Works and writings

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • 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?

  • 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.