sihand – LookingOutwards 06 – Bauer

Random Paintings by Andrej Bauer

The picture above was made by a computer program developed by the Slovenian computational artist, Andrej Bauer. The program accepts the name of a picture, which in this case is my name, and generates a random picture using the name as a “seed”. The same “seed” consistently yields the same painting.

How? You might ask. As Bauer explains it, upon receiving the “seed”, which is the name of the picture, the program constructs an according mathematical formula. The unique formula determines the color of each pixel in the picture. Although the composition of the painting may appear random, it always follows the same sequence. The online version of the program is converted from the original one in ocaml to javascript with ocamljs.

I really enjoyed playing around with the program because the results are constantly surprising. Most of “my” works aren’t as aesthetic as the popular ones, but I believe that if I keep on experimenting, something would eventually come up. I think Bauer’s work is a real-life manifestation of the Infinite Monkey Theorem (wiki).

Here are some more popular images in his gallery.

Check out Bauer’s random art gallery here.

Learn more about Andrej Bauer.