Art from Code: A Response to Grace Hertlein

Generative art refers to art that has, in some way, has been created with the use of an autonomous system, or in the computer art lens, an increment or property of randomness, to create a soft organic effect.The term generative art is predominantly used in reference to a certain kind of art made on the net, particularly because artists devise programs that can be accessed and controlled by the public. Generative art is also associated with process art. Through generative art one can create a entire scene through a series of simple and light lines, the presence of noise or lack that of that the lines create. Grace Hertlein was one of the forces who pushed for the acceptance of this idea  even though the traditional minded community pushed against it. “Grace reported that she was called a “whore” and “traitor” by a fellow artist, who saw her choice of medium as morally questionable and as a complete rejection of authentic artistic traditions.  Graces work unlike others of her time used the idea of noise from randomness to essentially mimic nature with simple random features allowing for variation in figure and form.

For my first sketch, I was inspired by interactions between animals and elements. Such as birds interaction with air, worms interaction with dirt, and so forth. What I finally chose however was the presence of light and how it interacts with animals such as moths or bats which my sketch could both represent depending on the sketches. I also utilized mouse interaction and incremented mousex and mousey as the scale of the bats and their relative to their opacity to the human eye in order to try to make it more similar  to a “3D scene layout,” rather than a 2D sketch.

For my second artwork, I looked at flowers, not the flowers but florets or the center of the flower, I was drawn to the florets rather than petals because i felt that the patterns within them, we much more intricate than the patterns of flowers and and resemble techniques similar to grace Hertlein. The floret of the flower parallels to the line techniques used by Hertlein to create noise, each overlap of lines represents the location where a seed is stored.  I created this by using multiple curves with a variety of stroke widths. Some curves have had a light pink fill to represent the holding location of the the seeds. Then to create a overlap I rotated the curves rotate(millis()/100.0); to have a constant rotation, and translate(offset, -sin(-millis()/1000.0)*100); to keep expanding it and have multiple layers. I added green and light green to connect it to plants, since from my psychology class I learned about how society colors have indoctrinated forms, shapes and images they connect it to, I thought that it would add to the resemblance to nature in serve as a visible contrast between the vibrant unnatural like colors of the floret pod. I also used a variety of opacities to help the illusion of a large amount of pods. This is one of my final sketches that really uses randomness to its advantage although only as one increment. In this case I used this to allow the variation of point a’s equivalent, which varied from 300,500, This way a new floret will be produced each time the sketch is played.

For my last response to Hertlein I wanted something colorful, but yet abstract. My goal was to connect a form and color pattern of different dissociated things and try to have them flow together. For the color scheme  I looked at the the natural phenomenon of the northern lights of An aurora.  I was so drawn to this because of the gratuity of the color and the repetition of the elongation of the  pattern movement. For the form, I looked at the idea of “popular representation” of dna, Although it strays a bit from Hertlein’s traditional works, I wanted to connect the two expressing this typically seamless looking illusion with a series of lines Hertlein reflecting lines on a vertical linear axis.  To create the form I rotated ellipses of random width and height, with the random factor with caps ranging from up to 100 or a little as 20 to create multiple I simply duplicated and translated them.

For the color I  had to incremented r and g as aspects of the rgb color, allowing the color to gradually shift in all three aspects while stilling connecting to aspects  from the green spectrum,blue spectrum, pink spectrum,yellow spectrum,

Author: Olivia Odom-Johnson