This is the 49th issue of the Gorilla Newsletter - a weekly online publication that sums up everything noteworthy from the past week in generative art, creative coding, tech and AI - as well as a sprinkle of my own endeavors.

Before we get started - for some reason last week's newsletter was intercepted by many a spam filter, I don't know exactly why, and it's the first time that this happens. My hunch is that I might have used some words that the spam filter doesn't like, which I'll be more careful with in the future.

If you got a second to check your spam folder and mark the Newsletter as 'not spam', that would actually help tremendously! It sends a positive signal and helps improve the overall deliverability of the Newsletter!

That said, I hope that you're all having a great start into the week! Let's get into it! 👇

All the Generative Things

Demystifying Generative Aesthetics

Among the very first videos that I've watched on generative art is Tyler Hobbs' iconic talk at Clojure Con 2018 'Code goes in, Art Comes out'. He begins his presentation with a number of loaded questions:

What actually makes for an interesting artwork? And more specifically, what makes for an interesting generative artwork? Are the requirements different just because it's made with code? This question bothered me for a long time because there isn't really a clear cut objective answer to it - in some cases I can't even explain to myself why I feel drawn to a particular artwork or why it evokes something inside of me — "Ugh, you know, the colors are nice, and stuff"

That's why I've really fallen in love with Monk's article on this topic from a couple of months ago, titled 'Demystifying Generative Art', he hypothesizes a framework for the analysis, evaluation and appreciation of generative art:

https://www.lerandom.art

Demystifying Generative Art

Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) develops a framework for appreciating and analyzing generative art through an investigation of the movement's locus of artistic intent.

Generative art is quite a unique artform when compared to other art practices, and that's primarily due to the artist not directly creating the artwork, but rather a somewhat autonomous system that is in charge of generating the actual outputs. This gives rise to new evaluation criteria: should we now place emphasis on the qualities of this system? Or the process that goes into the creation of this system? Both? Neither? Maybe the system isn't so important after all, and what truly matters is still the final result that comes out on the other end - after all, that's in many cases the only thing that the audience will ultimately interact with.

Each one of these questions can be leveraged as a unique angle of analysis - a lens as Monk calls them - to further examine what makes for an interesting generative artwork. While Monk's pilot article focused on introducing a potential framework, the second installment places emphasis on the aesthetics, and examines the criteria to evaluate them:

https://www.lerandom.art

Demystifying Generative Aesthetics

‍This is the second part in a series on building a framework for appreciating generative art. In the first part, "Demystifying Generative Art," Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) builds the case for such a framework. In this essay, he takes a closer look at one of the five framework components, Results-the outputs of a generative system.

Monk explains that we require a mixed approach, we not only need to consider traditional design principles, but also modern, digital, criteria - particularly the algorithmic considerations that are unique to generative art. Whether you're a generative artist, a collector, or simply someone that is interested in the art form, these are essential reads, and a great deal can be learned from Monk's insightful writing. As always I thoroughly enjoyed it, and am eagerly awaiting the next installment!

Inside the Machine

Santiago Ortiz recently shared a data visualization experiment which made quite the ripples over on Twitter - by asking ChatGPT to complete the same prompt "Intelligence is" hundreds of times and subsequently visualizing the results with an interesting interface, he enables us to peer into the mind of the smart text generator:

I believe that this could be an interesting exploratory tool to examine the output space of an LLM. I often find that I have to tune my input prompts to guide the answers that the chatbot returns, and nudge them into a satisfactory direction. It's pretty much trial and error. This also just makes me realize how slow LLMs still are, all things considered, having this kind of tool run in real-time could be a game changer.

Beyond that, I think that it reveals something more profound about LLMs, and it's humbling really. Seeing the outputs exposed in such a manner does ultimately exemplify that they're simply text generators, albeit very powerful ones they merely complete input sequences. If you were to repeatedly ask a person to complete the phrase "Intelligence is", they'll likely tell you off and to stop pestering them with stupid questions after the third time.

The HTML Review

The HTML review describes itself as an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web. Edited by Maxwell Neely-Cohen and Shelby Wilson, it strives to collect and showcase web-based experiments and experiences that act as story-telling devices. After being drawn in by the intriguing circular design shown in the tweet, I quickly realized that I had stumbled upon a treasure trove of internet art:

And it reminds me a lot of NET art; many of the showcased projects make me feel the same way, almost as if you're going through someone's diary, intimate experiences where the authors share their stories with you. While I didn't have too much time to dig into all of the showcased projects, my personal highlight was this web essay by Garry Ing, where the interactivity of the page ties into its narrative:

https://viewsource.info

a view source web

reflections on view source by Garry Ing. the html review, spring 2024

Recounting the history of the view source button that every web browser now makes readily available, he lets us simultaneously inspect the HTML tags of the elements that make up the essay's page. I highly recommend giving it a read! Beside this, if you have a cool project of your own that goes in this direction, you might want to pitch it to the HTML review. In their about section they elaborate a bit what kind of projects they're generally looking for:

We especially love when the subject matter of a piece has nothing to do with the web or technology, but the medium is merely a means to further the story and poetry.

P5JS' New Website

P5JS's new website is bound to launch this spring, and for the occasion they're currently accepting submissions from the community to later showcase on the website when it eventually comes out. Submissions are open until the 31st of March, and need to be submitted to the respective curation over on Openprocessing:

An important detail that you might miss if you don't check the tweet's replies is that you should also use the describe() function that lets you add a screen-reader accessible text to your canvas creation:

Web3 News

Maybe it's just me, but the past couple of months have been absolutely bonkers in terms of web3 and generative art. First we've had fxhash's launch on Ethereum at the end of 2023, and then more recently its Base integration earlier this month, then we also had Art Blocks' announcement of acquiring Sansa and their plans on greatly expanding their eco-system, and all of that while Highlight is dropping banger after banger, culminating in the largest generative art collection in history with Zancan's Aux Arbres.

That is to say that it's overall been an incredibly exciting time in the space, and it seems that things are moving forward really quickly!

WTBS in Conversation with Erick Calderon

We've all been eagerly waiting for the newest episode of the WTBS podcast after they teased it a couple weeks ago - this time, they're in conversation with Erick Calderon, aka Snowfro, who's probably best known for being one of the founders of Art Blocks. In their conversation they ask him all about the recent acquisition of Sansa, and what it means for the future of Art Blocks:

The acquiry of Sansa is mainly motivated by Art Blocks desire to cater to the collectors that lean towards a more data-driven approach to collecting, while wanting to remain a art-forward platform at the core. Sansa was originally built around Art Blocks and already has all of the tools to provide such an experience. Beyond that, Art Blocks will however remain a curated platform even with this expansion, artists will still need to apply and get a stamp of approval before being able to release their project on the platform - and for a good reason as there's just too many problems with a completely open approach. Erick states "I don't have the courage to be an open platform"

Another thing that really came through in the conversation, is that we're still incredibly early; we're at the very forefront of something that's going to be much bigger in the future. The generative art scene is still very much a niche when compared to other spaces, Erick gives a good example of this, consider how many iphones are sold every year by Apple - a whopping 232 million in 2023 - compared to the 2 million generative art NFTs that have been sold overall, as Erick estimates.

But despite this, I'd wager that NFTs are here to stay and no longer just an experimental new technology, especially when I see what the different players in the field are currently building, how they're innovating, and how the eco-system is becoming more interoperable.

[20:37] Getting your work timestamped on the blockchain is critical right now, don't be disappointed and don't be discouraged with the market, get it out there because you are staking your place in history prior to the day where I can go to ChatGPT and ask it "Please, build me the entire Art Blocks platform with 75 projects of great variety"[...]

An Update from fxhash

Ciphrd recently posted a big announcement over in the fxhash discord, explaining why it might appear from the outside that the platform has been somewhat inactive, and why it's been necessary to take some time to regroup and figure out how to rebuild a strong foundation and clear all of the tech debt that the platform has accumulated over time:

Ever since its inception fxhash has grown incredibly quickly, both in terms of platform features as well as in terms of community size. Emerging from the remnants of the hicetnunc community towards the end of 2021, many generative artists quickly flocked towards the open platform that enabled them to publish their work in a web-native manner.

And I remember, it was so wonderfully chaotic in the early days, for instance, you had to wait a couple of hours for the minter to come through and reveal what had been minted. In those early days it absolutely made sense to build out the platform very quickly, and iterate rapidly to cater towards what its audience wanted - how many platforms have we already seen completely lose momentum and find their end of service earlier than expected?

Even if it means that things will slow down momentarily, I honestly believe that it's for the best to take some time, clear all of the technical debt and deliver a more refined fxhash experience. Especially considering that the scene has become more competitive. I for one, am eagerly awaiting the new design and am excited to dive into the new version of fxhash when it comes out.

Highlight Studio

This piece of news completely flew under my radar last week - but Highlight released their proprietary tool for aiding artists in developing their generative projects for the platform: Highlight Studio.

Although I haven't tried it yet, apparently there's two ways to use it; either directly from the highlight website where you simply drop in a link to your project running on localhost, or by downloading it as a script and including it in your project where you have more functionalities to play with. You can find more information about it over on Github:

https://github.com

generative-art/HLSTUDIO.md at main · highlightxyz/generative-art

Contribute to highlightxyz/generative-art development by creating an account on GitHub.

Tech & Web Dev

CSS Flexbox vs. CSS Grid

Choosing between CSS Grid and Flexbox is a common web design dilemma. While the CSS Flexbox comes in handy for one-dimensional layouts and is super useful for arranging items linearly in a row or column, CSS grids on the other hand let you tackle two dimensional layouts more easily and allow for a more precise positioning of elements. There's many scenarios where both could be used interchangeably, which often gives rise to the age old debate on which one should be used.

Christine Vallaure recently published a deep-dive into exactly this topic, explaining both methods in detail, illustrating what each one is good for, and all of that in a way that is specifically geared towards UI designers who might not program the interface themselves:

https://uxdesign.cc

Why UI designers should understand Flexbox and CSS Grid

Most designers are familiar with responsive design, a column-based layout approach with fixed breakpoints to cover all screen sizes. However, we can move beyond the rigid structure with modern CSS...

The most interesting part of the article is towards the end, where Vallaure addresses the usage of breakpoints in conjunction with these layout methods, enumerating a number of scenarios where the use of breakpoints is acceptable. for instance, whenever a more radical change of the layout is desired, or a component needs to completely change in appearance.

Recently, in modern, modern web design (not a typo) there's been a trend towards more fluid design that tries to avoid breakpoints as much as possible, ditching them in favor of fluid design approaches that can self-sufficiently adjust to different viewport sizes. A prime example for this is Utopia's fluid approach to scaling font sizes to different viewport widths respectively - covered in issue 47 of the newsletter. Might the future of responsive web design be breakpointless?

