Don’t you just love the serendipity of the web? Two things have been on my mind recently:
- I joined the flickr 365 Days project where members take a self portrait every day for a year. Many use it to improve their photography or photoshopping skills. I’m treating it as an exercise in archiving and self exploration and presentation (i.e. I hope my efforts will be something I can look back on in later years as an interesting journal of how my year went aged 43/44).
- I’ve been reading “This is Your Brain on Music: Understanding a Human Obsession” by Daniel Levitin that Kate got me as a birthday present. I’m enjoying it, and I really like the cover which seems to combine paint splats to symbolise creativity, plant forms to symbolise beauty, a silhouette to reference the human brain, and data visualization like arcs to symbolise algorithmic complexity. It also seems to capture one of the current visual Zeitgeists I see in lots of design work.
So I’ve been looking out for ways to algorithmically draw a similar background so that I can make one of my daily portraits a similar silhouette. So I was excited this morning when my daily flick through ffffound unearthed this great piece of generative art:
‘Cyl 0149 150×100’ by Marius Watz which lead in turn to his two amazing blogs. The first, Art from code – Generator.x, is all about “the current role of software and generative strategies in art and design” and looks like an amazing resource of news, inspiration, and code. The second CODE & FORM: COMPUTATIONAL AESTHETICS is a blog supporting Watz’s coding and teaching activities and contains tantalising entries like this recent round up of computational typography: http://workshop.evolutionzone.com/2008/11/18/exercise-computational-typography/
Tim's Zen Blog of Sparseness 