While on the look out for generative or simulation-driven pieces, I found too many that I thought were interesting, so this post is rather full.

Generative Color Paintings

Two different approaches to generating digital paintings exploring color and pattern.

Watercolor Sediment

by Justin Livi

I think the results speak for themselves here. The watercolor effect is well done and the color variations are visually appealing. I don’t have much else to say, other than I’d love to have a wall-size print of one of these.

RGB Petri

by Jeremy Awon

[vimeo https://vimeo.com/699396]

First, this is simply fascinating to watch because the image grows outward from a single seed point. Second, the use of pixels as the fundamental “cell” leads to an interesting stylistic change at different scales. At the “normal” view, the result is very organic, almost a watercolor effect like in Justin Livi’s project. But when zoomed in, the images have a wonderful “retro videogame” feel (see examples here). I do wish there was a way to set the starting color in the applet or have multiple seed points; I think the red is too dominant after several images.

Both projects discovered via CAN.

MIT Media Lab Identity

by The Green Eyl and E Roon Kang

[vimeo https://vimeo.com/20488585]

I think this is a brilliant use of generative techniques. The designs are consistent and clearly fit together, yet each person associated with the lab is able to design their own personal version of the logo. I also like how the generation technique easily allows for animation of the logo in video. But what I find most interesting is how the the sparse use of geometry is able to integrate many different color schemes; while shape is most important in a logo, I’ve always assumed that color was almost as important. Appropriate that it was developed in Processing.

Word and Title Generation

Two projects working with generative text. The first is interesting on a conceptual level; the second is included because the results are so entertaining.

Random Word Machine

The random words are interesting because most are pronounceable and could be real words, but they would be decidedly strange if they were real. The machine seems to prefer infrequent letter combinations, which works well to make unique words, but also leads to things like “erbagwric” or “gonvexismy”. Also interesting is that many words seem to contain actual words or pre/postfixes. I find that reading these smaller words determines the meaning of the random words to some degree; “gonvexismy” must relate to confusion somehow.

Video Game Name Generator

This is pretty silly, but impressive in that the titles are both believable and completely ridiculous. There’s not much else to say, so I’ll end with some examples:

• Legendary Grizzly Bear Fever
• Professional Kangaroo Hunt
• Disturbing Karaoke II
• Biblical Monster Truck Assassins