Experiments in creative coding and generative geometry

Iso composite series iterations, February 2026

Iso switchback series iterations, January 2026

Happy holidays!

Created for the August 2024 Artcrush Gallery curation by Kika Nicolela

Frederik Vanhoutte x The Generative Art Museum
for Responsive Dreams 2025

A series of 11 generative prints

work in progress images for Responsive Dreams 2025

Official video for Max Cooper’s True Under Certain Conditions

Interactive generative geometry

10 min. unedited improv on modular synth

Multiscale 1D CA variation inspired by the work of Loren Schmidt

Over on Bluesky, I’m following along as Loren Schmidt is working on their open world roguelike. Through her work, I learned about tabular lookup cellular…

The isoverse manifests although we might not always see.

The isoverse manifests although we might not always see.

Interactive generative geometry

*

Do not overindulge.

Generative geometry in p5js

Generative geometry in p5js

Generative dice recipe 250326

Not so much a generative dice recipe as a preparatory construction that gives us an interesting starting point for countless experiments.

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.

Choices, the core of generative art, the code making decisions instead of the artist. The artist relinquishing control.

What is choice?

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.

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.

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…

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…

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.

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.

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?

Signed distance functions (sdf) are a staple of shader and raytracing code. This article shows a way to abuse sdfs for fun and profit*.

*mileage may vary

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.

Is there more to generative art than wallpaper generators?

Part of the raw data-visualizations made for a video artwork Sievert Rising by Frederik De Wilde

Counters coded for the Creative Coding Playground at the Vooruit, Ghent, a celebratory piece for its 100th birthday.

Complexity, evolution, homeostasis