ALGORITHMIC ART

Mike Bedford demonstrates how you can exercise your left and right brain simultaneously by generating algorithmic art.

OUR EXPERT

Mike Bedford is firmly of a technical persuasion, yet has loved to exercise his more creative skills since he first got to grips with computer programming.

Art has been based on the Mandelbrot set, like this one generated using Fraqtive, just by zooming in and using imaginative colour schemes

I t has been suggested that creating artwork and computer programming are diametrically opposite. After all, art involves exercising creativity, while coding involves providing a fixed set of instructions that will be followed verbatim. More generally, the divide between the arts and the sciences is often considered unbridgeable. We’d beg to differ as, no doubt, Leonardo da Vinci would have done. As one of history’s best-known polyglots, his achievements included the painting of The Last Super, a mural that can be seen in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, his writings on a wide range of scientific disciplines including anatomy, botany, astronomy, mathematics and geology, plus his many inventions, perhaps most notably flying machines. With such an esteemed artist-cum-scientist as our inspiration, we feel more than justified in introducing you to the subject of creating art using a sequence of instructions. In some cases, we’re looking at how to do that using software that others have created, but if you are itching to write code yourself, we look at how you can do so to create your own unique algorithmic art.

The early days

It seems that, in most cases, the early days of computer-generated art involved very little in the way of creativity. By the early ’70s, pen plotters and primitive vector graphics terminals were starting to become mainstream, and programmers were keen to investigate the opportunities on offer. Of course, serious uses included plotting experimental results as graphs and creating engineering drawings, but as a first step to learning about this technology, students often experimented with basic geometric manipulations. And, as soon became clear, simple programs could produce some eye-catching designs.

Despite its simplicity, variants of this polyspiral, typical of the early days of purely geometrical computer art, have created attractive art.

CREDIT: Byron Mayfield, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/

We imagine, many coders are creating much the same designs today. Indeed, we’ll look at one way of doing that – and going much further – when we delve into the Processing programming language. As an example of this early form of computer-generated art, though, we present an example of a polyspiral (above), which can be generated with very few lines of code. Is it art? Barely, although we have come across a variant on the theme comprising a matrix of similar polyspirals in a range of different colours, which might not look out of place framed and hanging on a wall. As a case in point, we should mention the geometric Islamic art – symmetry, tessellation and all – that adorns many of the world’s great mosques.