Tools like midjourney and off-the-shelf VQGAN/CLIP notebooks give us a sort of "democratization of the image," making it very easy to generate pretty-looking content with zero prior art-making experience, and almost no technical skills needed.

ljvmiranda921.github.io/notebook/2021/… To demonstrate, I just now came up with a fairly primitive text prompt, and plugged it into #midjourney.

Prompt: "castles, oil painting, fantasy, scifi"

Output image, some minutes later:

latent shadows —

a photographic walking tour of alter-London within the #midjourney latent space. fragmented shadows are cast by neural structures situated within an infinite multidimensional digital space; generated by a network trained on our collective photo media. Westminster Abbey, Barbican Estate, St Paul's Cathedral, Tate Modern —

Experimenting with #midjourney feedback loops (inspired by @jeromeherrcc).

1. Text prompt to generate a clean subject and palette: 2. Feed image + new text prompt back into #midjourney with desired expressive style:

Digital art exhibitions shouldn’t be reduced to a few small digital screens mounted hastily in an empty room (see: Christie's, Sotheby's).

So, I thought I’d start a thread showing some more interesting ways digital and screen-based work can be exhibited.

👇 (cont) One great example of this can be found in Ryoji Ikeda’s (@ryojiikeda) work. It's often screen-based, but highly experiential, I've seen his work described as an ‘assault on the senses'. His recent solo show at 180 Strand in London was exceptional.

ryojiikeda.com

A cautionary note for artists & collectors.

With the growing interest in generative art, there are a lot of opportunists and shady platforms emerging, largely being built on open source generative art sketches that artists have released over the years. I have had a number of opportunists attempt to remix my open source sketches and generative art code for their own profit, and to build their own art platforms (even when it is against my explicit license). This has happened for years, but is being exacerbated by recent interest.

I have a 7-color e-ink screen arriving tomorrow, so I'm experimenting with custom color dithering techniques. Here is Subscapes #39 reduced to a 7-color, 600x448px paletted image. One thing that is worth more exploration is an error diffusion technique that isn't based on a simple scanline. On the left is left-to-right scanline, on the right first I run through with random jumps, and then apply a second pass with left-to-right, to avoid dither patterns.

Digital reconstruction with dithered CMYK plates.

The algorithm seems to evoke feelings of nostalgia.

📷 by bantersnaps → unsplash.com/photos/1GUwkry…

#javascript #computationalphotography 📷 by Matej Sefcik →
unsplash.com/photos/ThQqXin…

Speculative design for a new creative coding toolkit.

You layer together "Components", each is just a single script that exposes some attributes and/or UI props. Now that I've coded the LinearGradient and NoiseLines components, I could easily re-use them in other projects, or even publish them online for other users of the tool to bring into their own designs.

Linear interpolation (sometimes called 'lerp' or 'mix') is a really handy function for creative coding, gamedev and generative art.

The function interpolates within the range [start..end] based on a 't' parameter, where 't' is typically within a [0..1] range.

A thread... For example, divide 'loop time' by 'loop duration' and you get a 't' value between 0..1.

Now you can map this 't' value to a new range, such as `lerp(20, 50, t)` to gradually increase a circle's radius, or `lerp(20, 10, t)` to gradually decrease its line thickness.

A function that produces a scribble.
#generative #code #javascript So many of my sketches begin with the same function: producing a uniform distribution of values along an array, between [0..1] range. Here's how it looks in JavaScript.

I'm calling it "arcs" (for arc lengths) but perhaps there is a proper name for this sort of thing?