Category: LookingOutwards-06

Blog 06

Manolo Gamboa Naon is a creative coder from Argentina with a focus on generative visual aesthetics. Through the combination of image and video, he strives to discover the line between chaos and order. In his piece Manoloide, Last Flowers, he displays selections of different variations of black, red, yellow, white, and blue. The pieces look like acrylic paint lathered onto a canvas, giving the illusion of texture. The shapes are also flower-like and fragmented, with no shape repeating. Naon certainly achieves an organized chaos in his work, with the feeling of a pattern but no exactly repeating imagery. You can also see where the colors ever so slightly blend together to create fine lines.

Looking Outwards-06

I browsed through various articles showcasing beautiful randomized computational art, but the artwork that I found the most unique was Rami Hammour’s “A Text of Random Meanings“.

“A Text of Random Meanings” by Rami Hammour

Hammour is an architectural designer based in Brooklyn, NY and has garnered his artistic attention through his sporadic, yet structured artworks. For this piece in particular, I admire the randomized bars and lines that look like a collection of mazes, or a labyrinth. Hammour creates this effect using a random number generator to visually create 18 lines of a “Registers and Taps” coupled with python scripts. The drawing comparing three different registers of 9, 11, and 13. I can see how Hammour’s artistic sensibilities manifest into this randomly simulated artwork because he aims to create random yet systematic pieces, and blend both the natural randomness of mathematics with artistic mapping.

Blog 06 – Randomness – srauch

I find Paul Dunham’s installation Click::RAND to be fascinating. It’s based on the book A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates, which was published by the RAND corporation in 1955 to allow computer programmers to have an extensive amount of truly random numbers on hand. (The numbers themselves were generated by a program designed to work as a roulette wheel.) The book was available in standard print, but also as computer punchcards, and it’s the latter version that Dunham was inspired by. He created “instruments” by wiring together a grid of old-fashioned electromagnetic relays that make an audible click when they open and close, then feeding them the random numbers provided by the punchcards as instructions on when to move. The result is an audible experience of randomness, with ephemeral patterns seemingly flashing in and out of the composition.

The listening experience seems to say something about how we as humans tend to try to impose order on our surroundings. Because of the way our neural networks work, we aren’t capable of thinking in a truly random way, and we have an inherent tendency to seek patterns. So, it’s an interesting experience to listen to something random and watch your brain spin itself out looking for patterns that actually aren’t there. 

Here is a video of Click::RAND in action. Scroll to about halfway in to see it in all its glory:

Blog – 06


The work of Katharina Brunner most inspires me. She is an artist and data scientist from Germany that often uses randomness in her artwork. She also is involved in the fields of technical writing and research. Recently, she created a software package in R called generative art. She publicly posted this package on GitHub so that people can access and experiment with randomly generated art. According to her website, she says that her package allows for the creation of images based on thousands of points. Additionally, the position of every single point in the picture is calculated by a formula that takes in random parameters. Thus, every image looks different due to the built-in randomness. Her work stands out to me because she is creating her own artwork while simultaneously working to inspire others by giving them the initial tools to learn about the field of generative art. Check out her work below!

By: Katie Makarska

https://katharinabrunner.de/generativeart/

Looking Outward – 06

“Small Scale – Fidenza #545” by Tyler Hobbs

Tyler Hobbs is a visual artist who develops and works with algorithms and plotters. Hobbs’ style represents the stiff structure of a computer and the messy chaos of nature, striking an interesting balance in his work. He created “Fidenza” which is a generative algorithm that creates random, generative art. He describes the algorithm as “highly flexible”, and it continuously produces interesting results. It was so fun to scroll through all the artwork produced by the same algorithm as they all go very different directions, yet hold similar underlying charcteristics. “Fidenza” is a flow field algorithm that creates random, organic curves. With these curves, Hobbs shares that there is variety in scale, turbulence, stroke style, shape segments, sharp edges, sprials, collision, margins, and color which leads to infite possibilties of “Fidenza”. In color palettes alone, there are 14 possible color palettes that each have different probabilities for the colors being used.

