Algorithmic Art
Algorithmic Art
Most of the art on this website is drawn from digital artists on the Adobe Behance platform (all CC 4.0 Licence). The main background images are all from the incredibly talented Dario Veruari. We chose the images because they reflect our key themes—not just in what they represent, but in how they are made.
The key technique behind almost all of the images on our website is procedural generation (most of them are made using Houdini 3D animation software). The basic idea is that you input elements, and select algorithms, and the software (together with a lot of processing power) generates the next steps. You tweak and iterate until you realise your vision. In other words, procedural generation is a form of AI (and can be done with machine learning, though most of the commercially available software seems to use algorithms closer to those found in AI planning)
Our project is about designing machines that instantiate and promote our moral values. But designing machines—or software—that can realise our aesthetic values is also a challenge. With the art on this site, you can see some of what can be achieved by human-machine teaming, where the creative impetus comes from the artist, but they couldn’t ever achieve this result without the technology.
One liberating feature of this is that it means those of us without the fine motor skills to do great art manually have more of a shot of doing it with a technological aid. But will we continue to be as creative, collectively, if we don’t have to work so much at the craft? We’ll see.
We keep track of the artists we like on a Moodboard at Behance: have a look here.