king talk

One of the most interesting aspects of generative art for me is when the outcomes of your code reach a point where the underlying mathematical and logical concepts are completely obscured and the image or animation stands entirely for itsself. This is what happened with the third iteration of my logspots / colorspots experiments. The outcome: re-birth. A set of images where even I as the creator have problems with understanding.

Unfortunately, this also leads to sort of a problem. I sometimes create hundreds of versions of my code when experimenting. Afterwards, when I select which versions are suitable for further refinement, I’m often having a hard time reproducing how exactly the code worked at this particular time. So, if anyone has any special techniques or tools to keep track of a ton versions of code, I’d appreciate any suggestions.

»Field« is a development environment for experimental code and digital art in the broadest of possible senses.

It looks like a mash-up of processing and vvvv. Using the advantages of node-based and text editor programming in one single software. It was developed by the openendedgroup and has been developed over the course (of the MIT media lab) of many years. While there are a great many development environments and digital art tools out there today, this one has been constructed with two key principles in mind:

Embrace and extend — rather than make a personal, private and pristine code utopia, »Field« tries to bridge to as many libraries, programming languages, and ways of doing things as possible. The world doesn’t necessarily need another programming language or serial port library, nor do we have to pick and choose between data-flow systems, graphical user interfaces or purely textual programming — we can have it all in the right environment and we can both leverage the work of others and take control of our own tools and methods.

Live code makes anything possible — »Field« tries to replace as many »features« with editable code as it can. Its programming language of choice is Python — a world class, highly respected and incredibly flexible language. As such, »Field« is intensely customizable, with the glue between interface objects and data modifiable inside »Field« itself. »Field« takes seriously the idea that its user (YOU) are a programmer/artist doing serious work and that you should be able to reconfigure your tools to suit your domain and style as closely as possible.

More short movies of »Field« can be found here…
go out at grab your own… ; )

Additional technical informations about »Field«. It …
… is exclusively developed and tested on Mac OS X 10.5
… is Open Source, licensed under the GPL v3 (You should read the license)
… has a JavaIInterface … renders with OpenGL
… writes in Python / builds in Jython

via Benedikt Groß

While working on my generative wireframes, I got more and more interested in how something like that would look when set in motion. Then I came up with is what you see in this video:

You might notice that it doesn’t look anything like my previous work. That is one of the aspects I love so much about generative design: you never know where you will end up. I started out with some rotating ellipses and came to a completely different result by simply changing parameters and editing tiny bits of code. There is a Flickr set with some screenshots from earlier versions.

As far as the result is concerned, it is not audio reactive. Different types of animations are triggered by pressing keys. Additionally, there’s some modifier keys that change the behaviour of various elements. Actually, the program has some more possibilities that just didn’t fit into the context of that particular video. I am looking forward to use them in future work.

Oh, and it was made with Processing.