Generative art

Serendipitously, I happened across blouseybrown's blip today (I look at her blips occasionally but I didn't follow her -- I do now!). She's doing a Futurelearn course called Creative Coding. Her blog made it  sound interesting, so I went to have a look, and before I knew what was happening I'd signed up. It started a week ago, but I hoped I could use my geek skills to catch up quickly.

I'd never even heard of creative coding till today -- read blouseybrown's blip/blog to find out more. I haven't written a single line of creative code yet. This isn't only because Orange decided to slow our broadband connection to dialup speed so I couldn't do any work or watch any of the videos and had to go out for a walk instead. When I got back matters had improved and I got absorbed in the examples of generative art -- art generated by means of lists of instructions, which actually predates modern computers -- and in the discussion about who the artist/creator is in this case.

I suppose I'd taken for granted that you can produce visual art in this way, but I hadn't realised it would work for music as well -- see the video of a work by Cornelius Cardew. All fascinating stuff!

The few photos I took on my walk were rubbish, so I decided to feed one through a computer program in the form of a Photoshop filter, and this is the result. So I guess it's a collaborative work between me and whoever created the filter.