Sun Jun 23, 2013
I wrote another program in Processing to explore Perlin noise. Creative coding feels like an indirect technique for producing art. I build tools that create for me. The result can be sound, an image, a movie or something else.
I never know what exactly I will get, and this for me is part of the beauty. The result combines randomness with expected attributes. In this case for instance I do not know where shapes will be placed, or what colors will be used. I only know the general feeling of it. I know the image will contain curves of a certain thickness that diverge and converge in specific ways. I also know the kind of elements that will be missing: straight lines, text, squares or circles, to name a few.
One could say I’m a curator, since I decide which images are good enough and which ones get thrown away. At the same time, I’m imagining and creating a tool that produces something for me. I wonder then, who the artist is: the one who writes the program or the one who generates the image? I find it fun to think that the program is the artist, when it’s me who decides how the program works. If the program is the artist, I determine how his brain thinks.
This brain, made of lines of code, does not run all by itself. I observe it and adjust it while it creates. It continuously adds new curves to the canvas without any help, but I decide when it’s the right time for a new layer, how dark old layers should become, and when the image is ready.
I think the program is an extension of myself. It’s a tool I produce that allows me to extend my creative abilities.