Works and writings

MCB_00019

Blog archive: McCabeism: turning noise into a thing of beauty (2011)

If you’ve seen any real­ity zoo/wild-life pro­gram you’ll rec­og­nize this. Five min­utes into the show you’re con­fronted with a wounded, mag­nif­i­cent ani­mal, held in cap­tiv­ity so its care­tak­ers can nur­ture and feed it. And inevitably, after three com­mer­cial breaks, they release it, teary-eyed, back into the wild.

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Short note: choice

Choices, the core of generative art, the code making decisions instead of the artist. The artist relinquishing control.

What is choice?

Double pendulum

Short note: determinism and predictability

Recently, during an online discussion about generative art, determinism, emergence, and the like, I felt like we were running in circles. The problem seemed to be different interpretations of “predictability” and it’s relationship to determinism.

Division 2009

Blog archive: Division (2009)

From my very first steps with processing, I’ve always been fas­ci­nated by the divi­sion of space, vol­umes and sur­faces. In ret­ro­spect, many of my con­structs can be seen as explo­rations of this theme.

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Books

I’ve spend some time delving into my shelves to collect the books that shaped my creative coding practices. Some of them I wholly internalized, others merely served as a source for a useful snippet or two. I present them here as a nebulous cloud, not as a curriculum, because that’s the way I experienced them. …

Walking: modularity in creative coding

Spaghetti code is great! For many of us writing creative coding in Processing, starting with a simple idea and progressively adding layer and layer of complexity and functionality is a familiar workflow. It’s also a source of unexpected emergent features, what others would call bugs or mistakes *eyeroll*. The tangled messes we code…

Sun and broken crystal

This year, I was given a most wonderful Father’s Day gift, a draft, technical pen on tracing paper, that my father made in 1960 as part of his graduation as a “technisch ingenieur”, industrial engineer.

Cracking

Ages ago, 2006 or so, I came across a small book, Pamphlet Architecture 27: Tooling by Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch. It described several generative, parametric systems. One of the recipes is shown here, cracking. In this post we’ll build a generative system in Processing to explore the idea.

Li(n)e

The last few months, I spent quite some time in one-on-one conversations on Twitter and Instagram with people looking for help on something they want to try with creative coding. Often, these conversations start with the same questions, what courses to follow, what books to read, what learning path to follow?

The wrong way to use a signed distance function (sdf)

Signed distance functions (sdf) are a staple of shader and raytracing code. This article shows a way to abuse sdfs for fun and profit*.

*mileage may vary

Reading an .obj file in Processing

One of the most useful skills in creative coding is reading all kinds of data and files. And reading Wavefront .obj files in Processing is definitely one of the more fun applications.

generation

Generation (2021/2019/2013)

Is there more to generative art than wallpaper generators?

unKeats-01

unKeats (2016)

Excerpt from Lamia by John Keats

Fukushima

Fukushima Safecast visualization (2015)

Part of the raw data-visualizations made for a video artwork Sievert Rising by Frederik De Wilde

Vooruit100

Creative Coding Playground – 100 years Vooruit, Ghent (2013)

Counters coded for the Creative Coding Playground at the Vooruit, Ghent, a celebratory piece for its 100th birthday.

trinity

Trinity (2010)

Complexity, evolution, homeostasis

Videos

28 black cubes unfolding into colorful shapes and refolding back

Desync 28 x 10 (2021)

image

Chromatom six (2021)

We live on the surfaces (2020)

Space colonization with depth-of-field effect, white lines on black

Charting (2020)

Space colonization with depth-of-field effect, white lines on black

Mote 2 (2020)

Rings of light dots projecting on teh surface of a broken cylinder

Scanlines 2 (2020)

Rings of light dots projecting on the surface of a shattered sphere, white on black

Scanlines (2020)

2019-11-27 16_37_47-sketch_191126b

Angelis (2019)

neo-Angelis 2018

Neo-Angelis – a continuous rotation (2018)

dark Angelis 2018

Angelis – Dark (2018)

comSigilFramelessCMYK

Com Sigil – Frameless CMYK (2018)

Com Sigil Pattern In Absence

Com Sigil – Pattern in Absence (2018)

comSigil

Com Sigil (2018)

myMindIsTheSkyAtNight

My mind is the sky at night – Nebular version (2018)

vorscape Fracture

Vorscape – Fracture (2016)

vorscape Grid

Vorscape – Grid (2016)

Archives

Twitter archive (2022, part III)

Twitter archive: the first Midjourney months (2022)

Twitter archive (2022, part II)

Twitter archive (2022, part I)

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Twitter archive (2021, part IV)

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Twitter archive (2021, part III)

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Twitter archive (2021, part II)

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Twitter archive (2021, part I)

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Twitter archive (2020, part II)

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Twitter archive (2020, part I)

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Twitter archive (2019)

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Twitter archive (2018)

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Twitter archive (2017)

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Instagram archive (2022, part I)

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Instagram archive (2021, part II)

Instagram archive (2021, part I)

Instagram archive (2020)

Instagram archive (2019)

Instagram archive (2018)

Instagram archive (2017)

Instagram archive (2012-2016)

Flickr archive (2007-2015)

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Iso: plot archive (2022)

Iso: plot archive (2021)

Iso: plot archive (2020)

Iso: plot archive (2019)

Iso: plot archive (2018)

Generative dice: Twitter archive (2019-2020)