Food for thought. I’ve definitely spent some time in what felt like procedurally-generated architecture — some of which seemed to have some bugs in it, where the algorithm created spaces that made no sense. And yet they were built by human hands… discuss?
Top: from comments, Procedural System Structure, as discovered by Joahnsonn. http://proceduralcity.com/ as powered by NVIDIA PhysX and OpenGL
Bottom: Introversion’s engine builds what looks like generic European cities. Lots of discussion on the Introversion forums: It’s all in your head, Part 7
Wow, it’s Milklovano, from the former Soviet satellite nation you’ve forgotten, recreated in all its gritty blandness!
Wait, actually, Introversion is from the UK…
Wow, it’s Nortchesterhampton, recreated in all its gritty blandness!
Seriously, really quite brilliant work making this function - and it says a lot about what could be generated procedurally for art as well as games (to say nothing of game art).
We already knew Introversion had some serious game design chops from their gorgeously minimal game Darwinia. Now, can we play Darwinia in a city?
Shamus Young’s “Pixel City” feels like flying in a helicopter into the art from Ghost in the Shell, or discovering a metropolis inside your computer. The latest work from an undiscovered YouTube talent, the software itself will be released under an open source license. I don’t need to tell you this could inspire other experiments for urbanist visualists wanting to work with real-time landscapes.
It’s also interesting that the process itself becomes part of the artwork: it’s by understanding how each element is pieced together that you really connect to the meaning of the whole.
This is a demonstration of a program I wrote to generate and fly through a dynamically generated city. You can read the step-by-step of how it was made at my website:
Artist Lia has created her first piece of art for the iPhone and iPod touch, something called PhiLia 01. It’s a quirky, gorgeous generative sound and visual app activated by movement, one that encourages users to save their own artwork.
Composer Morton Subotnik used to talk really eloquently back in the days of multimedia CD-ROMs and The Voyager Company about computers as “chamber music” environments. Instead of seeing the personal scale of technology as an impediment, he viewed it as something intimate and wonderful. So it’s fantastic to see artists engage mobile platforms as a way to have that relationship with a participant.
There’s now also a page up that is beginning to collect some of these particular artworks, focusing on generative-style interactive creations, and featuring work by our friend Memo Akten. Joshua Davis’ kaleidoscopic artmaking tool Reflect, which he showed for the first time at OFFF earlier this month in Lisbon, is enroute.
The way in which these tools are being created is interesting, too. PhiLia is built in OpenFrameworks, the open source C++-based development tool made friendlier for artists with integrated toolsets, a community of friendly creative folk, and simplified, speedy syntax similar to Processing. OpenFrameworks, thanks to its open source nature, has made its way onto the iPhone.
Part of what this demonstrates is that, while the iPhone itself is proprietary, some of the power of open source can still triumph. And, indeed, by basing work on this open source foundation, these same artists aren’t imprisoned by a single platform. PhiLia could be a desktop app, or on other mobile platforms once they support OpenFrameworks.
And, yes, it means I’m aching that much harder to get OpenFrameworks and/or Processing onto Android – it should be possible. (Java on Android is not identical to Java on desktop, so it can’t be a direct port – you can’t just install Processing on Android – but it is possible.) There are also still some wrinkles in the App Store approval process; it really is refreshing on Android (and presumably things like Palm WebOS) not to have those restrictions.
Then again, that’s the whole point: OS and specific platform shouldn’t have to matter, and open source software – and artwork – can be just as brilliant on a proprietary platform as an open one.
You can thank Lee Byron, Memo Akten, Damian Stewart, Zach Gage, and the core OF team (Zach, Theo, and Arturo). The “power of open source” is not some sort of magical whirlwind that surrounds code and makes things appear spontaneously – it’s blood, sweat, and tears (unpaid!) by real people. Although, if you get those real people together in a room and do some sort of battle shout or Care Bear Stare (sorry, I’m an 80s kid), it might help psych you up.
As visualists, the sad truth is we have a poorer sense of the history of our medium than musicians. Part of this is simply a lack of access. YouTube is a weak substitute, but it’s a start. In that spirit, Karl (Format K) sends us the minimal geometric machinations of pioneering electronic graphics artist and animator John Whitney. We’ve previous mentioned the role of Whitney and Larry Cuba in helping the modern computer graphics industry to be born – with a little help from a movie called Star Wars. Here, you get a real sense of an artist working within the restrictions of the technology to produce something beautiful. It’s a chance to recognize how we’re indebted to this kind of work. While the temptation may be to replicate effects like this with more modern tools, they also illustrate how you can focus on a technique within a tool – and perhaps there’s a digital equivalent of focusing on artistic limitations.
The musical score turns this into a dream collaboration, with the work of Terry Riley.
It’s nice to have access to this, but boy, would I love to have an HD-quality rendition of many of these films available for download or on a high-quality medium like Blu-Ray. Any chance a modern-day Voyager would re-release seminal visualist work from decades past?
Fractal-generating software was once all the rage. But fractal geometry is as compelling and organic as ever. And newly-released Fractice software is not only free, but has some unique features that make it worth a look – particularly real-time control for live visuals – and that bring fractal software into the year 2009:
Anti-aliasing
Deep zoom (a natural feature for fractals)
Multicore and distributed processing
Movie recording
Live visual controls: mixing, mirroring, origin motion, palette tweening, dual-monitor support, and MIDI
Where this gets even more interesting is that our friend Jeff Mission, maker of the generative, Wiimote-controllable software WiiWhorld, has written scripts allowing you to control Fractice with gestures on your Nintendo Wii remote. The video at top shows what happens when you blend Fractice as a background layer with Jeff’s own generative creations in WiiWhorld.
Jeff writes:
We’ve had a lot of fun working on this over the past several months, and putting it through its paces at some local events. Like Chris’ other software, it’s open-source and free to all.
I’d still like to see people push fractals in different aesthetic directions, but I find this fascinating, nonetheless. Curious to see what folks do with it.
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