“from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved” – Charles Darwin
Since graduating from ITP – NYU in 2015, I have been meaning to revisit a generative art project I worked on while in graduate school. Over the past few months, I did just that culminating in a new print line – Generative Spirograph art prints! These prints are currently available for purchase as a limited release.
It’s been fun transforming this project from an animation I programmed while in grad school to a physical print years later drawn using an Axidraw drawing machine!
This print line is the result of a 100 day project I documented on Instagram. You can follow me on Instagram @dirtalleydesign where I continue to post a new generative spirograph design several days a week.
What the heck is generative art? Or Processing?
Generative art is art that is created programmatically. Processing is a programming environment many artists use that is based in the Java programming language. Processing makes it easy to make changes to a “sketch” or program, and visually see what is happening. Processing also has a lot of programming power!
However, many artists also use JavaScript and the Javascript library, p5.js to power their generative art sketches on the web.
Why create generative art?
Creating art programmatically allows you to make endless permutations of a design, to create work that has a high level of precision involved, or to create art that is interactive and infinite.
Generative spirographs
Traditional spirographs are created manually using plastic gears and a pen (and which many of us growing up in the nineties knew and loved!) The spirographs I am making are created from a program I wrote that draws circles rotating around a central point.
However, the placement of the circles is determined by the frequency and amplitude of waveforms (trigonometry, anyone?) With manual spirographs, a user is limited in what shapes they can create based on the shape of the gears themselves. My program is not limited in this way!
It’s All About Waveforms – and Mathematical Curves
Spirographs are part of a family of mathematical curves called hypotrochoids – curves created by tracing a point on a radius of a circle. My program creates similar curves by drawing circles rotating around a central point, where the placement of the circles is modulated by waveforms. Since waveforms repeat constantly, they are great for generating patterns.
Pure waveforms can be created using trigonometry – sine, cosine and tangent calculations for instance, many of which are built-in functions in Processing. The waveform frequency (number of times the waveform repeats in time), and amplitude (the size of the waveform) determines the design, in conjunction with the shapes being drawn.
A small selection of these designs are now available to purchase as prints on my Dirt Alley Design website! Each spirograph is drawn on paper using an Axidraw drawing machine (otherwise known as a pen plotter) and a variety of pens.