But anyway, kudos to Christine for putting together this great resource. Here's also another cool article on the two methods that I thought was put together really well:

https://blog.logrocket.com

When to use Flexbox and when to use CSS Grid - LogRocket Blog

Learn about which of the CSS layout systems, CSS Flexbox or CSS Grid, is best for your project according to what designs you prefer.

A Formula for Responsive Font-Size

Last year when I migrated the blog over to Ghost I decided on using one of the free themes that they provide, namely the solo theme - now the blog looks a lot different than what you see in the theme, since I made quite a few modifications in the meantime.

When I first popped the theme into my code editor to try and make sense of what's going on in the CSS, and trying to make an adjustment to the size of the text I was met with the following line:

--content-font-size: clamp(1.7rem, 0.38vw + 1.4rem, 2rem);

For the longest time I couldn't really make sense out of this line, but thinking about it for a second now, it actually makes sense, and turns out to be a cool trick to achieve somewhat responsive font sizes.

In CSS, a rem, short for “root-em”, is simply a relative unit of measure that's used for defining font sizes as well as other element dimensions, and is usually based on the font-size of the root element. Most browser will usually default it to 16px although users can change that influence this from the settings. Similarly, the vw term is a viewport width relative measure, a percentage essentially - 10vw would basically be equivalent to 10% of the viewport width.

Combining these two notions, we get the above line: basically a formula that makes the font-size grow and shrink depending on the overall width of the viewport, naturally also clamping it to a maximum and minimum value as well. I'm bringing all of this up because I recently came across this post by James Fisher where he talks exactly about this in a bit more detail:

https://jameshfisher.com

A formula for responsive font-size

This CSS is now part of most websites I make:

The comments over on Hackernews bring up some good points though, since users often set the root font-size themselves for an ideal reading experience, or have vision problems, it might be a bad idea to override this with a CSS rule like that when a specific font-size is desired. But I'm not certain which is right or wrong, maybe using breakpoints in this scenario might not be too bad after all:

The State of the Terminal

Gregory Anders published a companion article to a talk that he gave at Neovimconf 2023, titled 'The State of the Terminal' and with it he takes us back in time showing us some of the historical problems terminal based applications have had to deal with and how they were overcome before explaining how modern terminal emulators tackle these issues:

https://gpanders.com

State of the Terminal

This is a companion article to my talk at Neovimconf 2023. I have been using Vim/Neovim as my full time text editor for close to 10 years. I've spent a lot of time in the terminal and have become very aware of the many flaws and idiosyncrasies of this bizarre platform.

If you prefer a video format, a recording of the talk can be found here:

Gorilla Updates

RE:designing the Blog

This week I made some big progress on the redesign, and finally feel very confident about being able to complete the re-design in a reasonable amount of time. There's still a lot of details that I need to figure out to set myself up with a sustainable system, and there's still many pages that I still need to tackle. But, the heart-piece, the article template, is shaping up really nicely and close to completion now - here's what it currently looks like with a fancy dark mode as well:

And since we talked about the CSS Flexbox earlier, this new design solely relies on a Flexbox driven approach: the entirety of the page is contained within a big Flexbox, containing the vertical navigation bar on the left hand side (itself a vertical column flexbox), and the page content on the right that in turn nests other Flexboxes.

Why not use CSS grids though? Well because I never really learned how to use it, and never felt the need to so far, I have yet to run into a scenario where I'm not able to make the layout that I want with a Flexbox - although I will admit that sometimes there probably are many parts where it would make more sense to use a grid instead.

I'm also really happy about how the sidebar turned out; instead of solely applying a blur to the background when it expands, giving it an additional slightly transparent background color makes its contents much more readable imo - and it works both in light and dark mode:

Hoping to make more progress in the coming days. Let me know what you think so far! What are some of the things you'd like to see on the new website? Any features in particular? I still also need to consider a lot of accessibility issues, so let me know if any of you guys have specific requirements in that regard.

SDF Shenanigans

I've also found the time to experiment a little more with SDFs, here's one that came out really nicely - although it's just a bunch of circles rotating around a central point, it almost feels like it's a 3 dimensional thing, and it's not actually very clear if the floating orbs are represented by the colored area or the negative empty space:

Initially I dismissed the sketch as being boring, but after posting it to Twitter and seeing that it got a bunch of likes I had another look and thought that it actually was pretty cool with an unintentionally interesting effect.

This one was actually not the initial sketch that I had made that day. Earlier in my session I was playing with the Math.exp() and Math.log() functions in JS, since I rarely ever use them, leading to the emergence of the following a meta-ball-esque sketch:

Letter packing made Easy

And yet other thing that I tackled head on this week was letter packing; or font packing... or text packing - I'm not entirely sure what to call it, might be important to figure that out for SEO purposes. But the idea basically revolves around loading in a font file, then writing a bunch of letters to the canvas using that font, and later on jumbling them up and packing them on the canvas so that they don't collide. Here's something I made with it:

I've had the idea for a long time, but I never actually tackled it because I knew it would be tedious to write the code for it - and it was, but it's not actually that complicated, just quite lengthy. A big part of it is OpenType.js, that lets you easily load in fonts, and also lets you get the paths of individual letters (glyphs) as vertex arrays. Coupling it with a collision strategy makes it possible to pack them on the canvas. I'm already in the process of writing about this idea and will likely release as my first premium content piece! If you're interested in packing shapes I recommend checking out this post of mine:

https://www.gorillasun.de

An Algorithm for Polygon Intersections

In this post we'll work our way towards an algorithm that can compute convex polygon intersections. We'll also a method for intersections between axis-aligned rectangles, a function that can determine the intersection of two line segments, as well as a point in polygon test.

Music for Coding

Well there's really only one piece of music that I can share this week, and it's Tycho's Awake for the occasion of it's 10th anniversary:

I remember the first time listening to it in my bedroom around 2017-2018, I was completely blown away. At the time I wasn't a big fan of electronic music, but listening to Tycho really made me do a complete 180 on that. I've listened to the album countless times now and I really recommend you give it a listen, works especially well while coding.

And that's it from me this week, hope you enjoyed this week's curated list of generative art, web3 and tech shenanigans — now that you've made it through the newsletter, you might as well share it with someone that you know who might enjoy this kind of content - sharing the newsletter is one of the best ways to support it!

If you've read this far, thanks a million! And if you're still hungry for more Generative art things, you can check out the most recent issue of the Newsletter here:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Gorilla Newsletter 48

Generating the Alphabet by Amy Goodchild - Fragment: a Web Environment for Creative Coding - Generative Music in Blender - Words of Advice from Kika Nicolela - Dave Bollinger's Pixel Spaceships - We Love the Art Contest Winners - Obsidian's Infinite Canvas file format +++ lots more

And if that's not enough, you can find a backlog of all previous Gorilla Newsletter issues here:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Newsletter - Gorilla Sun

Weekly recap of Gorilla Articles, Art and other interesting things from the world of generative art and creative coding.

Cheers, happy sketching, and again, hope that you have a fantastic week! See you in the next one - Gorilla Sun 🌸 If you're interested in sponsoring or advertising with the Newsletter - reach out!

This is the 48th issue of the Gorilla Newsletter - a weekly online publication that sums up everything noteworthy from the past week in generative art, creative coding, tech and AI - as well as a sprinkle of my own endeavors.

https://www.gorillasun.de

Gorilla Newsletter 48

Generating the Alphabet by Amy Goodchild - Fragment: a Web Environment for Creative Coding - Generative Music in Blender - Words of Advice from Kika Nicolela - Dave Bollinger's Pixel Spaceships - We Love the Art Contest Winners - Obsidian's Infinite Canvas file format +++ lots more

That said, hope you're all having a great start into the week! Let's get straight into it! 👇

All the Generative Things

Generating the Alphabet by Amy Goodchild

Amy Goodchild recently published a new article over on her blog, in which she explores a generative approach to creating hand-written letter forms:

https://www.amygoodchild.com

Generating The Alphabet - Amy Goodchild

My current generative artwork-in-progress includes text, but I don't want to use a font. In browser based art work, using a "web safe" font could produce inconsistent results, while including a font file would mean a large file size.

In the past I've also incorporated text in some of my sketches, but it always felt a bit off to use an external font when everything else is generative - so I completely understand why you'd want to also make the font itself generative. Amy achieves this by representing the letters as a set of paths that are subsequently smoothed and deformed with a bunch of helper functions that she details in the article. The resulting hand-written aesthetic is spot on imo!

This generative alphabet is part of her latest generative project, of which she's shared a number of WIPs over on Twitter already - they've been eye catchers every single time. From what's revealed, it seems to be a generative system for apophenic diagrams, and the variety of layouts that's been shown so far is quite impressive:

But why stop at generative letters? Another cool part of the project is the use of word2vec to generate semantically related words for the labels and markers that occur throughout the diagrams. If you're not familiar, word2vec is a technique used in NLP (Natural Language Processing) that lets you attribute words with a semantic score and groups them together according to that score - it then lets you easily fetch semantically similar words:

Overall, I'm super excited to see where the project goes, and maybe we'll get another write-up once the it's released!

I did experiment with something a bit similar earlier this year, where I had an idea of packing numbers on the canvas - the numbers shown here are also simply represented as paths/vertices, then placed with an algo that checks for collisions between the paths, I thought that the outputs turned out pretty nicely but weren't really all that interesting without additional elements:

I'm curious to see what these would look like with letters instead of numbers 🤔

If all of this has made you curious about generative letter forms, I highly recommend also checking out what Daniel Catt's been up to lately - he's been working on turning his plotter into a journaling assistant and documenting the journey over on his Substack:

https://newsletter.revdancatt.com

📙 #030 - Arts-Based Research, may contain swearing

What actually is arts-based research, what am I researching, am I going to get Kitty to do all the work (yes), and some fancy journaling page layouts, plus swearing.

And while we're talking about diagrams and apophenia, I coincidentally also came across a tweet by the genart OG Paul Prudence, in which he shares Benjamin Bett's Mathematical Models of Consciousness, which immediately struck me to have aesthetic similarities with Amy's project:

Also very reminiscent of Aleksandra Jovanić's work in Chromatlas, Benjamin Betts spent a significant chunk of his life exploring the representation of the "evolution of human consciousness" via geometric diagrams - I don't know enough about Betts work to be able to comment on it, but my only thought here is that the diagrams are pretty gorgeous. I found this article that shines some light on his endeavors, but doesn't however elucidate according to what principles Betts created his diagrams:

https://www.themarginalian.org

Geometrical Psychology: Mathematical Models of Consciousness by the 19th-Century Psychologist Benjamin Betts

"Imagination receives the stream of Consciousness, and holds apart and compares the different experiences."

