The circle is a spiral | Generative art diary
Hans Ulrich Obrist of the Serpentine Gallery often posts notes and...
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!
Hans Ulrich Obrist of the Serpentine Gallery often posts notes and doodles from various artists on his Instagram. I saw this one from Korakrit Arunanondchai years ago and it’s stuck with me.
the circle
is a spiral
it’ll be o.k.
i promise
It popped into my head again this week while working on these handwriting spirals. I often feel like I am going in circles (in all sorts of contexts) so I find it comforting to think that if I could zoom out, I’d see there is not just repetition but progression.
I had a tiny bit more time for art this week, and it’s been pretty productive. I had a mechanical issue with my plotter which cut some explorations short but I’m hoping I’ll have time to troubleshoot it with the helpful folks from Evil Mad Scientist soon.
Things I’ve done this week
Plotting spirals
I got very into creating handwriting spirals and the obvious next step was to turn them into SVGs and plot them.
I love the back and forth between the amount of effort that was involved in setting up the handwriting and sentence generation code, versus how “quick” it is to generate each one of these pieces, versus how much work it would take to write by hand.
I’ve also been playing with parameters, like making the text bigger as the spiral expands. I kinda want to dive right into the middle of this.
It was when I was plotting a piece like this that my plotter started acting up. All was more or less fine in the first pass but something mechanical failed two thirds of the way through the second pass (with a gold pen) and everything became misaligned.
Ever since then, this kind of misalignment is happening frequently. I’m in touch with Evil Mad Scientist (the makers of the Axidraw) and they’ve been very helpful so hopefully I’ll get this fixed soon!
I’m very keen to get back to it, especially as I absolutely love the effect of the gold ink on top of the black. It’s barely noticeable when viewed straight on.
But looks like this when tipped to the light.
DREAMY.
Integrating handwriting into diagrams
Progress has been made on integrating my handwriting code into my diagrams. I’ve shared a couple of examples of this before, where I was testing to see how it looks - but I was manually positioning all of the labels etc then. Now I’ve set up collisions detection for words.
The longer notes are currently all being placed in the same location, and then any other elements that collide with them are removed. I am going to create a system for finding large empty areas on the page and then that can be filled with those notes as well as other content like tables, lists, scribbles, etc.
I also need to tighten up the styling as, now that I’m fully leaning into the handwritten style, I need it to look like there are only 1-3 specific pens/pencils being used for each diagram, rather than lots of varied stroke weights etc.
Plus about 50 million other things.
Here’s a debug view, for fun! Each green/red circle is a collision point - the red ones indicate that a collision happened and an element was removed.
Things I’ve enjoyed this week
Joanie Lemercier’s delicate and detailed nature plots, in collaboration with the rain!
This spray paint stencil roller that says KATSU KATSU KATSU.
This poor dude just trying to figure out how to get from A to B using reinforcement learning.
That’s it, thanks again for joining me here!
I’ll leave you with this cool plant, and I’ll see you here next week.
- Amy ⭐
"Developing through emotions" has strong Hilma af Klint vibes. I totally dig it - nice work!
Those spiral pieces look amazing. Love how the start out legible and delve into chaos as it moves further out. The blend of gold and black is a really nice touch.