Extras and Asides to my GA2000 presentation, Politecnico di Milano, Italy December 2000

Why are there so few commercial generative art programs out there?

Maybe there are, but they are not called "generative art programs":

• Bryce.
• Maya.
• Various fractal generators.
• Specialised programs for specialised customers.

And maybe we are not really thinking of the end user when we design these programs? Who are we aiming at? The artist or the general public? Surely it should be aimed at the general public at least in part. Computers are there to empower people, not continue the division between a professional paid skilled artist/designer and the amateur.

What would we have to change in our programs if we wanted to attract the general public?

• Very easy to use.
• Windows based, or maybe Macintosh based. Unix-Linux is not yet an option for the mass market.
• Cheap. I'd suggest less than $100, and certainly less than $500.
• Supporting common file formats, vector and bitmap.
• Demo available.

What a horrid list that is!

"Must read" GUI Design Books

About Face - The Essentials of User Interface Design - Alan Cooper

The Inmates are Running the Asylum - Alan Cooper

The computer is more adventurous than the human brain!

As an experiment I decided to physically paint one of the images generated by my programs. These two images are computer generated:

I decided to use, as a base, the diagonal grid of discs of the first image, but with the coloring of the second image.

Apart from showing that I am not a very good painter, the final painted image also has the triangles more evenly distributed. I was working from memory when I painted the triangles, and my brain seemed to naturally redistribute the objects. The computer was more adventurous (creative!?) than I was. Maybe a real artist would have done better, but to me it was an interesting and instructive experiment.

The underlying image was a Gliftic interpretation of a grid of dots. The Gliftic image was placed in Repligator, who decided to interpret it by placing fragments over it. So the final physical painting is

Owen's Interpretation of Repligator's Interpretation of Gliftic's Interpretation of a diagonal grid of dots!

Gliftic Version 2

The paper spoke about Gliftic V1, V2 should be available in early 2001 and will have the following new features:

• You can cross breed images
• User defined forms can be imported from DXF and WMF files.
• The largest image you can make is 2000 pixels on a side
• More form generators
• More predefined color schemes
• More interpretations
• You can create non square images with many popular formats already defined (including the Golden Rectangle).

Here is a user defined form, and how it has been interpreted by Gliftic V2

Note that these are NOT "effects", but interpretations. As mentioned before the user can choose the color scheme as being based on one of his or her photographs:

One last example, keeping to the Greek (Santorini) color scheme, but using a fish form:

and interpretting it in an arabesque way:

(Back to the original article)

If you have enjoyed this paper you may be interested in Ransen's Artistic Programming Course.