Raphaël Améaume's Fragment

I featured Raphaël Améaume in an earlier issue of the newsletter, when he published his brilliantly designed personal portfolio. Raphaël recently popped up on my timeline again, announcing that he's joining Polar with the aim to find support in the development of the creative coding environment that he's currently building:

And it turns out that it's actually a super cool tool; easily installed with npm, and if you're familiar with p5 you should have no difficulty spinning up a sketch and get started with exploring some ideas. The first thing you'll notice when you access the local server on which fragment runs the sketch, is the control panel that sits next to the canvas preview and offers a number of useful toggles and sliders. For instance it useful controls to create captures of your work on the fly.

Raphaël has actually been developing Fragment for a couple of years now, prior to making it open for the public in September of 2022. The project initially came to be as a personal tool for exploring his own ideas as well as developing client projects:

If Fragment looks interesting to you, I recommend checking it out and supporting Raphaël over on Polar if you end up using it for your own projects. Polar is essentially a Patreon-like subscription platform for open source projects, just like Raphaël's Fragment:

https://polar.sh

Introducing Fragment, a web development environment for creative coding

Fragment is a web development environment for creative coding. It works with any external libraries using a HTML canvas. It can export a canvas to images and videos and can also be deployed online. From a quick prototype to a complex experience, Fragment facilitates the creation process by providing a fast and reliable environment to work with.

Generative Music in Blender

Sione Teumohenga, that goes under the artist name Lonelyspeck, recently shared an audio experiment that unconventionally makes use of Blender as a sonic playground: by moving sound sources rapidly past the viewport (the camera) sounds are pitched up and down when they approach and then distance themself from the user again:

This is due to the Doppler effect that takes place in this scenario, if you're not familiar, the Doppler effect is essentially the change in frequency of a wave that an observer experiences due to the relative motion between the observer and the source of the wave. In simpler terms, it's how the sound or light you hear from a moving source can change pitch or color depending on whether the source is moving towards you or away from you.

I found a cool visualization for the effect here, fittingly the simulation that's shown in the video is also made with Blender (although I was looking for an explanation of how sound waves are actually simulated in Blender):

A classic example for this is the change in pitch of a siren as an ambulance approaches you and then recedes. As the ambulance gets closer, the sound waves get bunched up, making the pitch higher. Then, as it moves away, the waves spread out, causing a lower pitch.

I'm actually impressed that Blender is capable of simulating spatial audio in this manner, if anyone can educate me on how that works. I assumed that in games they simply reduce the volume of a sound source the further away it is, but I'm probably quite wrong on that. In any case, super interesting exploration by LonelySpeck - I'm excited to see what comes from it!

Web3 News

Words of Advice from Kika Nicolela

Kika Nicolela has been an artist and filmmaker for over 20 years, been exhibited numerous times around the world and has contemporarily become one of the leading voices in the NFT art space - in a recent long-form Tweet of hers she addresses the downward trend of the market and the overall low morale of the community due to it:

A bit later in her tweet Kika explains that art sales in the traditional setting are much, much rarer when compared to what we've seen so far in Web3. And this has lead to us acquiring a distorted perception of what makes a successful project - apparently works need to sell out in a matter of minutes and in gigantic quantities for them not to be considered failed projects. When this isn't really what this space is actually about after all:

The concept that we should release an art piece and sell out in minutes is, imo, a distortion of this space. Maybe we should appreciate what we have here: a new way of spreading, communicating and selling our art. And that expands our realm of possibilities of surviving as artists.

And I really couldn't agree more. I've addressed the issue before, that bragging about how fast something sells is a problem, and should not be a metric for quantifying the worth of an artwork. If you're a collector that cares about these stats, then sure it's important, but the artistic discourse should not really revolve around it. This is especially detrimental to artists, where the only take-away they get is that "your art is not good because it didn't sell" instead of more meaningful feedback.

And we're still hyper fixated on sales, even in the midst of the deepest bear market - just as Kika puts it, the space isn't really about that, it's never been about the sales, but rather about the community, the art, the conversation as well as the interesting experiments that we're able to do with the wonderful new tech. It might be easy to think that an engaged audience ensues from big sales, and although it works for some projects and artists, it's generally the exception and not the norm. I believe that it mainly works the other way around - you put yourself out there, connect with people, exchange ideas, whether you're an artist, collector, or builder, and then success comes over time.

Most of the successful artists that I follow do exactly that - they show up everyday and share their art and ideas. Maybe this extended bear market that we're experiencing right now isn't such a bad thing after all, weeding out all of those that are just in it for a quick buck. Personally, I feel very enthusiastic about the future of the space, there's still so many cool things popping up every single day!

Dave Bollinger's Pixel Spaceships

I don't consider myself a big collector, but every now and then I come across a project that I just can't pass up on, for instance Dave Bollinger's Pixel Spaceships that released last week on fxhash. And at 4 tez it felt like an absolute steal, I was lucky to snag two mint tickets before the project minted out in the following hours after:

If you're not familiar with Dave Bollinger, he's a generative art OG having been part of the scene since the mid-2000s. Pixel Spaceships doesn't only impress with the variety of its aesthetics, but also with historical value as Frederik Vanhoutte points out in a tweet of his:

If you're curious about the systems behind an artwork like Pixel Spaceships, and want to learn how Dave conjures pixelated spaceship shapes onto the canvas, I recommend checking out the detailed write-up that he's made for the project over on his personal site (where you can also find writings about other projects of his):

https://www.davebollinger.us

PixelSpaceships - Dave Bollinger

Unapologetically: this is retro, this is low-rez, this is pop art. The use of color herein may seem "garish" to sensitive viewers. Please simply avert your eyes if it causes excessive pain! You've been warned. But for the more adventurous who remain... Coloring and shading were implemented so as to mimic hardware limitations of early arcade machines.

We Love the Art Contest Winners

Towards the end of last year the Optimism foundation (an Ethereum L2) held an NFT contest titled "We Love the Art" that receiving over a whopping 7000 submissions for the three categories of AI art, generative art and music that the contest was held on. But the results are out, and the winners have been announced, with quite a few interesting creations in the lineup - you can read all about it here, including some of the motivations behind holding such a large scale contest:

One of the most notable generative artworks in the line-up are 0xfff's 'You are Here' that transcends a single blockchain and actually bridges across 31 of them! The tokens' artwork is actually directly influenced by their blockchain traversal history - there's a nice little thread by IMG.ART that explains it in a bit more detail here:

Web & Tech

Obsidian's infinite Canvas file format

If you're not familiar with Obsidian, it's probably the most powerful and versatile note taking app that's currently out there. And it's free to use as well! I use it on a regular basis for all sorts of organizational purposes, as well as for drafting up ideas for new posts and projects on the fly.

It comes with a bunch of powerful features out of the box that elevate it beyond a simple note taking app, for instance a graph view that lets you see how your notes are interconnected, and which resources reference each other. But beyond those features, what makes Obsidian great is its philosophy - a really insightful long-form tweet by Andrej Karpathy (the AI legend) explains this in a bit more detail:

One of Obsidian features that's pretty cool and recently got an interesting upgrade is their infinite canvas, that lets you organize notes and other types of media in logical flows, which is often used to plan out things that might require a more involved layout:

They recently released a unique JSON-like file format to represent this infinite canvas, replacing the .canvas format that was previously used. This means other infinite canvas applications can now adopt this format and can in that manner become interoperable - here's Obsidian's announcement tweet where you can learn more about it:

A mega-guide to organizing your CSS

Since I've been working on a new design for the blog, I've been battling against an ever increasing pile of messy CSS files where I'm spending most of my time just moving things around and renaming classes in the attempt to make things just a smidge more organized and maintainable for my future self.

While researching if there were actually any organizational philosophies for CSS I came across this massive resource from the MDN Web docs that goes over all of the dos and donts:

https://developer.mozilla.org

Organizing your CSS - Learn web development | MDN

This is the final part of our building blocks module, and as you can see there are many ways in which your exploration of CSS can continue from this point - but now you can go on to testing yourself with our assessments: the first one is linked below.

One of the tips introduces us to OOCSS, which stands for Object Oriented CSS, and just as the name suggests it's a CSS methodology that relies on Object Oriented principles for structuring different classes in a style sheet. It's kinda really smart actually, and most of the mistakes that it strives to avoid are things that I am 100% currently doing in my own CSS. For instance, it advises to avoid location based styling and encourages a separation between the styling of containers and their content.

OOCSS was pioneered by Nicole Sullivan in 2008, so I'm only 16 years late to the party, but it seems that modular approaches to CSS are still relevant in modern web development:

https://snipcart.com

Organize CSS with a Modular Architecture: OOCSS, BEM, SMACSS

Bye-bye spaghetti code! Learn how to organize your CSS architecture using foolproof methodologies like OOCSS, BEM, and SMACSS. Result? A scalable, modular CSS architecture.

Bluesky Open Sources its Moderation Tools

While it's the absolute wild west out here on Twitter, Bluesky is in the process of open sourcing Ozone, their collaborative moderation tool that allows users and teams to come together and create custom moderation approaches to the content that's posted across the network - they detail how all of this works in this announcement post:

https://bsky.social

Bluesky's Stackable Approach to Moderation - Bluesky

Today, we're open sourcing Ozone, a tool that lets a team of moderators or curators collaboratively review reports, create labels, and inspect content on the atproto network. Later this week, we're opening up the ability for users to run their own independent moderation services.

Although Bluesky looks like a cool place to be, I simply don't have the bandwidth to be on yet another platform, maybe at some point in the future I'll actually try and be more active over there.

A Question of Probability

I came across a super intriguing poll by Daniel Litt in which he asked who was more likely to win a game of chance based on flipping coins. The rules of the game are described in the following Tweet (think about it for a second and then make your pick):

To me it intuitively seemed that Alice had an advantage, since in my mind she'll be rewarded for consecutive sequences of Hs, but it seems that this is in fact not the case - in reality Bob is more likely to win this game:

Now you might ask why that is? Well, I can't actually tell you why, but Juha Karttunen made an interesting visualization for the outcome of a million games played with varying numbers of consecutive tosses:

AI Corner

First AI Software Engineer by Cognition

Cognition introduces the very first AI software engineer: Devin! In a showcase video they present us with an LLM powered AI agent that has access to a code editor, a terminal as well as a browser, and makes use of these three tools to solve programming problems - you can watch it here:

After devising an initial plan, the agent iteratively writes code, browses API documentation, squashes bugs and follows the instructions that are typed into the LLM prompt box until the developed code is of a satisfactory state. Currently Cognition boasts a 13.86% preformance on real world software engineering benchmarks, setting itself apart form all other competitors:

But honestly I don't know what all the fuss is about, sure, it's impressive that we can now have LLMs sit in the driver's seat to operate tools in such a seamless manner, but the video still clearly shows that Devin was being instructed by a person - just sped up really quickly. It's likely that the person operating Devin had to actually check and monitor what the agent had concocted to direct it towards a desired outcome. At this point it just doesn't strike me as very useful - most of the examples that are floating around are very basic things.

