This is a video capture of a generative software art work programmed in Processing. The work was made to run on a mac mini and HDTV installed in a gallery. The video gives an idea of how the software drawing machine looks while running but the real thing is non-looping and changes all the time.
It is from a recent series of generative software art. Even though it is a time-based work that evolves countless iterations of animation, I refer to it as a drawing because it consists primarily of simple graphic line work on a solid white ground. It was also important to me that the line work and patterns closely reference drawing I was doing a few years ago using ink and paper. The work has five segments that occur in random sequence and each of the segments has random variables that make individual iterations unique but recognizable as a member of a segment group. Processing is an open source programming language that makes coding visual work accessible to artists and designers ( http//:processing.org ).
The process of writing the program was heuristic in nature and involved experimenting by joining small blocks of code, setting up some parameters, recording ranges of random variables and watching the resulting animated drawings to observe the behaviors of the lines and the interactions between the forms. By selecting ranges of numbers that resulted in forms that I responded to visually and introducing some noise in the coding, I was able to create this series of generative drawings that reflect my own earlier pen and ink drawings on paper and early drawing machine experiments in the history of computer arts. I enjoyed the entire process and result.
