It's done exclusively through programming. I also don't use Photoshop, or Illustrator, or anything like that. I'm just writing a program that needs to draw something interesting. I'm not doing any sort of image processing. There's no data set that I'm working with here. Like most generative artists, I'm starting from a blank canvas, here. I think both of these are from last year (2016), and a couple more from this year (2017). To give you an idea of the sort of artwork that I make, I'll show you a few images. Basically, generative artwork has all of the fun, exciting parts of programming, and it doesn't have any of the parts that you get paid for. Nobody's nitpicking my variable names, or white space. I was lucky enough to switch over to being an artist full-time earlier this year.Īs an aside, I have to say programming artwork is way, waaay more fun that programming a database. A few years later now, I've made maybe 500 pieces of generative artwork. I didn't even really know that it existed, at the time. I stumbled my way into the world of generative artwork. I looked around to figure out what skills I could bring to bear on my artwork, and programming was the most obvious option for me. A few years ago, I decided to try and take artwork a little bit more seriously.

Some of you may have used that, and I apologize for any bugs that you hit. I worked for many years on an opensource distributed database called Apache Cassandra. To give you a little bit of background about myself, I have a traditional programming background.

I think it's particularly interesting for programmers because it takes a mindset that we all developed when we learned how to program, and it applies it to an analysis of the visual world around us, and also to how we can create visual artwork. Thank you very much for coming out! I'm really excited to talk to you about a topic that I find incredibly fascinating, which is generative artwork, or writing programs that generate artwork.

Layers hack for MS paint