Over on Youtube, Theo voices his opinion on Devin and raises some good points in reaction to the different showcases, I recommend checking out the video if you're curious to learn more about how Devin actually works from the regular user's perspective:

Design against AI

The AI landscape is currently in a consistent state of upheaval, there's a new tool, new model, new something coming every couple of days and being heralded as the new big thing. And somehow the hype has yet to die down somehow. How do we actually work with AI in this setting and incorporate it into our practices, be it programming, or design?

In the rapid version of his talk at the 2024 Design in Tech conference John Maeda tackles this exact issue with AI. Should we fight against it? Compete with it? Collaborate with it? Or something else entirely? You can watch it here:

Gorilla Updates

What have I been up to this week? Looking back I actually got a lot done, even though there's been other life stuff that I had to deal with. Overall I've probably spent more time than I've ever have on social media - but for a good reason, I've just been having so much fun over on Warpcast, with the additional incentive that I'm being given a considerable $degen allowance everyday to tip other creators and artists, and that simply for being active on the platform... why wouldn't I?

Is it engagement farming? Absolutely, yes, but then again... why not? I'm having a blast. There's so much to talk about with what's currently going on over on Farcaster, that it warrants its own article - although it's taking a lot of mental bandwidth to keep up with everything, a good descriptor for it at this point would be "vibrant", with new shenanigans popping every day (see drakulas and vampires) that might or might not develop into something more legitimate in the future. If you're still not on Farcaster, here's an invite link - it costs a couple of bucks to join but we both get some Warps if you do via the link.

That said, I also explored a couple of new ideas, like alternative coordinate systems. I learned about Bipolar coordinate systems a couple of months ago, but then couldn't really wrap my head around the concept nor could I figure out how to implement it. I somehow managed to get my idea working in a matter of minutes when I tried again this week - have a looksy at what I came up with:

Basically instead of having a single origin point you now have two, such that points are defined by their relative distance to both centers, as well as the angle that is formed from the two centers and the coordinate point. As always, the Wikipedia page actually gives you a good overview of what the math for this looks like, it's actually not incredibly difficult:

http://wikipedia.org

Bipolar coordinates - Wikipedia

Bipolar coordinates are a two-dimensional orthogonal coordinate system based on the Apollonian circles. Confusingly, the same term is also sometimes used for two-center bipolar coordinates. There is also a third system, based on two poles ( biangular coordinates). The term "bipolar" is further used on occasion to describe other curves having two singular points (foci), such as ellipses, hyperbolas, and Cassini ovals.

I also experimented with elliptic coordinates - not to be confused with ecliptic and ellipsoidal coordinates - but often perceived to have epileptic qualities (as the comments over on Twitter have pointed out 🤣). But not too much came from that idea however - careful with this one, might make you motion sick:

I also managed to put in some legwork on the redesign of the blog... yes, yes I know it's taking me an absolutely disgusting amount of time but I'm finally getting to a point where I have a complete picture of all the CSS and HTML partials in my brain - and also finally decided on a font combo that I'm 100% confident with, and that I believe represents the identity of the Gorilla Sun blog really well - here's some sneak peeks:

I also managed to figure out how to make a sleek dark mode toggle purely out of CSS:

Ahmad Moussa || Gorilla Sun

@gorillasu

Dark mode toggle CSS + JS only! Not perfect, but it works

15

22:22 • 16 Mar 2024

It definitely still needs some work but I'm happy with it at this point.

Music for Coding

This week I've mainly been jamming out to some Ginger Root tracks after getting hooked by Loretta:

And that's it from me this week, hope you enjoyed this week's curated list of generative art and tech shenanigans - now that you've made it through the newsletter, you might as well share it with someone that you know who might enjoy this kind of content - sharing the newsletter is one of the best ways to support it!

If you've read this far, thanks a million! And if you're still hungry for more Generative art things, you can check out the most recent issue of the Newsletter here:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Gorilla Newsletter 47

Le Random's First Anniversary - Combine24 Generative Art Competition - Tsubuyai Porcessing by Koma Tebe - Optical Illusions by Akiyoshi Kitaoka - Aux Arbres Largest Genart Collection in History - Naive Yearly by Are.na - Flui Typography by Utopia +++ lots more

And if that's not enough, you can find a backlog of all previous Gorilla Newsletter issues here:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Newsletter - Gorilla Sun

Weekly recap of Gorilla Articles, Art and other interesting things from the world of generative art and creative coding.

Cheers, happy sketching, and again, hope that you have a fantastic week! See you in the next one - Gorilla Sun 🌸 If you're interested in sponsoring or advertising with the Newsletter - reach out!

Welcome back everyone 👋 and a heartfelt thank you to all new subscribers that joined in the past week!

This is the 47th issue of the Gorilla Newsletter - a weekly online publication that sums up everything noteworthy from the past week in generative art, creative coding, tech and AI - as well as a sprinkle of my own endeavors.

https://www.gorillasun.de

Gorilla Newsletter 47

Le Random's First Anniversary - Combine24 Generative Art Competition - Tsubuyai Porcessing by Koma Tebe - Optical Illusions by Akiyoshi Kitaoka - Aux Arbres Largest Genart Collection in History - Naive Yearly by Are.na - Flui Typography by Utopia +++ lots more

That said, hope you're all having a great start into the week! Let's get straight into it! 👇

All the Generative Things

Le Random's first Anniversary

Last week, on the 8th of March, Le Random celebrated its first anniversary marking one full year of their presence in the generative art scene. In this short span of time they've established themselves as a leading voice in the space, not just by building the largest documented genart timeline in existence, but also by amplifying the voices of the individuals that are at the forefront of this art movement:

Happy Birthday Le Random, and thank you for all the wonderful articles and interviews throughout the past year! Naturally we also get a new piece from Monk, in which he writes about how we got to where we are today with generative art, recounting how the machine has played a crucial role in reinventing how we make art and how it greatly augments our art making capabilities:

https://www.lerandom.art

Mona Lisa to monogrid

How did we transition from art that looks like Leonardo's Mona Lisa to art like Kim Asendorf's monogrid? Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) investigates the history of art's mechanization to contemplate the future of digital generativity.

Combine24 Generative Art Competition

In other news, the Finish National Gallery just recently announced that they're organizing an open generative art competition; you can find more info about it over on the official announcement page:

https://combine24.alusta.art

Combine24

A generative art competition by the Finnish National Gallery.

The submission period for the competition runs from March 1st to May 31st, so there's still plenty of time. The only requirements for your artwork are that A) it needs to make use of the provided CC0 dataset that represents the gallery's collection, and B) it to be an original work minted as a generative project on Highlight:

If I find the time, I might give it a shot and participate. But it might be challenging for me personally at least, since I'm not generally used to making data driven works. The first idea that comes to mind is training a neural network of some sort on the dataset and then have it imagine new outputs, but that's hardly very innovative - it would still need to have some sort of creative twist. Besides, it's also been a minute since I've done anything ML related.

Another idea would be some form of generative dadaist collage, but that would also be outside of my comfort zone, and I'm not certain how you'd go about implementing it - since the final work needs to be minted on highlight, the image assets would also have to be stored somewhere. On second thought, maybe I should actually get a feel for the dataset first and then only do something with a subset of the images.

Tsubuyaki Processing by Koma Tebe

Koma Tebe never ceases to amaze us with his tweet sized code sorceries; in a recent creation of his he impresses with a cool metaball-esque sketch, that makes use of a cool P5 trick that I had almost forgotten about:

Koma Tebe

@KomaTebe

f=0,draw=r=>{for(f++||createCanvas(W=400,W),background(0),noStroke(c=128),C=circle,d=200,j=0;j<W;j+=16)for(i=0;i<TAU;i+=PI/24)fill(c+128),C(sin(i)*(J=j+f%32)+d,cos(i)*J+d,J/8),c=-c;C(d,d,180),fill(0),C(d,d,9*sin(f/3)+150),filter(BLUR,6),filter(THRESHOLD,.4)};//#つぶやきProcessing

373

17:40 • 28 Feb 2024

The secret to this one is the filter() function that comes out of the box with p5js, which lets you apply an image filter to all pixels of the canvas at once, such as the BLUR and THRESHOLD filters in this instance. Quickly popping Koma's code into the P5 editor and toggling off the two filters, we can get a feel for what's happening under the hood:

The blur makes it such that the outward going circular shapes on the canvas blend into each other, while the threshold clamps these values back to a saturated black or white value. This makes it such that the shapes connect in a sort of goo-y, metaball-esque manner. Which has the nice side-effect that you can get different outcomes depending on the harshness of the blur and threshold parameters. Simply a classic P5 trick.

I also recommend checking out Koma Tebe's other sketches over on Twitter, since there's lots of cool tricks that can be learned from the Tsubuyaki format. And while we're talking about code golfing, another cool one I came across recently was by Steve over on Warpcast, in which he packages an entire web page inside of a tiny cast:

Initially I had some trouble figuring out what I was looking at, but that was due to being a Firefox user... which doesn't actually render the code properly. If you're viewing the cast in Chrome you can simply highlight the content of the cast, then right click it to reveal an option that says 'go:to' to open the code snippet as page in the browser (or alternatively drop the cast content into your address bar) - which will then reveal Steve's creation: the farcaster logo made entirely out of vertical slashes and horizontal dashes. It's a neat trick, and I'm wondering what more can be done with it since you technically could also include JavaScript within such a short code snippet.

Optical Illusions by Akiyoshi Kitaoka

I frequently browse Pinterest to find inspiration for my sketches, and my latest obsession has been optical illusions - they also seem to perform really well on social media since they're really powerful eye-catchers. I recently came across one that had me do a double-take, to check if I I was actually seeing correctly - have a look for yourself:

If you're not color-blind then it should appear as if the grid of alternating darker and lighter green tiles is warped in some manner - but that's actually just an optical illusion, the grid is actually perfectly square! And there's no bend to it whatsoever. So, what's actually going on? I quickly did a little investigation and recreated the pattern with code, also making an alternative version with different colors:

It's not a 1-to-1 copy of the pin when it comes to the placement of the pink and white geometric flowers, but the effect's still there, and even more pronounced when you scroll over the image. In the alternative version with different colors the effect didn't really come through - so it must have something to do with the actual colors! After posting it over in the birbsnest discord, Metamere jumped in explaining that it's an optical illusion invented (discovered?) by the Japanese professor Akiyoshi Kitaoka:

Turns out this specific pattern is called Primrose Field, and comes in different versions, it also works when the grid is grayscale and the geometric flowers are alternatingly black and white. But that's just one of many, many more optical illusions that Kitaoka has created - he's actually been documenting his works since 2002 over on a page titled Akiyoshi's illusion pages:

It's essentially a treasure trove for all sorts of different optical illusions - with a big focus on those that are still images but appear to be in motion whenever your gaze shifts, or when they fall into your peripheral vision. What's more is that Akiyoshi's illusions have made it onto quite a few influential album covers, such as Animal Collective's critically acclaimed album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, as well as Lady Gaga's 2013 album Artpop. You can learn more about Kitaoka's life over on Wikipedia:

http://wikipedia.org

Akiyoshi Kitaoka - Wikipedia

Akiyoshi Kitaoka is a Professor of Psychology at the College of Letters, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan. In 1984, he received a BSc from the Department of Biology, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan, where he studied animal psychology (burrowing behavior in rats) and (at the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute for Neuroscience) neuronal activity of the inferotemporal cortex in macaque monkeys.

