alt Hacker NewsGenerative art was my first love. By accident, I ended up being a student of the great Frieder Nake (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frieder_Nake) and that changed my future trajectory.
Eventually, this led me to writing my own indie book on generative art with Go: https://p5v.gumroad.com/l/generative-art-in-golang, which led me to a talk I gave on GopherCon Europe: https://youtu.be/NtBTNllI_LY?si=GMePA3CfVQZJq2O7
These were great times, but I think the book is not worth buying anymore. Sadly, AI-generated imagery sort of killed the mojo of algorithmic art for me, and I've been trying to get back to it for the last few years.
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I spent a fair amount of time with p5 etc, but the results always felt limited and brittle. You need a lot of complexity before anything really interesting happens, and Processing lacks features like gradient fills that limit what's possible. It helped there were people like Jared Tarbell who (IMO) were way ahead of what most people were doing, and were willing to share their code.
I wasn't unhappy with some of the results, but it was an interesting and frustrating struggle.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/32832718@N00/17951484570/in/ph... https://www.flickr.com/photos/32832718@N00/19868350512/in/ph... https://www.flickr.com/photos/32832718@N00/17952106385/in/ph...
You can push AI in the same way and end up in some unusual spaces, but the quality often degrades when you get there.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fr...
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fo...
> Sadly, AI-generated imagery sort of killed the mojo of algorithmic art for me
I used to (and occasionally still do) make generative art and found this too! Although I'm not really sure why - I still love good generative art and don't really consume any AI generated art intentionally.
I think possibly one of the main things that happened was a lot of online generative art communities got flooded first by NFTs, and then AI generated art. I find it a lot harder to reliably find other people's generative art these days.
> I ended up being a student of the great Frieder Nake
That is quite wonderful.
> Sadly, AI-generated imagery sort of killed the mojo of algorithmic art for me,
I am surprised you did not specifically mention Nake's provocative writing "There Should Be No Computer-Art" : https://dam.org/museum/essays_ui/essays/there-should-be-no-c...
His argument is still 100% relevant in the age of AI.