For informational purposes only
This is a fluid document, compiled from different notes/docs, originally started in ~2008, having grown slowly from my more general manifesto of that period and frequently been revised to help steer my own practice (the artistic parts) ever since.
All of the things listed here are "soft" guidelines & considerations, not an exhaustive set of hard rules! Various omissions and exceptions do exist, and the latter are explicitly encouraged! Yet, I do not imagine there'll be even minor agreement about these highly subjective, personal stances — in fact I'm very much expecting the opposite... So I'm also not publishing these bullet points to start any form of debate, but, after all these years, it's important for me to openly document how I myself have been approaching generative art projects, the topics & goals I've been trying to research & learn about, also including some of the hard lessons learned, in the hope some of these considerations might be useful for others too.
Since that list already has become rather long, there're also a bunch of other considerations & clarifications I've had to omit for now. Please keep that in mind when reading, and if some sections are maybe a little too brief/unclear...
A Physical Book makes a digitized book “physical” by rendering it in a simulated space where properties like gravity, friction, and velocity all apply. The program randomly perturbs the letters, then takes a snapshot at a point in time, re-assembling the images into a new, “un-digitized” book.
The raw, uncorrected scanned text of The Up-To-Date Sandwich Book: 400 Ways to Make a Sandwich (1909) is re-imagined as this 251 page (50,964 words) book:
A Physical Book uses the web-based game engine Phaser. Each page of the book is rendered into an invisible <div>
(to produce correct leading and line-height), then copied into the Phaser game world with each letter instantiated as a distinct addressable sprite.
For each page, one of a dozen transformations is applied to give the text varying physical properties, such as mass, acceleration, collision, or opacity.
On page load, the requested chapter number is rendered, the transformation is assigned, and the world is allowed to run. A Selenium wrapper script calls all 500 pages in succession, taking a screenshot at a random point in the animation:
The final book is rendered in a two-page spread PDF.
genoTyp is an experiment regarding fonts under genetic aspects. Their characteristics are encoded in hereditary factors. Different fonts can be mixed as desired and their genomes can be manipulated. New fonts are generated according to genetic rules.
Links to generative artworks
Blog of marius waltz
Open source creative software catalog