I'll probably try and recreate some more of his works and maybe even try to come up to remix them in a generative manner.

On SDFs by Inigo Quilez

Inigo Quilez made a full rewrite for one of his stellar articles about SDFs, in which he introduces smooth-minimums and how they allow us to blend 3D shapes in a smooth manner:

https://iquilezles.org

Inigo Quilez

Tutorials and articles of Inigo Quilez on computer graphics, fractals, demoscene, shaders and more.

Web3 News

The largest Genart Collection in History: Aux Arbres

A couple of days ago the minting period for Zanca's Aux Arbres concluded - and with over 70 thousand mints it indubitably went down as the largest blockchain art collection in history. A factor that played into this exorbitant number of mints likely has to do with the fact that Zancan's system kept revealing new types of variations, colors and patterns whenever a certain mint-number milestone was reached:

Some of the rarer variations that were revealed later throughout the minting will likely be highly valuable collector pieces in the future, for instance the honey-comb variation that was one of the last ones to be revealed, as well as a cool Smolskull crossover:

After being asked about if there were still variations that were unrevealed, Zancan reveals to us that these variations weren't actually part of the original script but were added in during the minting of the project!

If Zancan hasn't already cemented himself as one of the greatest contemporary artists then this should do it, we'll likely still be talking about Aux Arbres for many years to come. I'm happy I didn't sleep on this one and have a few in my own (meager) collection.

ArtBlocks Self-Publishing Announcement

Last week Art Blocks made quite a big announcement, unveiling that with their recent acquisition of Sansa the platform is currently in the process of creating an environment that will make it possible for artists to self-publish their generative projects:

It is however not entirely clear how open this new branch of Art Blocks will be, considering that projects which weren't Art Blocks curated, still had to undergo some form of curatorial audit before obtaining a stamp of approval for being released. In other news, WTBS also made an announcement that they're recording an episode with Erick, and I believe that we should be getting more information about the upcoming changes to Art Blocks in that conversation:

Web & Tech

Naive Yearly by Are.na

I must confess that when I first came across Are.na, I didn't really get it - it simply seemed like a place for collecting things you find on the internet, and I can already do that in any kind of note taking app, so what's the point?

But I slowly came around, Are.na is a distraction free place on the internet where you can not just collect ideas and arbitrary types of content, but it also lets you organize your thoughts and give them structure, while providing social features tailored towards this end. If you're not familiar with Are.na, this article by Jil Wright describes it beautifully, explaining how she uses the platform as someone that has an information addiction (just like me):

https://medium.com

Using Are.na for Research

Aren.a is an online platform that I've started using for personal knowledge management and collaboration.

Every year Are.na holds a conference gathering people who expand what the web is and can be. They document this conference in form of a web page with pieces that compliment the talks given by the invited speakers:

I highly encourage you to explore those pieces (by clicking on the speaker names in the list on the right) - my favorite is Maya Man's eulogy for Google's 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button that found the end of it's lifespan in 2010. That said, if you're not on Are.na yet, go check it out!

Retrofitting Fluid Typography

Choosing fonts and an appropriate font-size for different text elements in a web page's UI is often more involved than it seems. In the age of responsive web design it often makes sense to scale font-sizes depending on the size of the browser's viewport that's displaying the page; and the most common solution nowadays is to apply a different font-size value whenever one of these breakpoints takes effect. This is a bit cumbersome as you'll have to create quite a few media queries in which you define the font-size values. Richard Rutter recently wrote an interesting article in which he takes a different approach that calls itself Fluid Typography:

https://clagnut.com

Retrofitting fluid typography

As part of my forthcoming Patterns Day talk I decided to rebuild the newly redesigned Creative Boom article page using Utopian fluid typography to replace its multitude of breakpoints. This is the story of why and how.

Fluid Typography disposes of breakpoints and interpolates font-sizes depending on minimum and maximum values. It's a novel concept suggested by Utopia, which isn't a tool or framework, but rather a way of thinking about type and space in web design in a fluid manner. Although it sounds a little pretentious, I recommend giving Utopia's introductory video a watch, where they explain the concept and overall approach:

Over on their website they provide a couple of free tools, like font calculators, for you to use and get started with fluid typography yourself:

https://utopia.fyi

Utopia

Fluid responsive design

CSS Scroll-triggered Animations

Modern CSS is truly a treat - Ryan Mulligan recently wrote an interesting article about scroll-triggered animations that are purely done with CSS:

https://ryanmulligan.dev

CSS Scroll-triggered Animations with Style Queries

Combine scroll-driven animations and style queries to trigger an animation sequence powered only by CSS.

His article is inspired by an experiment from last year by Bramus van Damme that's also worth a read:

https://www.bram.us

Creating Scroll-Triggered Animations by combining Scroll-Driven Animations, Custom Properties, Style Queries, and Transitions

When you combine Scroll-Driven Animations with Custom Properties, Style Queries, and Transitions you hack your way into creating Scroll-Triggered Animations.

AI Corner

Why future AI won't revolve around Chatbots

The hype around our AI powered chat partners has yet to die down - and deservedly so, they've proven themselves to be extremely powerful tools for all sorts of tasks. We are however still limited in that our only means of communicating with them is through a prompt based interface. Fast Company discusses this issue in a recent article of theirs and showcases three companies that have already leveraged LLMs in innovative manners:

For instance, the second example they provide, a company pitted two LLMs against each other in a sort of conversation to come up with new ideas:

He started playing around with the idea of combining two large language models (LLMs), one to gather travel data and the other to analyze company spending. What if those two LLMs had a kind of conversation? And what if they instructed one of those LLMs to act as if it were a CFO who needed to prepare a board presentation on how to save money on corporate travel? 

A relevant article in this regard is by Amelia Wattenberger back from 2023, in which she had already identified this same issue and also tackles it from a UI perspective titled "Boo Chatbots"

An AI masterpiece better than Dune 2

This one isn't educative in the least bit, but as someone who's attempted to make ASCII art with ChatGPT's help, I highly enjoyed watching this dramatic chat of someone with far more patience that I do:

Gorilla Updates

I've been deep, deep in CSS hell again this past week, in an attempt to figure out a relatively decent design for a new landing page for the Newsletter, and there's still not much to really show right now, except a big stinkin pile of broken CSS. I did however find a little bit of time for some generative shenanigans - I already mentioned the little Akiyoshi Kitaoka inspired optical illusion sketch earlier - but I also explored another idea that involves a triangular lattice inspired by yet another thing I saw on Pinterest:

I thought that the unfolded cutout for the star tetrahedron looked really cool - from an artistic POV it's more interesting than the actual 3D shape that it forms, to me at least. Apparently these are called nets:

Looking just a little bit more into it, if you're looking for an algorithm to unfold a 3D shape onto a 2D plane you'd probably be looking at UV unwrapping. But yet again, I was all out of time for exploring internet rabbit holes this week... so maybe that's something better left for next week. And that's not really what I wanted to do in the first place, I just wanted to generate some interesting triangle patterns, so I started out simple and just did a little grid/lattice in which I apply some random rotations to the individual triangles, and I feel that there's already something there:

Besides that I also finally got another idea out of my system that I've been thinking about ever since I made my sketch for Genuary 2024's Wobbly prompt - and it turned out differently from what I had envisioned, but in a good way actually! In my mind I was envisioning a circular thing that had wavy bands shooting outwards from the center, but it ended up looking somewhat 3D, with the bend of the bands conveying some sort of additional depth:

Ahmad Moussa || Gorilla Sun

@gorillasu

Medusa

107

22:29 • 10 Mar 2024

Music for Coding

If you're a fan of Nujabes, then this one by Uyama Hiroto will hit the sweet spot - Freeform Jazz is Hiroto san's third full-length studio album released in 2016:

The overall sound is hard to describe, somehow distant and mysterious, but still raw and intimate, uneasy but relaxed. Each track is very different and unique, but the entirety of the album still flows really well and blends into a beautiful larger whole that never loses your attention. A relevant piece of writing here is a conversation between Uyama with his editor and music compiler Hashimoto Toru that shines light on how the album came to be:

http://kumomi.org

Uyama Hiroto "freeform jazz" Interview (2016)

This is an interview about Uyama Hiroto's third full-length album, freeform jazz. Joining Uyama here is close friend Hashimoto Toru. This interview is particularly recommended reading for fan...

It is, as implied by the title, a work that is free in form. Alongside the beautiful ensembles characteristic of Uyama, the release is filled with freaky beats, experimental ideas, and dope song progressions, lulling the listener into a false sense of security.

In the famous words of Patrick Star "Now you must acquire a taste for... Freeform Jazz" - but I believe that it's not too difficult to do so when the Jazz is presented as beautifully as this. After giving the album a full listen, I have to say that it's very likely going to establish itself as a personal favorite. Being considered as Nujabes right-hand man, they have worked closely together on multiple tracks - here's one of them that I found to be stellar:

That's it from me this week, hope you enjoyed this week's curated list of generative art and tech shenanigans - now that you've made it through the newsletter, you might as well share it with someone that you know who might enjoy this kind of content - sharing the newsletter is one of the best ways to support it!

If you've read this far, thanks a million! And if you're still hungry for more Generative art things, you can check out the most recent issue of the Newsletter here:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Gorilla Newsletter 46

Compressionism as an Art Movement - Particle based Fluid Simulations - Infinite Procedural Photorealistic Worlds - Molnar's Paris - Plotting on Jackson Cubes - The Blockchain was Invented for NFTs, not Currency - A CMS for Github Pages - A Netlify Horror Story +++ lots more

And if that's not enough, you can find a backlog of all previous Gorilla Newsletter issues here:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Newsletter - Gorilla Sun

Weekly recap of Gorilla Articles, Art and other interesting things from the world of generative art and creative coding.

Cheers, happy sketching, and again, hope that you have a fantastic week! See you in the next one - Gorilla Sun 🌸 If you're interested in sponsoring or advertising with the Newsletter - reach out!

