Creative Coding

Written by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory This read discusses how new media, like computer technology, is constantly evolving yet simultaneously back-peddling towards what would be know as a "bleeding edge of obsolesce". Normally, I questioned "what is new media?", yet the author suggests more appropriate questions such as "what was new media?" and "what will new media become?"... The "new" in "new media" suggests that what is new will one day become old, however, this is not the case with new media; as new media is almost the same yesterday as it is today, as stated by the author. This leads me to assume, due to the constant  storing and evolution of new media, it could not possibly become old despite the age of any such media; as "old" media found today is rediscovered as "new" media, which is a constant cycle of repetition. I found this interesting, as archi...

Written by Morten Søndergaard Article: The Politics of Big Data Aesthetics This read focused on investigating big data aesthetics as a relatively new concept; with the purpose of the article to investigate the theoretical complexes that might help describe and analyse big data aesthetics from different perspectives, these perspectives being: Conceptualisations of control on the internet Sensibilities in ubiquitous environments  In art interventions Conceptual beauty As well as theoretical positions: Media studies Empirical analysis Art studies  Social constructives   Media aesthetics or post-Kantian phenomenology  The article then continues by discussing elements of big data that can be perceived as controversial culturally and socially; with things such as "surveillance, ubiquitous marketing and tracking, the environment, industry and globalisation". As such complexities lead people to believe that meditations of big data is "bypas...

Written by Geoff Cox, Alex McLean, Adrian Ward Aesthetics are broadly defined as pertaining to material things perceptible by the senses The aesthetic value of code lies within its execution, not just its form, to appreciate generative code, first the actions of the code must be understood as well as the experience of the action. In this read I enjoyed how the author(s) compared and closely related the art of poetry to code; how code can be written as a form of poetry, or at least this was my interpretation of the read. "By analogy, generative code has poetic qualities, as it does not operate in a single moment in time and space but as a series of consecutive 'actions' that are repeatable, the outcome of which might be imagined in different contexts." An example given: if ((light eq dark) && (dark eq light) && ($blaze_of_night{moon} == black_hole) && ($ravens_wing{bright} == $tin{bright})){ my $love = $you = $sin{darkness} + 1;...

Complexity Theory as Context for Art Theory There are many clusters of contemporary generative art activity: Electric Music and Algorithmic Composition Computer Graphics and Animation The Demo Scene and VJ Culture Industrial Design and Architecture   Generative art can be explored through is abstract meaning of "generative" and "art"; generative art is art, "generative" being a subset of art, meaning multiple results can be produced by using some kind of generating system. So, the defining factor of generative art is that the artist must be using some sort of system with a set of language rules, a computer program which has a degree of autonomy resulting in an art-work. Throughout this reading, I was most intrigued when studying the difference between chaotic systems and random systems. The study explained the separation between the two, chaotic systems being complex and difficult to predict over time, yet they still consist of structure; r...

Loop and Function Today's reading was from Software Studies on Loops and Functions, here is just a quick brief on what I read and learned from the reading . When reading about loops, I was slightly confused due to how loops were being discussed/explained, as I am familiar with loops in programming languages such as C# and JavaScript/Java, but page 179 of Software Studies was discussing loops in ways I was not familiar with or understood. The loop in this instance was said to denote a vast chain of beginnings; iterators, GO-TO statements with passing arguments, count-controlled loops, condition-controlled loops, collection controlled loops, tail-end recursion, enumerators, continuations, generators, or lambda forms. I did understand that a loop only needs one opportunity in a run-time to become infinite and a loop is a loop inside another. Next onto page 181, a loop was described to haphazardly diverge into two branches: iteration, in which "a collection of instruction...

To improve my understanding in learning to basics, the very fundamentals of programming using p5 libraries, we were tasked with creating basic characters using code, with some experimentation if feeling comfortable or adventurous with coding in JavaScript. Designing a character At first I had no idea of what to create, an ideal idea was to make a fox, using ellipses and triangles, but creating a triangle was a bit of a hassle; it required coordinating each point of the triangle, which confused me... I then drew a character on paper, this was so I had a rough idea of what I was going for in terms of appearance. Its pretty hard to make-out what it is, but it was meant to resemble a reindeer, a poorly drawn reindeer. I was going to pursue to whole "fox" idea, but I decided to go with something festive, and a reindeer was perfect! Creating the character! Creating the reindeer was simple; all I had to do is use several ellipses, lines, and arches. It still took ...