LAB31

When you hear “generative art.” you may think of text=to-image outputs from tools like Midjourney.

But there’s an entire field of art that existed long before the first diffusion model came to be. The idea that code itself can be creative, that artists can set rules and let the art emerge from those rules, is so damn cool to us. If you want a crash course in the history of generative art, this is a great place to start.

The idea for today’s project came from a funny misunderstanding. One of us (we’ll let you guess which one) thought for a very long time that “self-play” in the context of AI meant “let the models follow their own interests and learn through playing.” It turns out that self-play actually means just having an AI compete against another instance of itself, over and over again, until it invents new strategies. One of us found this definition kind of sad.

But the slippery nature of language is interesting. We started thinking about all the other AI terms that have much different, deeper, richer meaning than what they might seem if you only imagine them in the context of technology.

That unearthed territory became the ground for our art making. We chose a term, unpacked all the superposed meanings of that term, from computation to cognition to cosmic. We distilled the universal patterns of the term, then used algorithms to turn those patterns into art.

Here’s a diagram of the process.

And a mind map.

Before we link the art, here’s a snippet of the code that creates one of the pieces.

init() {
// Create particles
for(let i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
this.particles.push({
x: Math.random() * this.canvas.width,
y: Math.random() * this.canvas.height,
vx: (Math.random() – 0.5) * 2,
vy: (Math.random() – 0.5) * 2
});
}

// Create attention fields
for(let i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
this.attentionFields.push({
x: Math.random() * this.canvas.width,
y: Math.random() * this.canvas.height,
strength: Math.random() * 2 – 1,
phase: Math.random() * Math.PI * 2,
frequency: 0.5 + Math.random()
});
}

Want to see the art?

ENTER THE GALLERY