This is the 46th issue of the Gorilla Newsletter - a weekly online publication that sums up everything noteworthy from the past week in generative art, creative coding, tech and AI - as well as a sprinkle of my own endeavors.

https://www.gorillasun.de

Gorilla Newsletter 46

Compressionism as an Art Movement - Particle based Fluid Simulations - Infinite Procedural Photorealistic Worlds - Molnar's Paris - Plotting on Jackson Cubes - The Blockchain was Invented for NFTs, not Currency - A CMS for Github Pages - A Netlify Horror Story +++ lots more

That said, hope you're all having a great start into the week! Let's get straight into it! 👇

All the Generative Things

Compressionism as an Art Movement

Compression isn't only crucial for all sorts of technical purposes and applications, but has also occupied an art-centric role over the years - it is actually quite fascinating to think about how the size limitations of early computers have influenced the overall trajectory of digital art over the past decades, not only from a technical point of view but also the aesthetics thereof.

Twitter user Diid, who's currently building out The Center for the Advancement of Digital Art, recently published an article on this exact topic, diving into the origins of the term Compressionim, positing it as an art movement in its own right, and how it is undergoing somewhat of a renaissance with blockchain art that is also confronted with the size limitations of the underlying tech:

https://www.cada.art

On Compressionism - The Center for the Advancement of Digital Art

A brief history and explanation of what compressionism is and where it came from.

Diid starts us off by recounting the origins of the term Compressionism, first coined by James Powderly as a title for an interactive video project of his, but then later given to Nathaniel Stern for another performance art project:

https://vimeo.com/

"Compressionism" - scanner performance art and printmaking

Performative digital and hand-made prints, produced by strapping a scanner, computer and battery pack to the artist, then traversing the landscape.

A short description of the project can be found here.

If you google the term Compressionism you don't actually find much about it, as an artform/art movement at least. But I would to some extent agree with Diid that it is an apt umbrella term for much of the art of our era, be it dither art that employs color reduction techniques for aesthetic purposes, ASCII art that reduces an image into letter symbols, size-coding and code-golfing that are often impressive feats of a human type of compression, and would go as far as saying that AI art falls under this category, where machine learning models up-sample imaginary outputs from compressed internal representations.

And especially with code based on-chain projects, we are seeing a renaissance of this phenomenon, where expensive blockchain storage pushes code artists make their projects as small as possible, such as to minimize the associated cost - just past December we observed many a generative artist size-code their systems for fxhash's launch on ETH.

The most notable project in that regard was Piter Pasma's Blokkendoos, in which he creates a Monte Carlo path tracer in only 5954 characters of dependecy-less vanilla JavaScript code. At the time Piter also shared an interesting thread on the importance of size optimizing code, that I believe is relevant to this discussion:

Piter Pasma also chimes in with some questions of his own underneath Diid's tweet, raising some interesting points:

But as Diid points towards the end of his article, he's not trying to define the movement as a whole - if it can be called a movement that is. While it can be interesting to group different artforms under a collective -ism, to more easily categorize and compartmentalize, it can often lead to overly simplifying the complexity, the philosophical ideas and the historical context of these artforms. After all, an isms is not synonymous with idiosyncrasy, and I believe the distinction has to be made there. Art is generally beyond isms.

Particle based Fluid Simulations

Although a bunch of circles bouncing around on a virtual canvas might at first glance seem a bit underwhelming, the implementation thereof lies at the foundation of some quite advanced computational concepts. The first culprit in that regard being numerical stability - when simulating physics computationally we are entirely at the whims of the internal finite precision arithmetic of our computers, and in many cases achieving a somewhat stable system can be quite challenging.

Particle simulations are also fascinating because they're an integral component of many other interesting types of simulations, such as collision systems, mesh and soft body simulations, flocking simulations, and as I most recently learned, also fluid simulations. I came across a tutorial series by PixelPhysics over on YouTube, in which they show us how to implement a particle based fluid sim from scratch, entirely in vanilla JavaScript:

Their implementation is based on a paper back from 2005 titled Particle based viscoelastic fluid Simulation (the paper is not an incredibly difficult read), which describes a system that allows the simulation of surface tension via a double density relaxation procedure - but before this starts sounding like some strange technobabble straight from r/VXJunkies, I'll leave it to PixelPhysics to do the heavy lifting and explain how it works. I might attempt my own implementation at some point though.

A commonality that I see between particle simulations, is that the behavior of particles often boils down to their proximity to other neighboring particles and their movement. In a flocking simulation, following Craig Reynolds famous model, the movement of the individual particles is influenced by steering behaviors that depend on the vector forces of other nearby Boids (other particles).

When it comes to fluid sims, another important resource is this Coding Adventure by the OG Sebastian Lague, in which he also creates a proper fluid simulation:

When I explored physics simulations for myself last year and wrote a number of posts on the topic, I always felt that there was a lot more there to explore, and it's definitely something that I'll likely tackle again in the coming months - especially flocking and fluid sims. So the main take-away here, is that investigating the behavior of bouncing virtual particles is frequently a worthwhile scientific endeavor.

Infinite Photorealistic Worlds using Procedural Generation

Whenever I see the term 'Procedural' nowadays, it almost feels like a relic from an era long past - considering how far along generative AI has come. This week I came across an interesting, relatively recent, paper that claims an entirely procedural approach to creating photorealistic scenes:

The results look quite impressive, especially since the generator not only creates images but also 3D asset files (Blender) for the depicted scenes. As always, the Hackernews comment section for the article is quite polarized:

I can get behind both points of view though; on the one hand the system seems quite useful for generating novel 3D training data, and the paper actually already has a few citations that use it for this purpose - but on the other hand I also have to give it to the other opinions that question the photo-realism of the generated scenes. It might not be the best descriptor, and a procedural approach might just be a little too late for that considering what we're doing with machine learning these days.

But I find it strange to diminish the value of a project like this one, just because we can do things with AI now, I strongly believe that there's always merit to exploring alternative approaches to different tasks even when they might not be cutting-edge. Genuinely curious, what do you think about this issue?

Molnár's Paris

And to top off this generative column, and with NFT Paris conlcuding, Le Random leaves us with a historical travel guide that takes us through Paris, recounting the important places of Vera Molnár's life in the bustling art capital:

https://www.lerandom.art

Molnár's Paris

Vera Molnár moved to Paris at the end of 1947 and would call the city home for the rest of her storied life. Use our interactive map to follow in her footsteps across the French capital and discover the entwined narrative of artistic evolution and urban existence that defined her practice.

I was especially curious to see what Monk had to say about Le Select, the Hungarian expat café that Molnár would frequent, through which she got to know Sonia Delauney. When I wrote my own piece on Molnár's life I came across some resources stating that she met Kandinsky and Malevich there, although I couldn't find further information if these claims were accurate. Maybe it was only meant metaphorically. Next time you find yourself in Paris, you might just want to build in some of these locations into your itinerary!

Pen and Plottery

The occasional plotter segment of the Newsletter is back! ✏ There were quite a few plotter-related things this week that warranted its return 👇

Plotting on Jackson Cubes

If you've noticed, I'm a big fan of written resources that inspire us with new ideas, teach us new things and/or provide us with interesting methods to make interesting art - and that's exactly what Jos Vromans did with a recent post of his, in which he checks all three of those boxes. In Plotting on Jackson Cubes, Jos introduces us to Jackson Cubes, shows us how they can be decorated with different plotted patterns and even provides us with a couple of SVG generators to easily create these patterns:

If you're not familiar with what a Jackson Cube is, it's essentially an Origami cube that's assembled out of 6 interlocking pieces of folded paper. There's different variations, like the one shown above that have one or more corner sliced off, resulting from a slightly different folding procedure, and making them stackable on top of each other.

These cubes derive their name from their creator Paul Jackson, who came up with the folding technique in the early 1970s - there is a cool video of his back from 2018, in which he personally demonstrates the folding technique:

Looking into it a bit more, I also found this interesting list of the different variations that Paul Jackson came up with, and I guess the proper term for the cubes with the corners sliced off is Columbus Cubes:

http://www.origamiheaven.com

David Mitchell's Origami Heaven - MODE - Designs From the Paul Jackson Cube

The web-site of paperfolding designer, author and publisher David Mitchell

Decorating these cubes with generative patterns is the cherry on top, and imo makes them really pop. Jos points us towards two pattern generators of his, that allow you to directly export SVG files and feed them into your own plotter if you have one. Although I've messed around quite a bit with the 10 print pattern, I actually never experimented with triangle subdivisions - so I found it super cool that Jos also wrote a bit about how to create these patterns in another post of his:

Overall, I really love the plotter+origami combo, feels like a match made in heaven. Besides that, a little bird also told me that Jos is already working on a couple more articles that we'll likely see quite soon over on his blog.

Plotter Animation by Compote de Plot

Another cool thing that you can do with plotters are stop-motion animations - such that each individual frame is plotted and then later recombined into a complete digital animation. The cool thing here is that it's often difficult to align frames perfectly, giving it that nice stop-motion jitter effect.

Compote de plot created a really cool one recently, in which a tessellated sphere disintegrates into individual tiles and then reappears from the void:

Compote de plot

@loic_goulefert

60 frames #plotloop
#plottertwitter

18

16:38 • 28 Feb 2024

I thought that the pattern on the sphere was really cool, it reminds me of a Voronoi diagram with the added effect that the edges between them are slightly bent due to the curvature of the sphere's surface. Compote de Plot sheds some light on how they did it after I inquired about it on Twitter, revealing that he's using blender's cell fracture tool to generate the pattern on the sphere:

I'll have to try and figure out how to generate a Voronoi Diagram/Delaunay Triangulation on a sphere now, I think the challenge here is having the tessellation wrap around- a quick google actually reveals that Red Blob Games has written about this, so I might just dig into it sometime this week:

Delaunay+Voronoi on a sphere

Plotter assisted Lithographs

And in other news, Licia He has been experimenting with making plotter assisted lithographs:

Licia He

@Licia_He

Made some progress in making code-generated, plotter-assisted, kitchen lithograph.

(Plotter litho? Generative litho? Gen kitchen litho? What should I call this )

57

19:03 • 27 Feb 2024

What's a lithograph, you ask? A lithograph is essentially a printmaking technique that involves creating an image on a flat surface with ink (or other painting materials), typically a stone or metal plate, and then pressing a piece of paper against that surface to transfer the image from the surface to the paper. Here, Licia prepares the lithograph surface with her plotters.

I found this cool article that shows the process step-by-step by means of a series of animated GIFs:

https://www.metmuseum.org

Lithograph

Lithography is a planographic printmaking process in which a design is drawn onto a flat stone (or prepared metal plate, usually zinc or aluminum) and affixed by means of a chemical reaction.

Web3 News

The Blockchain Was Invented for NFTs, not Currency

The invention of the blockchain is probably most often erroneously attributed to the elusive figure of Satoshi Nakamoto. Although the original white-paper for the bitcoin blockchain was revolutionary, from a historical point of view, that wasn't actually the inception of the cryptographic and decentralized notions that most blockchains build upon today.

