Interactivity and Computation • 60-212
CMU School of Art / IDeATe, Spring 2022 • Prof. Golan Levin
2. Maolo Gamboa Noan: I gasped when I saw this piece because it looks like an art piece made of lumps of hair strung together.
3. Sofia Crespo: This piece sticks out to me because it is 3D computer art, which makes it more familiar to me amongst her other pieces.
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https://openprocessing.org/sketch/1481951
This is my landscape generator, it creates a basic landscape with several layers with different colours to distinguish the contour lines of the world. It is then populated with trees and villages to bring signs of life.
If I had more time (and was allowed to use unity), I would take what I learnt in this project to make 3D landscapes with auto generating terrain and villages similar to minecraft as I think the way I approached this project would allow easy transition to 3D by adding a simple height map based on the perlin noise. I wanted to add a camera movement system, but I found out that I would have had to overhaul my project and make it 3D and I didn’t have time for that. This project was really fun, enjoyed making some basic pixel art again.
https://openprocessing.org/sketch/1479479
My piece is a seaside topography generator that calculates the manner in which rivers would navigate down the terrain. Each lowest point on the bottom of the screen generates a river by default and you can add more by clicking. It works by creating a massive 2d array the contains every height at every point and then (with some randomness) determining the path of least resistance for water.
I feel like my piece is generally successful – it is aesthetically pleasing to me and I feel like I succeeded in creating something different and challenging. I feel like I struggled to make the rivers feel completely realistic. I don’t feel like the depth of the piece is fully communicated in the water, and it seems like there is often an unrealistic amount of water flowing down the hills relative to their size.
Zach Lieberman does beautiful things with color and here creates a generative work that feels like a material-rendering but simply using a number of moving radial gradients (like point lights). He posts many iterations/experiments on his instagram so you can really see how his techniques develop and grow more complex.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CTetxTHjvsL/
Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel (which inspired the project by Jonathan Basile, pictured below) has stuck in my mind as an example of effective complexity. His concept of the generated book leverages the order, rules, and familiarity of books as pages of paragraphs, sentences, and words made up of letters and spaces while imposing additional constraints that each book has 410 pages, 40 lines per page, and ~80 letters per line – which teasingly seems to promise meaning. He introduces disorder through the characters in the book being random. What I find compelling about his concept is that it appears to follow total order in terms of meaning (taking form in the book-medium that is typically equivalent with meaning/knowledge) but in actuality is total randomness: a white noise of letters and spaces. It also illustrates the “10,000 Bowls of Oatmeal” problem well in that the resulting books are so random that they are meaningless and effectively indiscernable from each other. The story that plays out the concept is predicated on that exact false promise of meaning.
(sorry that was > 50 words)
The “Problem of Meaning” with generative art is especially challenging to me. From what I see of the generative art world, much of it tends towards being “unapologetically abstract and formal in [its] generative practice, seeking only to reinvigorate the sublime and instill a sense of awe” (173) which in a sense is appealing to me as a humble goal that demonstrates and celebrates beauty in its “truth to process” or truth to system. At the same time, I can’t help but look at all the generative art on Twitter or sold as NFTs and feel some skepticism and clash with my (debilitating) idealism: it shouldn’t be so “easy” to capitalize on generative art, it feeds a little too seamlessly into fast-consumption platforms, and at worst falls short at being visual eye candy.
The game Noita has a relatively low effective complexity. The game is a single physical map but it is separated into different areas that follow different sets of rules. Though every pixel in the game is simulated and can have an enormous quantity of physical effects applied to it, little of that can happen without some sort of direct or indirect action from the player. Therefore the environment itself, while topographically randomized is still relatively consistent from one generation to the next.
The Problem of Creativity:
I think that generative art pieces are absolutely creative. Far more so than much of photography in my opinion. With generative art pieces, you have to start with a completely blank slate and come up with something entirely new, while with much of photography you are already given the infinity varied masterpiece that is the world at large. Even if you are not drawing the art itself, you are still responsible for the machine, the virtual robot, that creates that art and you have an intent for what that art should look like. Therefore, generative art pieces are creative as without someone with vision to create the piece, there would be nothing to look at.
Question 1A: Clouds exhibit effective complexity. They are created by water vapor that has turned into liquid water droplets. While they are formed by the same molecules, they appear random in the sky and are influenced by factors such as temporature and altitude. Hence, there is order in how they are formed and but randomness in their formations.
Question 1B: I have always felt conflicted about the problem of authorship when it comes to generative art. When I was learning about generative real-time visuals for the first time using Touchdesigner, I felt I had little control over what the real-time visuals would look like and since I was a beginner, I would just play around with different parameters and functions and end up becoming pleasantly surprised by the product of my “creation”. Looking back at it, I would say the machine was more of a creator than myself because I had no control over the end product. However, now that I have more experience with the application, I can effectively create my ideas instead of letting the computer determine them. In this case, I believe I have then gained authorship over the work I create because the computer has become a medium, just as paint on a canvas, to help me create my art.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/85060381/buiiin
I chose buiiin by Manolo Gamboa Naon. The piece instantly reminded me of Hong Kong at night, looking out at towering skyscrapers. I found this piece extremely clever because from afar, the piece heavily resembles skyscrapers but when you look closer, some areas seem fictional, as if there are floating buildings. However, the colors the artist uses which contract the black background render some shapes to seem like reflections of office lights.
At around 22:16.
At around 11:00.
I didn’t have much time to create this piece, so it is just a simple clock that presents the time we are familiar with.
The shape in the center represents the hour, the position of the circle around represents the minute, and the number of smaller circles represents seconds. The color of the background changes throughout the day to match the color of the sky.
