Genuary 2022: Generative Code Art Prompts for a Month (opens in new tab)

Those images are really great! Can you share some details on your process and tools?

Wasn't aware of either! But very excited by both.

If Rust's your language, I wrote a library that should be pretty good at 2D things: https://github.com/logicalshift/flo_draw - I wrote it while working on another project (FlowBetween) where I found debugging would be easier if I could just render something on-screen but rendering stuff on screen always required a ridiculous amount of setup.

It has some nice options for feeding its own output back into itself as it uses streams rather than callbacks so it's quite good for procedural rendering type tasks (the 'Wibble' example is a good place to start with that)

p5 is great! Very easy to learn and has an amazing online editor to get you started immediately. Such a good tool for prototyping ideas quickly.

https://editor.p5js.org/

If you'd rather do visual programming than code, blender is a great choice. You can do generative 2D using the shader node editor, or 3D with the new geometry nodes.

For a code-based approach, I spent the weekend trying different permutations of Processing and settled on writing p5.js in VSCode. It's easy to set up, you can use vim bindings, and you can copy+paste your code into openprocessing.org if you want to share it (if it's interactive, for example).

Can you write geometry nodes in Python? I've found that "nodes plus an escape hatch to real code" is a nice balance.

This book and YouTube channel, both by Daniel Shiffman, are really excellent resources.

https://natureofcode.com/book/ https://www.youtube.com/c/TheCodingTrain

In my opinion the best starter book is Generative Design, hands down. If there was a generative art 101 textbook, this would be it.

https://www.amazon.com/Generative-Design-Visualize-Program-J...

I know. It's a nightmare. Several people I used to admire in the space have succumbed to the NFT virus. All they do now is shill for their latest 'drops'.

The demo scene this is not anymore. It used to be about fun, experimentation and showing off mad coding (and lately ml) skills. Now it's a pyramid scheme. I'm unsubscribing.

Or maybe I'm just getting old

I generally am not fond of NFTs myself, but want to give a counter point - while it's no fun to see artists you like posting a lot about NFTs, it's also great they can now get paid to do art. For established artists this means high purchase prices that (in the thousands, not something crazy) that make being a full time artist viable and acts as pay off for doing it for many years without much of a financial incentive. For smaller artists, it makes focusing on art as a source of income more viable. Personally i've bought some NFTs on hitenunc and was glad to support artists whose work I liked. Sure, buying some prints or something would be nicer, but that's not easy to set up, and the margins on that are presumably low.

It's really amazing that if you search for generative music on Twitter you find mostly NFT projects/people:

https://twitter.com/search?q=generative+music&src=typed_quer...

(But if you search for stochastic music you find almost nothing).

I for one think it’s a very interesting time for generative art sparked by NFTs. People that I’m following since Macromedia Flash for their digital experiments are suddenly creating NFTs. In the process everybody is motivated to improve their quality.

Yes, there are some annoying effects as well, the shilling and hyper speculation. But overall I’ve seen an amazing output of interesting works last year. Some of the recent works of Genuary that I’m seeing are really interesting.

> How refreshing to see a mention of generative art that isn't followed by the mention of "NFTs".

Well, thanks for kicking things off for us!

The irony is that this is the top comment, so it is in fact a mention of generative art followed by the mention of NFTs.