Satoshi based his decentralized financial system on the ideas of Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta, that were previously more concerned with developing a system for proving the integrity of digital records of any form, which led them to the conception of an early blockchain system. In this interview with Jason Bailey for RCS they recount their story:

https://www.rightclicksave.com

The Blockchain Was Invented For NFTs, Not Currency

A candid interview with the inventors of the blockchain

Throughout the interview they do emphasize that Satoshi made impactful contributions in the manner that their system was leveraged for financial purposes. They also state that NFTs in their current form are essentially the manifestation of their long-term goals for the system that they've built, and are moreover big proponents of an interoperable multi-chain future, where the decentralized ledgers can seamlessly communicate with each other. And we've actually already been witnessing this to some extent in recent months. As always, a highly interesting read from RCS.

Deep-dive into Farcaster NFTs

The Farcaster scene has been unfolding more and more rapidly, especially with Farcaster Frames that make it possible to directly mint NFTs from the social feed. Kaloh did some number crunching and reports back with what seem to be the most valuable collectibles in the current eco-system:

https://www.kaloh.xyz

🟣 Deep Dive: Farcaster NFTs

Let's dive in Farcaster NFT ecosystem with a market analysis and a curated list

If you're curious about how Kaloh aggregates these numbers I also highly encourage you to check out another piece he's written in which he explains all of it:

https://www.kaloh.xyz

📈 How To Crunch The Numbers Behind NFTs

Understand how to use my market analysis spreadsheets

Tech and Web Dev things

A CMS for Github Pages

Github pages is really cool, it makes the deployment of static websites incredibly straightforward. But once that static site grows just a little bit larger, working with it can quickly become a hassle - managing a bunch of markdown files in form of a github repo and manually linking image and media files through markdown can get messy really quick. This is where Pages CMS comes in, as an attempt to alleviate these pain points by creating a proper content management system for Github pages:

https://pagescms.org

Pages CMS: The No-Hassle CMS for GitHub

Tired of juggling Git and YAML to update your Next.js, Astro, Hugo or Nuxt website? Make it easy on you and your team, get a user-friendly CMS running straight on top of GitHub.

I spent some time and took it for a spin with a side project of mine - and I have to say, I'm really impressed! You simply link it to an existing github repo of yours, be it a Jekyll, 11ty, or any other static site generator, and set up a configuration file that defines the relevant folders in your project, mainly those that contain your media and markdown files, then you can already get started creating and managing your content via the CMS. Definitely worth keeping an eye on how this project develops in the future!

CSS :has() Rule

Our favorite web dev Ahmad Shadeed, as well as repeat offender of the Newsletter, is back with another deep-dive, this time teaching us about the :has() rule in CSS:

https://ishadeed.com

CSS :has() Interactive Guide

Everything you need to know about CSS :has() selector.

If you're not familiar the :has() rule, it's essentially a means for us to 'look ahead' and check what kind of element comes after the current element. A scenario where this comes in really handy is when you want to override the bottom-margin of the current element depending on what the next element is - for instance, we sometimes want a bigger margin when a block of text is followed by an image, to allow for some visual breathing room. Ahmad Shadeed guides us through all of the intricacies of this special CSS rule.

DOOM Rendered via Checkboxes

I came for DOOM Rendered via Checkboxes - I stayed for interesting Web Assembly internet lore and the Nerd Sniping phenomenon:

https://healeycodes.com

DOOM Rendered via Checkboxes

WebAssembly meets 16000 HTML checkboxes.

Andrew Healey's was inspired by Bryan Braun's checkbox shenanigans to create a version of DOOM that's entirely rendered via HTML checkbox elements. Apparently you can make a lot of things on the Web entirely with checkboxes as Bryan explains in an article of his:

https://www.bryanbraun.com

I keep making things out of checkboxes

Something happened earlier this year where I got on a run making checkbox animations and just couldn't stop.

Andrew builds his creation on top of Diek Mann's Web Assembly port of the original DOOM, pointing us to an interesting repo in which Diek Man not only teaches us about Web Assembly but also show us how the port is made possible:

https://github.com

GitHub - diekmann/wasm-fizzbuzz: WebAssembly from Scratch: From FizzBuzz to DooM.

WebAssembly from Scratch: From FizzBuzz to DooM. Contribute to diekmann/wasm-fizzbuzz development by creating an account on GitHub.

Have you been Nerd Sniped yet?

A Netlify Horror Story

A post from r/webdev has recently been making the rounds, in which a Netlify user has been billed a whopping $104k by Netlify for the bandwidth consumption of a simple static site:

After reaching out to Netlify's customer support it turns out that the site has in fact succumbed to a DDOS attack and incurred these exorbitant bandwidth costs - Netlify informs that the subject of this attack was an .mp3 file of an old Cantonese song included on the page. Netlify then offered to reduce the cost to 5% in light of it being a DDOS attack. Reddit comments recommended OP to post the story over on Hackernews before actually paying the outstanding cost - which then actually led the entire thing to catch on fire, even prompting a reply from Netlify's CEO over on Hackernews:

As well as an official statement from Netlify over on Twitter:

AI Corner

Runway Studios Creative Dialogues

Generative AI is unarguably going to transform the film-making scene in the coming years, and Runway Studios is currently at the helm of driving the creative dialogue around the cutting edge technology. Runway Studios, an off-shoot of the generative AI tooling company Runway, recently started a series of conversations between creatives that use AI for the purpose of creative expression - I found them to be highly insightful and really enjoyable to watch, here's episode 2 featuring Anna Ridler and Lex Fefegha:

You can keep an eye on upcoming episodes here, one of them will feature Golan Levin, so definitely worth keeping an eye on:

https://studios.runwayml.com

Creative Dialogues from Runway Studios

A series of conversations exploring human creativity and artificial intelligence.

AI and Design Systems

Last week I shared an article by Brad Frost from early January 2024 in which he proposes a global design system that I found highly interesting. Frost returns with a new article, this time exploring the role that AI models currently occupy in aiding the creation of design systems:

https://bradfrost.com

AI and Design Systems

We've all watched with simultaneous fascination and trepidation as a flood of AI-powered tools continues to wash over the digital landscape. At Big Medium, we help complex organizations design at scale and pragmatically adopt new technologies, so naturally we've been putting AI tools through their p

The main point of the article is that LLMs can be super powerful in generating the code for new components when trained on an already existing design system's codebase:

When you train a LLM on a design system’s codebase, conventions, syntax and documentation, you get a component boilerplate generator on steroids.

However, as we've already seen in recent history, it is still not a replacement for human judgement, and still requires a guiding hand to yield satisfactory outputs.

Gorilla Updates

Generative Irregular Puzzle Tilings

This week I worked a little more on my generative puzzle generator - I was wondering what it would look like to combine it with my code for irregular grids, albeit still a bit rough around the edges it did end up working out:

It was actually quite tricky to coordinate the connections between the irregular rectangular tiles - if done manually, you'd have to check which tiles are adjacent and at what positions their adjacency falls which is non-trivial.

I cheated a little, and create a preliminary regular square grid of puzzle tiles, for which we already lock in place the adjacency between each of the tiles. This grid is then overlayed it with an irregular grid that will then simply imitate the adjacency of the square tiles - if there is a shared edge that is. Maybe it's not a hack, since it still required quite a bit of code. Here's two debug outputs to visualize what's actually going on behind the scenes:

Maybe once I've wrapped up this project I can make a proper write-up. I'm also interested in seeing what it would look like when adapted to other tesselations, and in the future maybe I can also figure out how to bring this to life and create physical versions of these generative puzzles.

Designing Landing Pages and making things wonky

This past week I've been hard at work re-designing and re-structuring the blog - there's still sooo much to be done, but I'm slowly etching my way closer to something that I think I'll be really proud of:

I shared a couple of WIPs and asked for feedback over in Raph's birbsnest discord, which led to an interesting chain of events where Dave suggested adding a tiny css rotation to every element of the page:

This inspired Jordanne to create a tiny script called Wonky.js that does exactly that:

So, what are you waiting for? Do the right thing and wonkify your page right now.

A pit-stop at Unit London

Last week I went on a brief trip to the UK, visiting my partner who's recently started her PhD over there (so proud of her btw), and I used it as a chance to stop by Unit London that's currently exhibiting some works by Zach Lieberman and Ziping Wang. It was really awesome to see generative art in person for the first time. Zach's prints are really out of this world:

Ziping Wang's oil paintings are also incredible up close, I had to double and triple check that they actually were oil paintings. If you're in London for some reason, I highly recommend passing by - entrance is free of charge!

Music for Coding

I generally like to shout-out individual artists, but I've listened to this playlist so many times at this point I just had to share it - the cosmopolitan sound of the city pop genre might not be everyone's cup of tea, but to me it just instantly flips a feel good switch. Especially this playlist, with classics like Stay With Me by Miki Matsubara and Bay City by Junko Yagami, that just encapsulate the genre so beautifully:

That's it from me this week, hope you enjoyed this week's curated list of content - and now that you've made it through this week's newsletter, you might as well share it with someone that you know who might enjoy this kind of content - sharing the newsletter is one of the best ways to support it!

If you've read this far, thanks a million! And if you're still hungry for more Generative art things, you can check out the most recent issue of the Newsletter here:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Gorilla Newsletter 45

This week 📬 Weighted Voronoi Stippling - All about Color Spaces - Speaking in Net Language - fxhash comes to base - Zancan's Aux Arbres - Global Design and Documentation Systems +++ lots more

Previous issues of the newsletter can be found here:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Newsletter - Gorilla Sun

Weekly recap of Gorilla Articles, Art and other interesting things from the world of generative art and creative coding.

Cheers, happy sketching, and again, hope that you have a fantastic week! See you in the next one - Gorilla Sun 🌸 If you're interested in sponsoring or advertising with the Newsletter - reach out!

This is the 45th issue of the Gorilla Newsletter - a weekly online publication that sums up everything noteworthy from the past week in generative art, creative coding, tech and AI - as well as a sprinkle of my own endeavors.

That said, hope you're all having a great start into the week! You can also read this Newsletter over on the Gorilla Sun Blog:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Gorilla Newsletter 45

This week 📬 Weighted Voronoi Stippling - All about Color Spaces - Speaking in Net Language - fxhash comes to base - Zancan's Aux Arbres - Global Design and Documentation Systems +++ lots more

Weighted Voronoi Stippling

When I read the title of the newest coding challenge I immediately dropped everything and had to watch it start to finish. This time around Mr. Shiffman breaks down quite a tricky one for us — Weighted Voronoi Stippling!

I'm super excited about this topic because it's something that I've looked into myself about 2 years ago, at a time when I was exploring Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations. Back then however I gave up on pursuing a stippling effect, because I ultimately couldn't figure out how to implement the algorithm.

