Generativity

The interplay between mathematics, simulations, and aesthetics are the primary strands that connect the many different mediums that James has explored his career. His interests in programming and art naturally coalesced around generative art, and the introduction of a physical medium in plotter art captured his full attention. He now dedicates his time creating algorithmic artwork for plotters and 3D simulations. [Bio]

Designed by Scott Morgan (aka Loscil) and Craig McCaffrey, [the Colours of Air album cover]'s background fades downward from a light pink to a deep magenta, atop which is a dense field of horizontal white lines whose various contortions subtly suggest folds in a piece of paper. I spoke with Scott over email about how he arrived at this image, and while his process was more subconscious than strategic, the result feels entirely representative of the music in some ineffable way.

I stared at it a lot, fascinated by how these simple, mechanical lines not only introduce an uncanny third dimension, but also evoke striations in muscle tissue, geological formations, and topographic maps. Inevitably, I wondered if a system could be extrapolated from it to generate variations, and I soon found a path forward.

It’s a tale told in two parts: The opening section follows a city worker who becomes obsessed with a recurring starburst pattern he sees hidden everywhere around him, even in traffic grids. He eventually joins with other believers, forming a kaffeeklatsch-cult that’s soon undone by greed and hubris.

The second half follows a group of 10 preteen boys who discover a strange machine that produces small funnels, which in turn can be used to build increasingly agile robotlike creatures. As their creations grow in power and size, the kids’ friendships begin to splinter and they’re forced to confront another group of creature-builders. The movie ends with a massive last-minute reveal, set deep in the cosmos, suggesting that everything we’ve just seen was directed by forces outside the characters’ control.

Wired

My design goal was simple: A person can walk up, play with a MIDI controller, see a resulting image on a screen, and then send the image to a pen plotter. The plotter draws their unique drawing, and they can take it home and frame it.

...Typically, Generative Art is fully autonomous, and a pseudo-random number generator is called to create a randomized set of parameters. For AAS, I intended to pluck out the randomness and insert user controls.

I evaluated a few options for input devices. I landed on the Intech Grid series MIDI controllers for their simplicity and modularity. Meant to be snapped together, these controllers offered the correct number of inputs to encourage playful exploration without being overwhelming.

In the four years since [Darl Koopersmith and Wilson Miner's Designing accessible color systems post], Stripe has stretched those colors to the limit. The design system’s resilience through massive growth is a testament to the team’s original approach, but last year we started to see the need for a more flexible, scalable, and inclusive color system. This meant both an expansion of our color palette and a rethinking of how we generate and apply these colors to accommodate our still-growing products.

This essay will take you through my attempts to solve these problems. Through this process, I’ve created a tool for generating expressive, functional, and accessible color systems for any design system. I’ll share the full code of my solution at the end of the essay; it represents not just a technical solution but a philosophical shift in how we think about color in design systems, emphasizing the balance between creativity and inclusivity.

In Ulam's Coral Reef automaton, the rule of transition is that a cell is ON in the next generation if the following three conditions are met:

1. It borders (in the von Neumann neighborhood) one and only one newly occupied cell, where "newly occupied" means the cell came ON only in the current generation.
2. It must not touch (in the Moore neighborhood) an old occupied cell, where "old" means a cell that came ON prior to the current generation.
3. Among all cells that would qualify to come ON by conditions (1) and (2), eliminate those that would touch each other (in the Moore neighborhood).

The series of scribbles I’ve generated here is obviously nowhere near the level of sophistication of artificial intelligence. But it does live somewhere in the uneasy realm of computers pretending to be human. We’ll all be living in that realm eventually. Here’s hoping that against the odds, it’s a harmonious one.

Oscillations - Harmony - Minimalism - Multitude

No winners, no losers, and no end — the Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is no ordinary computer game. Created by British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970, Life debuted in Scientific American, where it was hailed as the key to a new area of mathematical research, the field of cellular automata. Less of a game than a demonstration of logical possibilities, Life is based on simple rules and produces patterns of light and dark on computer screens that reflect the unpredictability, complexity, and beauty of the universe.

This fascinating popular science journey explores Life's relationship to concepts in information theory, explaining the application of natural law to random systems and demonstrating the necessity of limits. Other topics include the paradox of complexity, Maxwell's demon, Big Bang theory, and much more.

The effect is achieved by:

1. placing dots on random positions on the canvas and giving them a random velocity in a random direction.
2. on each animation frame: calculate the distance between each dot. If it is below a certain threshold, draw a line between the dots.