lithium flowers bloom

inspiration

Erik Natzke‘s generative drawing in Flash

Game Is Over from Erik Natzke on Vimeo.

manual mouse input + flash actionscript

Craig Mullins‘ digital painting

CCTV Ink TV Commercial – Directed by Niko Tziopanos

CCTV Ink TV Commercial – Directed by Niko Tziopanos from Troublemakers.tv on Vimeo.

proposal

I would like to create a generative piece that would be able to compose something similar to Natzke’s gesture drawing but with limited manual input. The goal is not to imitate traditional drawing in textures and strokes, but I do think I can learn from the lighting technique we see in a lot of Mullins’ works. It has to be apparently digital however I would like to try coding emotions into the piece. It would be a too ambitious project for one semester, but I have some smaller starting points to work from.

The final form of the machine should be an automated computer program living on the web. It feeds on its own observation and produces one drawing everyday and publishes it to the web. This process is not to mimick evolution nor to develop artificial intelligence, it would be just another representation of myself, since I would code it not to be a general purpose drawing machine that draws everything perfectly, but to draw in a style similar to myself.

It contains apparently a lot of different components requiring totally different background knowledge. I guess I will starting with building a custom stroke module that is more responsive to the gesture, the ink ad could be a nice example of such behavior. I’m not crazy about this ink effect, but it serves a good reference for the fine controls that I would probably need to build into the system.