~mattyblog

Generative art for ersatz.website

I've recently updated the splash page of ersatz.website after I read a blog post by Amy Goodchild called "Early Computer Art In The 50's and 60's". In the article, Goodchild catalogues some early uses of the computer as an artistic medium. I found this post inspiring and fascinating because clarified for me the core idea of generative art: emergence.

Wikipedia describes emergence as a phenomena that "occurs when a complex entity has properties or behaviors that its parts do not have on their own, and emerge only when they interact in a wider whole".

I'm mostly familiar with the idea of "emergent behavior" in the context of video games - where new forms of play can occur within a game because the game's systems are robust enough to be combined in unforseen ways. A great example of a relatively recent game with a lot of emergent gameplay was Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch. The physics in the game combined with the combat abilities in the game led to some very cool and unexpected combinations. One of my favorites was this innovative way players came up with to get around the game world called a stasis launch. See here also.

In generative computer art, emergent behavior occurs when a myriad of simple rules and algorithms a programmer and artist uses when running a generative art program or simulation come together and create something unexpected. Amy Goodchild has written about this phenomenon as well. There is a real sense of fun that comes from the unexpected results of the confluence of mundane algorithms. That is what interests me about generative art: that something unexpected and pretty can come from something so antithetical to itself: a computer program.

The generative art that I did for the splash page of ersatz.website after reading Goodchild's article was partly inspired by idea of "emergence" that the article outlines. The specific idea of recursive squares skewed, colored, and layered on top of each other came directly from the the book Beautiful Racket. I found the cover very striking when I first saw the design several years ago, and wanted to try to make my own iteration. The Beautiful Racket cover appears to be based on an art series by Vera Molnar called (Des)Ordres (1974) that Goodchild featured in the article on early computer art as well.

I'm really pleased with how it looks. It was written in clojurescript and rendered through HTML canvas. The squares are generated in a new way every time the page is visited.

I'll publish the code in a future article once I tidy it up.