Title: Fidenza
Artist: Tyler Hobbs
Link: https://tylerxhobbs.com/fidenza

Looking Outwards 06

Randomness in generative art

Vera Molnar’s work was amongst the first to be using computation to create art. She would use algorithms that delicately balanced randomness and purpose. This is especially true for her piece titled ‘Dialog Between Emotion and Method’ from 1986 where the idea of computational control is linked to method but the randomness of emotion makes the cube-square-like forms chaotic and unorderly. I suppose a majority of her algorithm revolved around creating the random colorful lines but she used constraints to trap the randomness in squares throughout the canvas– a bit like organized chaos. I think the way she breaks the idea of perfection and order that computationally creating art can quite easily provide and instead leans into disrupting it to create more visually intriguing forms.

https://muda.co/veramolnar/http://dada.compart-bremen.de/item/artwork/127

Looking Outward 06 / Electric Sheep

This is probably one of the more obvious examples of randomness in digital art, but I still find the overall concept really interesting.
Electric Sheep (a project founded by Scott Draves) is a collaborative and dynamic body of abstract work that can be downloaded to most devices. The program runs while devices are in “sleep” mode, communicating via the internet with other devices around the world to create and change the animations (or “sheep”) on display. Users can vote for their favorite ‘sheep’ with their keyboard, which generates new sheep via the algorithm. Sheep can also be “mated together” manually by server administrators or by users who download existing parameters and make changes.

The reason I chose this work for the blog this week is because of its focus on interactivity. The fact that this is a collaborative project between thousands of different computers is fascinating. And while there is an underlying element of randomness with the automatic ‘mating’ of sheep through the algorithm, users can also participate in generating/supplying new sheep to the flock.

Blog 06: “e4708”

By Ilia Urgen
Section B

This week, I came across a cool work of late-20th Century digital art. “e4708” was created in 1980 by Mark Wilson, one of the greatest pioneers in digital image making. Since then, his various computer generated art pieces have been widely exhibited across the world, but “e4708” remains his most popular work.

Wilson’s digital artwork is a combination of both a well-thought geometrical layout and aspects randomly generated by the computer’s algorithm. For instance, the rows/columns of the squares and circles are distinctively arranged to form a certain pattern. However, we notice that the background overlay, circle diameter/stroke width, and the square/circle fill are randomly generated.

This delegation of assigned and random elements create a structured, but very unique piece of art.

“e4708” as it appeared in 1980.

Looking Outwards 06

Kenneth Martin’s Chance and Order incorporates aspects of randomness through a combination of chance events and artistic decisions. In order to create each pair of lines, Martin draws numbers (two at a time), randomly from a bag starting counter-clockwise. I admire the pure simplicity of the piece, along with the concrete repetition of lines across the canvas. Chance and Order offers a new perspective of the scientific and artistic world through incorporating creative elements and those of mathematical probability.

The points of intersection on the art are also written and randomly chosen from small cards, and a line is made between each successful pair of numbers picked out. The title, “Chance and Order” also symbolizes the greater process behind the work, a product of random events and ordering procedures. I admire Martin’s ability to hand-draw so precisely, and create these nearly computer-generated forms of media in the collections.

Hannah Wyatt

Randomness in Sound

The Click::RAND by Paul Dunham (2019-2020) is fascinating to watch. Dunham used a series of electric relays and random numbers to generate clicking noises that become sonic beats. He used the RAND’s 1955 book “A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates” as a database of random numbers to feed into the electric relays. The book is a giant table of a million random digits that contain small but statistically significant biases. The largest bias the table had while running tests was about 2%. Dunham fed the digits to a computer that converted every number into binary, which told the relays when to open and close. The result is a very fun and cool syncopation of clicks and metallic rings. Sometimes there are patterns that appear in the clicks, but they quickly dissolve into something else. I admire the simplicity of the installation, as well as the results it produces. The clicking pauses, breaks, quickens, slows, just like the rhythms of everyday life do as well. He will sometimes add more than one panel of relays to create even more poly-rhythms. There are no algorithms in his work, only randomness and relays. His artistic vision of giving the book a voice, and having the audience listen to randomness, is a highly effective one that definitely manifested in the final form.

Dunham’s other work is also very interesting and I highly recommend viewing his Click::TWEET project from 2020. In that project, he transcribed tweets into morse code using multiple telegraph machines to highlight how ‘loud’ social media is these days.

Click::RAND from Atticus Finch on Vimeo.