Generative Gestaltung

Generative Gestaltung

My work was recently included in the Book ‘Generative Gestaltung’ [Generative Design] by Hartmut Bohnacker, Benedikt Groß, Julia Laub and Claudius Lazzeroni. With 472 pages and over 1500 colour illustrations, the book aims to teach sophisticated generative design techniques and contains a large section of Processing code examples. The first section is devoted to 30 inspirational generative works from established international artists. The book is published by Verlag Hermann Schmidt Mainz GmbH (ISBN 978-3-87439-759-9) with an English version due soon.

Talysis II

The text in the above picture reads as follows:

‘Paul Prudence is interested in making artworks and performing real-time synaesthetic pieces that employ generative and computational systems. He is particularly interested in using digital video feedback as a recursive function simulator – a way of producing auto-catalytic (self-generating) artworks. With its strict symmetry and geometry Talysis II is evocative of the work of the Perceptual and Op-Artist movements of the 60’s. The Autotroph sequence takes similar modulative geometry and fuses it with an interest in computational models of morphogenesis (originally proposed by Alan Turing in the early 50s). Research in biology suggests one theory for morphogensis (the shape creation of living organisms) is based upon complex chemical feedback processes at a cellular level. The Autotroph sequences sets out to create computational organisms, that mimic this process, using video signals as morphogens, that can self-replicate into complex biological/crystalline forms.’

Autotroph Sequence – Generative Gestaltung

‘The systems used to generate Talysis II and the Autotroph sequences are programmed simulations of the classic analogue feedback set-up where a camera points to a monitor to which its output is connected. The computational version contains a circuit of renderers (virtual monitor screens), each passing its output, a white square, to the next renderer. Using a variety of transformations of the video signal as it is conveyed around this infinite loop the circuits generate a surprising variety of species of self-similarity. The software used to program these loops is VVVV, a visual programming video synthesis tool-kit designed by Meso, Frankfurt.’