Limitations and balance | Generative art diary
Getting to curved handwriting, and stories from Peckham Digital
I write about generative art, code, creativity and other interconnected topics. You can expect a diary every Friday sharing what I’ve been working on, some things I’ve found interesting, and links to my longer articles. Thanks for joining me here. 💖
Hello!
I achieved something in the handwriting code for my diagrams that I’ve been putting off/working towards for ages, so that was nice. I really wanted to take that progress and run with it but, for the next few weeks I’m fairly busy with some UX design clients.
Having ‘day job’ career that lets me make time for art at all is super lucky. My freelance contracts are sometimes part time or flexible, and I’m usually contracted for blocks of a few weeks or months, allowing the time between contracts for art. I have been working around this balance for a long time and I find it to be a defining feature of being an artist.
While I crave uninterrupted art-time, sometimes having forced time away from an idea lets it percolate and I find that having less time to work on something often makes that time more productive.
Things I’ve done this week
Curved handwriting
After much brain-wrangling with angles and confusion over why the f points were being put where they were being put - I finally got curved handwriting working.
This means I’ll be able to add curved labels to my diagrams! Currently it’s only set up to work with one word at a time, but curved sentences are only a short bit of code admin away.
Peckham Digital
This weekend is Peckham Digital, a festival of creative computing in London. There are loads of workshops and talks, as well as an exhibition. Last night I went to a meetup with talks from three speakers.
Joana Cicau spoke about the parallels between choreography and the web, pointing out that every webpage has a <body>. She did some coding in the chrome console to make the Google search results page dance. As a diagram enthusiast I particularly enjoyed this collection of choreography notations she shared.
Dan Coppen told us about a game Playfool have created, where humans compete against an AI in Pictionary. The aim is to draw the clue so that humans guess the answer but AI does not. They did a couple of live rounds which were really fun and I also liked hearing their ideas about how AI could incentivise humans to express themselves in new ways.
Playfool’s game outdraw.ai is due to release later this year.
V Buckenham shared her game building tool Downpour. It’s super simple to use, which means it comes with limitations - but working within boundaries can often spark ideas. (It occurs to me there are parallels here with what I was saying in the intro about working within time boundaries!)
She also shared lessons she’s learned while working on creative projects, encouraging us to Be Like Lego (make things that fit with other things), Be a Cockroach (make things that last) and more.
All of these talks were super interesting and definitely worth sitting in a hot stuffy basement on a summer evening! I’m planning to go to some workshops over the weekend and I recommend checking out the Peckham Digital schedule if you’re in or around London.
That’s it, thanks again for joining me here!
I’ll leave you with an image I took during a car wash and I’ll see you here next week.
- Amy ⭐
