information to assimilate them into a an elegant form.

http://www.dlux.org.au/fs02/exhibition.html

Video

http://acg.media.mit.edu/people/fry/tendril/movie.html

http://www.dlux.org.au/fs02/exhibition.html

Anemone

Ben Fry again…..
This is exactly what I am looking into for one of my module, well in a very simplified way, just the organic part should we…. This project was using the process of organic information design to visualize the changing structure of a web site, juxtaposed with usage information.

http://benfry.com/anemone/

Video

http://benfry.com/anemone/movie/

Atmosphere project

I am still checking the same guy over the net, and came across this….
Atmosphere is another project by Ben Fry. This application, should I say, presents a large array of information on a wide presentation screen, which could be manipulated by three handheld devices within the gallery space. The visitor takes one of the devices and moves it within a designated area, thereby manipulating the information presented both on the screen and the larger projection. Playing with data in a 3d environment, a bit likes a 3d desktop. I really like it Aestheticly speaking, I am not really sure about the concept.

http://acg.media.mit.edu/projects/atmosphere/

video

http://acg.media.mit.edu/projects/atmosphere/demo/index-hyper.html

Artificial Evolution

For my project I started to look at some application to see and analyze how I should approach and what are the key information needed for this kind of task.
At this moment I am looking at the Golly simulator. this is an open source project, a cross-platform Game of Life simulator called Golly. This application integrates different patterns and behaviors wrote in Perl or Python. It is very flexible in a way. The behaviours are very interesting. The Game of Life is a simple example of a set of rules more broadly known as a “cellular automaton”
The rules are simple –the cells on the grid has two states: “dead” or “alive”. The state of every cell changes from one “generation” to the next according to the states of its 8 nearest neighbors: a dead cell becomes alive (a “birth”) if it has exactly 3 live neighbors; a live cell dies out if it has less than 2 or more than 3 live neighbors. The “game” of Life simply involves starting off with a pattern of live cells and seeing what happens.

http://golly.sourceforge.net/