The History and Future of Gliftic

A customer's request to be able to "add things" to Gliftic got me thinking that maybe I should explain again, though in a different way, how Gliftic came about and how it is designed to be used.

Gliftic was born from an idea I had for an image generator. In fact my failure to make an image generator resulted in Repligator! I've often found that ambition can fail in its immediate goals, but along the way you find new and maybe more interesting paths to explore.

There is a conference here in Milan, Italy every year on Generative Art. I've contributed papers at the conference twice, talking about both Gliftic and Repligator. The idea of generative art is that the artist lays out a procedure for creating the art and lets the process get on with it. Now, this does not mean you have to use a computer. I think a gardener is a generative artist, for example. He plants the seeds and lays out the plants and waters the grass, but the garden grows. The musician Brian Eno has, in the past, setup synths to loop and vary, then he just lets them go. Kraftwerk used the same sort of technique to create whole albums.

So why not apply the same process to image creation? But what is the process in this case? What is setup? These concrete decisions are the hardest to make, and is almost the very heart of programming. You cannot waffle when you write a program, the computer will not even pretend to understand. (Unlike some humans who pretend to understand the waffle of other humans (politicans and art crtics come to mind). So I made an "executive" but not arbitrary decision to divide an image into three separate components. The overall form of the image, the overall color scheme of the image and the interpretation of the form with the selected colors. In Gliftic these are the F4 F5 and F6 keys. They are also clearly labelled on the lefthand vertical dialog bar.

Here is a concrete example which does not (yet) exist in Gliftic. Imagine a human body drawn as blue rose bush. For Gliftic the form of the image you are imagining is the human body. The color scheme would be various shades of blue. And the "interpretation" is the details of the rose bush. (Hell I like that! One day I'll get round to doing it!)

Here is an example which does exist in Gliftic V5. Imagine a trellis drawn with flowers and leaves and which use colors from you cat's paw. Here is your trellis layout and settings:

Here is the photo from where the program picks up the colors to use:

And this is what Gliftic generates for you:

Recently a customer wrote to me to ask if he could add his own interpretations and forms etc. You can add you own forms as vector files, the help file explains how. You can add your own images as color schemes, (very easy to do and explained in the help file). But you cannot add your own interpretations. Why?

You cannot add your own interpretations because each interpretation is a small program which mixes together the colors and forms in different ways, and adds its own objects sometimes. And interpretation is a dynamic thing, it reacts to what is given to it, it doesn't simply plonk down objects which can be defined by the user.

Which brings us back to generative art - to open up Gliftic to adding your own interpretations we'd have to add a programming language to Gliftic, and you'd have to learn it!

Adding a programming language to a program is possible but not easy. Examples are Visual Basic for Access, Python for PaintShopPro. We did in fact experiment with adding Python to Gliftic, and had some success, but failure at the "other end" persuaded us that it was not worth the hassle.

The "other end" was the user. As Python was being added to Gliftic I was experimenting with teaching artists and designers to use Python to create images (without Gliftic). The result was Ransen's Artist's Programming Tutor (RAPT), which was supposed to be a gentle introduction to creating images with an easy to learn programming language. In the whole world it attracted 10 students, who dropped off one by one over the next three months, until there were no students.

There is a discipline to programming. It is a large initial investment of time and effort, then the results start coming in. I don't think any of the students could see that, they believed Bill Gate "drag this and drop that" model of creativity. But you have a work of art! Bill is right if you call copy and paste art, but for generative art you have to stop and think and experiment, there is no quick way.

The disaster of RAPT meant we stopped all work on Python for Gliftic. It would simply not have been used. It would have been a feature which made the program heavier and slower for no practial purpose. And since I don't like "feature creep" (or "more is always better") we abandonded the Python project. Regretfully.

So what of the future? First of all don't hold your breath, we are not even sure ourselves what should be the next steps. There will definitely be more interpretations and forms. There will be maybe more color schemes and ways of specifying colors. Maybe vector output so that the you can bring in the designs to Illustrator and CorelDraw. Maybe presets, maybe mixed interpretations. Send us your ideas by going to the contacts page!

Owen F. Ransen
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