Rhea Myers

Tag: Generative Art

  • draw-something: new colour stabilizing

    drawing-20061128-082745.png

  • draw-something: Debugging New Colour Algorithm

    Debugging images from draw-something modified to use AARON’s new colour algorithm. Like I say, they’re debugging images. The colour is using a single choice probability and hasn’t been tested properly yet. I also need to distribute the forms better but that’s outside the control of the colour algorithm.

  • Last Night’s Talk By Harold Cohen

    Harold gave an excellent presentation of how and why AARON’s new colouring system works. I’ve just about hacked up an implementation of the system for draw-something from my notes in a couple of hours, so you can tell that Harold is a thorough speaker as well as an insightful and sometimes humorous one. 😉

    AARON’s new colour system uses three lists of numbers, one for hue created from an additive series with a random start, one for saturation generated randomly and sorted into low/medium/high ranges, and another for value created the same way. AARON then chooses the hue according to the kind of object, and the saturation and value from the low/medium/high ranges according to the probabilities assigned to them. There’s some error correction and some mach-band-like generation of slightly lighter and darker colours for edge adornment but as Harold said it is a very much simpler system than AARON was using before.

    It is also a strikingly successful system aesthetically. The colours and the contrast of the images are pleasing and interesting, sometimes mellow, sometimes dramatic, always “creative”. Perhaps this has to do with the new system matching our cognitive perceptual system’s preferences in some way.

    I asked a question, badly, and got an answer with some interesting details about how AARON handles intersecting objects. A Furtherfield reviewer was there so hopefully a review will be up on Furtherfield soon. Many thanks to the excellent Computer Arts Society and Imperial College for arranging the talk.

  • Goodbye Minara, Hello Inkscape

    Writing Minara has been a positive, if occasionally frustrating, experience for me. It’s precisely the wrong way to write a graphics program but it works surprisingly well. I’ve gained a lot of insight, and made something unique.

    But it’s that uniqueness that limits its utility to others and means that I’m unlikely to find support for it. So I’m looking at switching to Inkscape. Hopefully the experience I’ve gained writing Minara can help add some interesting stuff to Inkscape and create something like the interactive environment for graphics coding that Minara was designed to be.

  • Random Scribbles

    I’m working on a vector graphics equivalent to Latham & Todd’s mutator. The first (trivial) stage is to create random vector scribbles.

    test.png

    These can then be evolved into something better over successive generations of mutation and visual evaluation. At the moment the scribbles are just lists of drawing instructions, but transformation and iteration functions will make the images more structured.

  • Boing Boing: 3D prints of World of Warcraft avatars

    Boing Boing: 3D prints of World of Warcraft avatars

    A World of Warcraft player has had her/his favorite character — a gnome — run off a Zcorp 3D printer.

    Scary. And the technology is kewl too.

  • Future Feeder » Archive » Capturing Refraction

    Future Feeder » Archive » Capturing RefractionHere's a beautiful set of photographs exploring refractions through various glass and transparent objects by Alan Jaras. Spectacular Flickr sets : Bending Light, Twisting Light, MicroWorld

  • New media art shouldn’t suck

    Rhizome.org: New media art shouldn't suck

    MTAA has been wanting to move into the gallery for quite some time now. In order to do so, we'll need to start thinking that our audience is completely ignorant of digital culture. We can't expect them to be geeks that are excited about a good hack. We'll need to communicate our emotion, interest and excitement. We can't expect them to share it until we communicate every bit of it.

    I can't believe it took me so long to realize this…

    Welcome to the dark side, MTAA. 😉

  • Chordinator in Sourceforge

    chordinator.lisp

    After some struggles with Sourceforge, the source code for chordinator is now available.

    Here’s a sample:

    (defmethod colour-generator (hue-fun saturation-fun brightness-fun)
    "Make a function to make a new instance of colour."
    (lambda ()
    (make-instance 'colour
    :hue (funcall hue-fun)
    :saturation (funcall saturation-fun)
    :brightness (funcall brightness-fun))))

    (defmethod random-colour-generator (&key (min-hue 0.0) (max-hue 1.0)
    (min-saturation 0.0) (max-saturation 1.0)
    (min-brightness 0.0) (max-brightness 1.0))
    "Make a function to make a random colour."
    (colour-generator (random-generator min-hue max-hue)
    (random-generator min-saturation max-saturation)
    (random-generator min-brightness max-brightness)))

    (defmethod n-random-colours ((n integer) &key (min-hue 0.0) (max-hue 1.0)
    (min-saturation 0.0) (max-saturation 1.0)
    (min-brightness 0.0) (max-brightness 1.0))
    "Make a list of n random colours."
    (let ((generate (random-colour-generator :min-hue min-hue
    :max-hue max-hue
    :min-saturation min-saturation
    :max-saturation max-saturation
    :min-brightness min-brightness
    :max-brightness max-brightness)))
    (loop repeat n
    collect (funcall generate))))

  • What Is The Schillinger System

    What Is The Schillinger System

    The idea behind the Schillinger System is simple and inevitable: it undertakes the application of mathematical logic to all the materials of music and to their functions

    And to art as well (in “The Mathematical Basis Of The Arts”). A complete mathematical system for composition from the mid 20th Century.