Whoa, you are amazing! As both a designer and programmer this is what I've always wanted to do. Your course is a good start for me. I've seen most of the things in the lectures but they're still a good refresher.
I just peaked at these, and I'm bookmarking a million times over. I'm very interested in this space right now, thanks so much with sharing your knowledge.
I guess demoscene deserves a mention here. They kinda take the generative/programmatic art thing to the extreme, and do everything in real-time. Of course most productions these days are in 3D which makes them quite distinct from these geometric 2D ones, but there are still some similarities. Seeing a nice high-end 2D demo these days could be interesting.
There is a programming language for making really cool art called "Context Free":
"Context Free is a program that generates images from written instructions called a grammar. The program follows the instructions in a few seconds to create images that can contain millions of shapes."
The language is impressive in how complicated the resulting images can be from a few simple rules. Here is a link to one popular image in their gallery along with source code:
If anyone is looking for a gentle introduction into this sort of thing, Jeremy Ashkenas (of Underscore/Backbone hame) wrote a wonderful Ruby wrapper for Processing [0]. The syntax is remarkably simple (and Ruby!). Here's an example of the Mandelbrot set [1]
Pretty cool. Looks similar to what I did before creating http://GeoKone.NET. I was doodling with triangles, circles, lines and trying to figure out what numbers would represent if they were geometry.
This led to me developing GeoKone.NET, an interactive Sacred Geometry Generator. Check it out if you want to Create Some Recursive Geometry, it's pretty flexible in the things you can do with it :)
That's awesome! I've been playing around with some machine learning stuff recently, and because of my art background, I've been wanting to tackle similar stuff to this. Did you let your genetic algorithms run on real-life paintings? i.e. Did they get refine after making a physical model, or did you do the refinement and evolution before it got the physical creation phase?
The GA was based on an open loop simulation. I tuned a digital canvas / painting simulation by hand and then evolved the paintings in simulation. After evolving the painting I would execute the painting with a robotic arm. I did some preliminary work on closing the loop: using the actual output of the painting to tune the simulation but didn't get too far. A paper on my methods / simulation and results: http://carlos.ag/GA2008paper.pdf
This work is really aesthetically pleasing. Nice one!
Programmatic art generally falls under the domain of generative creativity. A field that draws inspiration from topics as varied as biology and architecture.
I've recently had the recurring idea that it would be awesome if I could do this with music, I found this after a quick search: http://overtone.github.io/ (+ it's an excuse to learn clojure) Anyone have experience doing this with music, & might have some opinion on the best tools?
How eerie, I had literally just (10 min ago) searched for something like this on Google and Github; I wanted to looked into dynamic generation of patterns but the only thing I could find were simple stripes and tartans. Cool stuff.
I've heard that Andy's work (while amazing) isn't generative. I think he actually lays it all out by hand (in Illustrator or the like). Not sure if genius or crazy, maybe both.
Renaissance artists didn't do much actual painting. They just sketched what they wanted, mixed colours, and had students do the rest. This is basically the same thing, only with abstract art. If this isn't art, then the renaissance didn't have any artists.
Andy Warhol had a Factory of people working for him too. Damien Hirst does now as well. It's not uncommon at all for artists to do residencies with big name artists. Have you ever had a gallery show? Let alone a whole museum at your disposal to do something with creatively - it's a ton of work, even for a group of people.
I'm agreeing with you though, this is art. Sometimes, so is my mom's cooking.
Exactly my point. Just because someone else is doing the work (or, in this case, something else) doesn't mean that the work isn't the first person's art. And yes, I suppose, anything can be technically art. But this is veritably the same kind of art we've already come to accept.
https://vimeo.com/groups/waza2013/videos/61113159
My lecture notes may be of interested to you also:
http://www.runemadsen.com/printing-code
For example:
http://www.runemadsen.com/printing-code/lecture-form