Home | Forums | Article Search | Subscribe & Shop | Contact Us | Log Out generate.txt Email This Print This View My Personal Library Caught In The Web May 2009 • Vol.9 Issue 5 Page(s) 88 in print issue Add To My Personal Library generate.txt The Department Of Stuff by Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda is the creator and director of the popular News for Nerds Web site Slashdot.org. He spends his time fiddling with electronic gizmos, wandering the ’Net, watching anime, and trying to think of clever lies to put in his bio so that he seems cooler than he actually is. I’ve always been fascinated by generative art, that is to say art that is constructed by algorithm instead of such primitive means as a pencil or a guitar. The ideas behind generative art certainly aren’t new: John Cage and Brian Eno have been using them for decades to create their music. The famous sounds behind The Who’s “Baba O’Reily" was composed by Pete Townshend by using numbers of significance to his guru, combined with one of the earliest uses of a synthesizer in popular music. In college, I played around with generative art extensively myself. One of the more stupid items I created was a silly poem generator (cmdrtaco.net/poemgen.cgi) that generated poems based on the output of the Unix ‘Fortune’ command, or even random Web pages. I’ve been hooked ever since. The things you could do even a decade ago are nothing compared to what is possible today with gadgets that you carry in your pocket. Brian Eno isn’t content to produce a thousand U2 hits: He collaborated on an iPhone application called Bloom, where you select arbitrary moods and tap the screen to create music that might actually sound good enough for your own airport. One of the first things I played on the Nintendo DS was called Electroplankton. This interactive musical application allowed you to “compose” music with methods light years away from the staves and notes of real composers. One “level” lets you compose music by adjusting the angles of leaves on a plant. Drops fall from the sky and bounce off your leaves, reflecting through your plant and creating (hopefully!) aesthetically pleasing sounds. Another level lets you play with bubbles, gently popping them, or swirling them around to create audio soundscapes (or just a cacophony). If you don’t have access to a Gameboy or an iPhone, try out Evolectronica (evolectronica.com), which allows you to listen to loops of generated music and tell the system if you like them or not. Over time, the system hopes to evolve new music. Generative art isn’t limited to music. Some quick searching through Flickr will produce countless examples of visual art. You could start with the Generative Art pool (www.flickr.com/groups/generativeart), but none of it is particularly interactive. Context Free Art (www.contextfreeart.org) lets you express yourself visually through your own equations. A quick browse of the gallery of user creations is enough to see the power of the tools. Best of all, on this site, you can see the actual “code” used to generate each piece of art and modify it to suit your own creative whims. It’s a little more complicated than the Logo turtle you might have played with on an Apple II in the ’80s, but the concept is the same. Since you can actually see the code and extend it, this opens the door to interesting collaborative possibilities. You can take a stranger’s work, extend it, and hopefully derive some pleasure from the creative process. The collaborative nature of this work is interesting and creative, but perhaps not all that useful. Other projects online are less about “art,” but they really have powerful aesthetic components. Microsoft’s Photosynth (livelabs.com/photosynth) assembles hundreds of photos found on Flickr and assembles them into a visually amazing navigable 3D space. You can see things like the pyramids at Giza or the Obama inauguration as assembled from a thousand unique vantage points. Finally, I wanted to show you Astrometry.net. Like some of the other projects mentioned in this column, this one takes Flickr photos as input. But Astrometry.net uses the photographs of the night sky taken by budding astronomers and photographers and analyzes them to figure out the actual stars in the image. I’m all for art for art’s sake, but there’s no reason you can’t learn a little something at the same time. Contact me at malda@cpumag.com Want more information about a topic you found of interest while reading this article? Type a word or phrase that identifies the topic and click "Search" to find relevant articles from within our editorial database. Enter A Subject (key words or a phrase): ALL Words (‘digital’ AND ‘photography’) ANY Words (‘digital’ OR ‘photography’) Exact Match ('digital photography'- all words MUST appear together) Home      Copyright & Legal Information      Privacy Policy      Site Map      Contact Us Copyright © 2010 Sandhills Publishing Company U.S.A. All rights reserved.