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Generative Art


I stumbled onto programming by accident when I was searching for a major to study. I’d never thought about being in this medium but I always let myself get carried away by opportunities. The same thing happened when it came to generative art.

Generative art refers to art pieces created by an autonomous system (non-human). In this context, it has to independently determine features of an artwork; it may not be artificial intelligence but more of an algorithm that generates patterns depending on situations or “cases”. Sometimes it can interact with humans or the ambient around it (weather, materials, other robots, etc.).

One day, a friend told me that he was going to be involved in an experimental music event for the first time and he asked me if I wanted to do visuals for the show. I said yes and I started looking for ways to act as a VJ (Video Jockey).

I looked for software that could help me mix videos in a live projection (Video Mapping), but only found expensive software. After a while, I found an open source framework called PureData and decided to search for tutorials and examples in order to make my way through all the raw knowledge.

Months later, the event was around the corner and I had only a weird patch that I’ve never tried on stage. I setup my gear and, through a process of trials and errors, I ended up making live visuals generated by my laptop. That was the moment I knew I’d found something that I could really get into.

After years of compiling a ton of information and creating a loads of video material, I started doing shows and creating multimedia artwork as an artist collective under the name Beluga.

This has become an entire art movement with academic foundations, there’s Generative Art fairs, museums, interactive shows, even art biennales like The Wrong, promoting artists all over the world.

Sometimes we think about coding and think that its only purpose is to create systems or automatization tools, but there's other possibilities to coding. Tools and frameworks might exist for many objectives but generative art is different, fun, creative. You can make interesting things with it, might be as a form of expression, maybe about what's happening around you, and make others think about what you are trying to say.

There are many types of generative art genres and mediums: Generative Music, Visual art, Software art, Architecture, Literature, Live Coding, NetArt, Video Game art, and other more.

My contribution to generative art:

Regina’s Drawings

A robot that draws random images forever and at the same time uploads the images.

Ojos

Generative art that reflects on P2P (peer to peer) device surveillance, and other common devices, these practices are more than questionable due to their invasive and violent nature.


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