{Shan, Shui}*

April 17, 2022 10:27 AM

Infinite procedurally generated Chinese landscape painting.

By Lingdong Huang. Previously: 文言文編程語言 A programming language for the ancient Chinese . Alternatively: fishdraw: procedurally generated fish drawings.

posted by smcg (11 comments total)

There's a pretty nice series of posts delving into the code behind the landscape generator that might be of interest as well. It's a fun project to jump into and play around with.
posted by protorp at 10:49 AM on April 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

I enjoyed that occasionally generated electrical transmission towers, pizza huts, and even a guy in his boat fishing on land.
posted by mystyk at 10:56 AM on April 17, 2022 [4 favorites]

He is such a talented artist and programmer. He recently joined the MIT Media Lab as a grad student, the λ-2D project there is him working on programming with drawings instead of text. There's a working demo; the UI is minimal but program / animated run is quite fun.
posted by Nelson at 10:56 AM on April 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

It scrolls for a bit and then you have to click to load the next part, is that where the procedural generation kicks in? Because I notice the first part was more... balanced, aesthetically. And then later you might get a lot of islands with empty space between them, or a section that was just mountains taking up the whole screen.
posted by subdee at 10:58 AM on April 17, 2022

I thought the Pizza Hut might have been a punchline or something. Glad I’m not the only one who got that.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 11:10 AM on April 17, 2022

I wonder how long this has to exist before he has to post a "Please stop making NFTs from my code"? It was a couple of days after the fish one went up that the NFTs started to appear.
posted by scruss at 11:33 AM on April 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

The landscape project is older than the fish, 4 years ago or so. Here's the GitHub for the source. It's MIT licensed so he has little legal protection against some scumbag making NFTs out of it. The generative fish thing was really maddening, I wrote up the story just as it happened.

There's also his nonflowers project, which has a similar aesthetic to the landscape paintings.
posted by Nelson at 11:43 AM on April 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

I thoroughly enjoyed this, both the aesthetic and the pic that it generated from my cell number as a seed. Thanks!
posted by gemmy at 5:27 PM on April 17, 2022

Is it *actually* infinite? Because if it is, it hits the "Library of Babel" threshold by Jorge Luis Borges. All real-and-not-real histories of China will eventually be played out in that landscape painting, and you, as the viewer, will never be able to discern which ones are true.
posted by metametamind at 7:14 PM on April 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

Someone pointed out that there's an infinity of numbers between 0 and 1 but none of them are 2. That is, "infinite" doesn't mean "all"; an infinite painting need not depict all possible histories.
posted by mpark at 12:50 PM on April 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

*applaud post title*
posted by of strange foe at 12:57 PM on April 18, 2022