generative art

Endless Forms Most Beautiful – Generative Spirograph Prints

November 19, 2019 by michellechandra in Generative Design

“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? → Read more

Music Visualizing Experimenting with P5 and JavaScript

July 25, 2014 by michellechandra in Data Visualization, JavaScript

Summer break is almost over! Hard to believe. I went to Eyeo 2014 in Minneapolis in June, visited Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons, and since then, have been hanging out in California teaching myself JavaScript.

I have also been working on a music visualization project with Jason Sigal inspired by star trail photography. The visualization uses p5.js, a JavaScript animation library being developed by Lauren McCarthy and based on Processing, and a sound library Jason is developing for p5 based on the Web Audio API.

musicvisualizer2

Progress on the music visualization has been tediously slow as I have been teaching myself JavaScript in parallel to developing the project. I have been learning JavaScript through a mix of online readings, Lynda videos, and JavaScript workshops held by Girl Develop It San Francisco.

Thankfully, the visualization is finally starting to have a musical quality! The small size of these screenshots dosen’t quite do justice to all the beautiful details of the music visualization. Each ring of circles represents one frequency wave being analyzed via FFT. The size of the circles and color transparency is mapped to the volume of the song. The rings of circles are built over the course of the song, “painting” musically in a sense.

I like the ripply distortion affected to the ring of circles by the changes in the music. For next steps, I want to have the visuals change to beat detection as well as volume, will finesse the colors, and work on emphasizing the distortion to the visuals, and think about more patterns to create beyond radial.

An earlier screenshot of the visualization when it looked more like actual star trail photography (but was boring to watch as fairly static). Used background CSS gradients which faded out with jQuery (DOM manipulation JavaScript library):

Goal is to have this project finished and online by the end of August!

Generative Art and Processing

September 18, 2013 by michellechandra in Processing

I have two words for you: Generative Art

This week’s ICM course involved moving from a static, manual idea of Processing to animation and interaction. Not surprisingly, when Dan Shiffman began to show us different ways to create an interactive drawing, my initial reaction was : oooh! things move! shiny! colors! more! more! more!

Ziv Schneider and I met later in the week to discuss a complimentary collaboration for ICM. Luckily, Ziv came prepared having actually researched some pretty awesome examples of Generative Art as inspiration. In the context of my programming class, Generative Art is using Processing (programming language) to create artistic work (i.e. painting).

At the end of the day, I didn’t have much time so I decided play around with randomness, transparency and stroke weight to create painterly effects.

Here is my first attempt at building layers of color, thinking back to basic painting practices (the composition of the sketches is partially randomly generated): → Read more

Powered by WordPress - Built by ThemeShift