Originally posted on Substack
“Create with the heart; build with the mind.” - Criss Jami
Good Morning!
I’ve been wondering, “What is creativity and where does it come from?” Are we wired with certain default, “inspirations” of ideas that generate the corpus we have come up with today? I think of Carl Jung’s story archetypes and it would seem that there is evidence for a collective conscience.
Yet, we still need to ask, are there entirely new ideas that have never been thought or created?
- colors that we have yet to have been seen
- ideas beyond science fiction that have never been thought
- realms of discovery that have yet to conceive
I don’t have an answer.
Through reading, I did come across the quote above and I think it helps bring the abstract word of “creativity” one level deeper. (I am sure there are many more) by parsing it into three interrelated concepts.
The conception or imagining of an idea.
- the idea and inspiration of an idea or the what of any piece of work.
The motivation behind an idea.
- the excitement or reason or the why of an idea.
And the “build” aspect of an idea.
- The medium, the techniques, the process of printing the medium on a page. (or screen, or stone, or building, etc). The how in creating a piece of work.
So how does this help or why is it important?
As one who enjoys creating, I think that it is easy to get hung up in the build aspect of creativity. What framework should I use; is C++ or Java or Python better? All of these questions can impede us from being able to be creative.
And that goes for all aspects as well.
You might have an idea, and want the idea to be perfect letting the little gremlins of doubt bleed your will to build. A cause you want to convey, (a.k.a. global warming, think Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”) your passion has overflown with emotion and letting emotion drive leaving no room for building to commemorate the passion.
Taking these elements in equal measures help define the meaning of creativity that makes sense to me. Without either of these three components, we end up either not creating or simply mimicking things around us without any injection of the pure creative process.
NEWS: Upcoming Conversation w/ Tyler Hobbs
This week I have finished a wonderful conversation with Tyler Hobbs talking about inspiration, crypto art, and a bit on the artistic process. There is plenty of editing still left so it may be a couple of weeks before I have it completed. But I am excited to share with you the amazing conversations we had. In the meantime, you can check out some of the essays he has on social media, intellectualism in generative art, and color.
Genuary 2021 Week 2 Highlights
For this week the above artists were some of my favorites for the week. Piter Pasma, Loackme, Vernon Miller, and Varun Vachar.
I can’t believe that it’s been already two weeks into Genuary. It keeps going too quickly but it is never too late to participate. Even if you go for one or two submissions, the great thing about it is the point is to encourage the creation and practice of creating generative art.
Inspirations
🖌️ Unconventional Media
60,000 Bees Recreate the Nefertiti Bust and Other Classic Sculptures in Wax with Artist Tomáš Libertíny
Tomáš Libertíny prefers to collaborate when recreating iconic busts and sculptures, although his chosen partners don’t join him in the studio. The Slovakia-born artist tasks tens of thousands of bees with forming the porous outer layers of classic artworks like the “Nefertiti Bust,” Michelangelo’s “Brutus,” and a large jug based on the “Nolan amphora” at The Met.
I love these type of projects; there is a little computational work to generate the form of the bust; but then the rest is done by bees. It’s pretty geometrical; however yet the process of using nature is always a beautiful thing to behold.
📸 Generative Graphics
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Just a simple and beautiful motion blurring effect and dance mixed together
Ambigrammatic Figures
Our initial attempt to implement Ambigrammatic Figures entailed the development of a custom generative adversarial network (GAN). This GAN was based on an introductory MNIST GAN, and trained from scratch on approximately 200 hand-selected face images. The GAN was algorithmically modified to generate faces that looked credible in both orientations. In particular, the GAN’s discriminator evaluated the generator’s output both upside-down and right-side-up, and produced a score that was a function of both. Unfortunately, the results of this technique were low-resolution, plagued by artifacts, and failed to converge well.
Just another interesting artistic application of deep learning by generating ambigrammatic faces.
Creative Algorithms - Generative Design & Creative Coding Art
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A showcase of generative, data-driven, interactive and real-time projects by designer and artist Patrik Hübner. Patrik, who is based in Germany, uses creative algorithms, data-driven design and artificial intelligence-based coding techniques to produce meaningful interactions of design, art and data.
🚤 Motion / AI / Sculpture
Helin
If an aesthetic object is created without any human purpose, do we witness an accidental product of nature or do we perceive new forms of artificial intentions?
This is an amazing AI model creating from historical busts to generate a digital model of a new image and then sculpted into rock. It just brings chills to my spine. A work of dozens of sculptures throughout history, locked into one sculpture is by far one of the most beautiful pieces I’ve seen in a while.
🔖 Articles and Tutorials
Generative Model Characters Using SVG
There are two things I love in this world: blobby shapes and putting googly eyes on things. This tutorial combines both of my great loves and hopefully provides a gentle introduction to generative art whilst doing so.
This is a fun little tutorial on generating little “blob” characters using SVG which has its own interesting characteristics.
Open Frameworks and Creative Coding w/ Zach Lieberman
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Rob and Jason are joined by Zach Lieberman, professor at MIT’s Media Lab and co-founder of the School for Poetic Computation. They first talk about Herb Sutter’s 2020 wrap up blog post and the ISO mailing from December 2020. Then Zach discusses Open Frameworks, a C++ toolkit he co-created 10 years ago for creative coding.
Another interview with Zach Lieberman and talks through OpenFrameworks
Procedural generation of tree models for use in computer graphics
The aim of the project is to build on the principles set out by Lindenmayer in order to procedurally generate realistic 3D models of trees, incorporating modern graphics techniques to enhance the output of conventional Lindenmayer systems. In addition to this more conventional approach, I hope to develop a similar tool using Weber and Penn’s parametric methodology. This will enable me to compare and contrast these two approaches and assess the merit of each.
Books
Coding Art
In this book you’ll learn to apply computation into the creative process by following a four-step process, and through this, land in the cross section of coding and art, with a focus on practical examples and relevant work structures. You’ll follow a real-world use case of computation art and see how it relates back to the four key pillars, and addresses potential pitfalls and challenges in the creative process. All code examples are presented in a fully integrated Processing example library, making it easy for readers to get started.