From pen plotters to light installations
October 18, 2020 12:41 PM   Subscribe

Generative Machines, an introduction and overview of generative artwork with Matt DesLauriers.
posted by kaibutsu (8 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite
 
Cool.

A few subreddits that might be of interest: r/generative, r/creativecoding, r/proceduralgeneration. and last, r/gonwild (note the missing 'e', r/gonewild is something completely different and NSFW).

A few other things that might be of interest:
  • Cinder, a C++ library for windows for doing this sort of thing
  • structure synth "Structure Synth is a cross-platform application for generating 3D structures by specifying a design grammar."
  • context free art " a program that generates images from written instructions called a grammar. The program follows the instructions in a few seconds to create images that can contain millions of shapes."
  • and obviously processing.
Searching github for "generative art", "procedural generation", "creative coding" can turn up interesting things. I tend to call this kind of thing "recreational computing" after the old column of that name that used to run in Scientific American, though that wasn't really art focused. In my mind, making generative art is a subset of recreational computing, and "recreational computing" isn't really useful as a search term.
posted by smcameron at 2:47 PM on October 18, 2020 [4 favorites]


Neat! I just built one of Bart Dring's plotters and am slowly moving my workflow from 30 year+ old plotters and HPGL to this new thing and G-Code. Bart's boards all provide wifi, SD card storage and Bluetooth access to the plotter. The wifi web front-end is pretty slick, too.
posted by scruss at 3:00 PM on October 18, 2020 [1 favorite]


I've been selling my seeded generative art at plotterprints.ca for a while now. The designs are seeded by a photograph and then my algorithms and tuned parameters produce vector output that my custom built robots draw using fountain pens, gel pens, fineliners, etc.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:30 PM on October 18, 2020 [3 favorites]


RevDanCatt has been doing lots of nice plotter work, and blogging both the results and the surrounding process.
posted by amcewen at 3:47 PM on October 18, 2020 [2 favorites]


I stumbled on this talk whole putting together a playlist of pen plotter time lapses (which is a pay some of y'all are probably better qualified to make). I thought the talk had a really nice amount of historical foundation (jacquard looms!), as well as interesting bridges to other media (like light installations and fabric work).
posted by kaibutsu at 4:59 PM on October 18, 2020


Although a "real" XY pen plotter like an AxiDraw is more fun to watch in operation, if you want to get into plotter art, a cheap way to do it is to get a used craft cutter (like a Silhouette or a Cricut) with a pen holder instead of a blade. They can be had very inexpensively because people tend to buy them for a single project, and do a great job as plotters, plus or minus the obnoxiousness of their included software.

It's a bit crazy that an old Hewlett Packard 7470A sells for more on eBay than a brand-new Silhouette (which will do material 12" wide x infinity), but because it's aimed at more of a "Craft" market instead of the "Maker" market, I think they get less attention. They're basically the very bottom end of "home CNC" machines.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:00 AM on October 19, 2020 [2 favorites]


It's not that surprising that old HP plotters are still expensive. They're all at least a quarter century old (the last HP pen plotter was introduced in the late 1980s, and they kept making pen plotters until about 1995). They didn't make that many. Many of the ones they did make were scrapped by users who wanted rid of that big noisy old thing. So if a pen plotter has made it to 2020 in a working condition, it's likely to be sold by someone who will wait for the right price. The $50 plotter doesn't exist any more.

One of the craft cutter manufacturers used to be a big name in pen plotters, so they're sticking to their roots. With cheap stepper motors and controllers, craft cutters are an amazing price, but vendor lock-in is a problem. HP and Roland had to pretty much invent the technology, hence the original expense.

(If anyone's looking to buy a plotter for generative art, the HP 7470A isn't the best choice. It can only use smooth paper in A4 or Letter size and is limited to two very short HP plotter pens. Most interesting pens and materials won't work at all. If you see one for suspiciously cheap, it's probably got an HP-IB interface that's extremely expensive to use. My 7470A is old and grumbly and mostly snoozes under a dusty pile in my office.)

I've recently started using brush pens with my little midTbot plotter, and the smoothness yet unpredictability of the line is great fun.
posted by scruss at 3:31 AM on October 21, 2020 [1 favorite]


and obviously processing.

Yes, especially Processing. I just rediscovered OpenProcessing, a dev site that showcases examples written in p5.js. It's pure Javascript, but has (almost) all of Processing's capabilities.
posted by scruss at 7:22 PM on October 23, 2020


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