If you look into it yourself, you'll come across the very same paper that Shiffman implements in the challenge - which makes up the very first result that comes up for the search query Weighted Voronoi Stippling:

The effect really comes to life when it's used to represent 3D scenes, such as the little mannequin/figurine that's shown in one of the paper's figures (see above) - it's fascinating how the human eye can make out shadows/illumination simply through the density of the individual points. That makes me think of a recent collaboration between Joannie Lemercier and Quentin Hocde that's also powered by a stippling algorithm, titled Nuages Possibles, in which beautiful cloudscapes are brought to life through many thousands of individual dots:

But what actually are Voronoi Diagrams? A Voronoi diagram is essentially a type of space partitioning, in which a 2 dimensional surface is split into individual polygons based on the distance to a set of points that's scattered across this surface - we basically need to distribute some points on a plane as a starting condition to construct a Voronoi diagram. The defining characteristic of each polygon is that it corresponds to the region that is closer to a specific point than to any other point in the set.

Here's what this looks like, next to some art I made with the concept back from Genuary 2023:

Voronoi Diagrams are also closely related to Delaunay Triangulations, in fact, they're duals! This means that we can derive a Delaunay Triangulation from every Voronoi Diagram and vice versa - we can do so by simply connecting the centroids of each two adjacent Voronoi regions with a line. Here's what this looks like, as well as some art I made with Delaunay triangulations:

A fun fact here is that Delone, the mathematician that came up with/discovered this kind of triangulation, actually knew Georgy Voronoy, and if you're curious about some of the history between these two types of fascinating patterns, I encourage you to check out something I've written about it:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Delaunay Triangulation and Voronoi Diagrams

This is the first one of a two part series of blog posts on Delaunay Triangulations. In this one we have a look at artworks that have been created with Delaunay Triangulations, a little bit of it's history, possible strategies to create them, and the related Voronoi Diagram.

If you want something a bit more technical, and want to challenge yourself with an algorithm that can construct a Delaunay triangulation from an initial set of points, here's an explanation of the Bowyer-Watson algorithm:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Bowyer-Watson Algorithm for Delaunay Triangulation

The Bowyer-Watson algorithm for Delaunay triangulation is maybe one of the easier methods to implement and understand for obtaining a Delaunay Triangulation.

But back to the main topic, how do Voronoi Diagrams lead us to a Stippling effect? There's this cool algorithm called Lloyd's relaxation, that iteratively 'relaxes' a Voronoi diagram until all of the individual regions attain a somewhat equal size, essentially iteratively nudging the seed points that predicate the individual regions in the direction of their centroids - here's what this looks like:

This already looks really cool, but it's not very interesting since the resulting diagrams will always end up looking similarly even after the relaxation has come to a conclusion.

However, what if we modified this procedure, and relaxed the Voronoi diagram based on some probability distribution? Meaning that we don't nudge the seed points towards the geometric centers of the cells, but rather in a weighted direction, towards a weighted centroid. This weighted centroid could for example be derived from the underlying pixel values that fall under the Voronoi cell, nudging the seed points in the direction of darker colors, ultimately achieving the stippling effect described when we place an image underneath our Voronoi diagram.

And this is the part that I couldn't figure back then, how to calculate the weighted centroid basically - that's where Shiffman comes in, tackling it in the latter part of the video! I haven't had time to experiment with it yet but I'm super excited to do so. And kudos, the recent coding challenges have just been banger after banger!

Okay, Color Spaces

My therapist: color spaces aren't real, they can't hurt you...

Color Spaces: RGB, CMYK, HSB/HSV, HSL, LAB, YUV, XYZ, YCbCr, LCH (CIELCh), sRGB...

If you've ever wondered about Color Spaces, what the differences are, what each one of them is useful for, why we need so many and why there are so many in the first place - this is likely going to be the last article that you'll need to read about the topic. Eric provides us with all of the answers in this massive article:

https://ericportis.com

Okay, Color Spaces

What is a "color space?" Well first you take some colors. And then you arrange them, however you like, into some kind of space: You might ask: what kind of color might we find at the origin: ? Right now, it's undefined, but we could put anything there: black, gray, brown, heck - even hotpink if we wanted.

I was shocked to learn that Oklab, a perceptual lab-like color space, is actually only 4 years old, and proposed in 2020 by Björn Ottoson through a blog post of his - now tell me that you can't change the world with a blog - and it actually seems to have become quite a big deal seeing that it has a number of advantages in certain areas.

Unfortunately I'm all out of time for investigating strange internet rabbit-holes this week, so you'll have to be satisfied with this thread over on the Processing forums about the Oklab color space:

Anyway, lots of cool stuff here again. Read the article.

Speaking in Net Language

Credit for discovering this one goes to Tom aka pumaparded, sharing it over in the birbsnest discord's inspiration channel - leading me to one of the most fascinating reads I've had in a while. Michael Connor recounts the story behind Olia Lialina's net.art masterpiece "My boyfriend came back from the War":

https://rhizome.org

Speaking in Net Language: My Boyfriend Came Back from the War

Rhizome champions born-digital art and culture through commissions, exhibitions, scholarship, and digital preservation.

If you're not familiar with Net art, short for networked art, it's and artform and art movement that emerged in the 1990s with the increasing accessibility of the internet, and used the emerging web technologies as the primary medium - it's a really interesting piece internet history to dive into:

http://wikipedia.org

net.art - Wikipedia

net.art refers to a group of artists who have worked in the medium of Internet art since 1994. Some of the early adopters and main members of this movement include Vuk Ćosić, Jodi.org, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, Heath Bunting, Daniel García Andújar, and Rachel Baker.

Olia Lialina's work is a prominent example of this. In "My boyfriend came back from the War" she retells the reunion with her boyfriend as an interactive web experience, and it can still be accessed here.

I have to say it again, the Rhizome article is an absolutely fascinating read, not just analysing Lialina's work, but also contextualizing it and providing insights and commentary on the net.art movement from a historical point of view. Olia Lialina's work is part of the Net Art Anthology, where efforts have been made to present and preserve many more of these kinds of works:

https://anthology.rhizome.org

NET ART ANTHOLOGY

A two-year online exhibition retelling the history of net art from the 1980s through the present day.

Web3 News

The FOMO this past week has been absolutely unreal with all of the NFT Paris shenanigans in full-swing and seeing everyone having a good time over in France - if you're curious about all of that you just gotta hop on over to Twitter and check out what everyone's posted over the past week:

Doesn't mean that there hasn't been some other cool Web3 things to report on throughout the week 👇

fxhash launches on base

Holup... what is Base?

Base-ically an Ethereum L2!

... and what is an L2? 😅

L2s are solutions built on top of a blockchain's mainnet (L1) to improve scalability, and usually drastically lower gas fees! Base is actually only one of Ethereum's L2s, you might have heard other terms thrown around, like Polygon and Arbitrum that refer to other L2s. I have no idea how they work from a technical point of view, but I found this nice article by Lipsa Das from Ledger, that provides us with a good and easy to understand overview:

https://www.ledger.com

What Are Ethereum Layer 2 Blockchains and How Do They Work? | Ledger

Built on top of Ethereum, Layer 2 blockchains help speed up transaction processing while keeping the costs down for the L1 network.

If I'm understanding this correctly, minting an NFT on base should then theoretically also make it available on mainnet Ethereum? Depending on how the L2 stores the token on the blockchain? Maybe one of you guys can chime in on this. But anyway, big W for fxhash - not an L at all.

Aux Arbres by Zancan

And while we're talking about base, in light of the Coinbase's France kick-off, Zancan was tasked with creating a generative artwork for the occasion - and it turned out to be a really impressive one:

Continuing with his signature aesthetic, Zancan lets us take individual snapshots of larger growths with Aux Arbres, that translates to "To the Trees", each mint presents part of the branches or trunks of a number of trees. What's special about this generative artwork is that each unique mint from Aux Arbers is part of a bigger whole, in the literal sense of the word; highlight provides us with a special interface to visualize where each one of those minted snapshots falls and to which tree they belong:

Collect NFT

What's more, it's a free mint, and the gas fees are super low due to it being minted on base - so if you've every wanted a Zancan piece, now's your chance! The project's still open for minting for a couple of days, and at this point over 50k individual snapshots have been taken.

Iroh: IPFS Reimagined

Recently learned about Iroh, an IPFS alternative that seems to do things in a little bit of a different manner, aiming to be a more efficient and scalable version of IPFS:

But there seem to be some mixed opinions on the project when juxtaposed with IPFS.

Thoughts on a Global Design System

An interesting article from early January that I only recently came across is a piece by Brad Frost, titled 'A Global Design System'. The article caught my eye because when the term 'global' is attached to something, it often incites political undertones. In recent years the globalization debate has become more nuanced, more politically charged, and opposing views have emerged around it in different context.

Moreover, the notion doesn't only concern itself with global trade and economics, but can also be conceptually extended to other practices, like web design in this instance:

https://bradfrost.com

A Global Design System

TL;DR: This is a call to action to create a Global Design System that provides the world's web designers & developers a library of common UI components. A Global Design System would improve the quality and accessibility of the world's web experiences, save the world's web designers and developer

Frost argues that we live in a duplicative present, where organizations invest valuable labor time and resources into creating design systems that are to a large extent the same - naturally because everyone needs to adhere to the same web standards. The main argument of the article is that we'd alleviate much of this wasted time with a unified global design system - Frost doesn't just preach, but also follows up with an actual proposal for such a design system.

You could now argue that it is not necessarily a bad thing that different companies are creating their own individual proprietary design systems - isn't it a good thing that there's diversity in brand identities and how they design things? On a related note, I only learned about 'A Global Design System' through a more recent article by Piccalilli that argues for a similar globalization scheme in the context of documentation platforms:

https://piccalil.li

A Global Documentation Platform

I read A Global Design System by Big Medium's, Brad Frost recently and it's inspired thoughts that have been swimming around in my brain for quite a while: the precarious safety of web documentation. I think we're sleepwalking into a disaster.

And another interesting piece of content by Brad Frost is this talk he gave at TEDx, almost a decade ago now, that I think pertains to many of the creative folk on here:

Web Dev Things

TC39 Meeting Notes

Ecma International's TC39 is a group of JavaScript developers, implementers, and academics, that collaborates with the community to maintain and evolve the definition of JavaScript - and they recently held their 100th meeting. Hemanth captured all of the points of discussion of this 100th meeting in form of a dev.to writeup.

Interactive Guide to SVG Loading Spinners

Who doesn't love loading spinners? A repeat offender of the Newsletter, Sébastien Noël from fffuel, wrote this cool interactive guide to making them:

https://fffuel.co

Making SVG Loading Spinners: An Interactive Guide

Learn to create a cool SVG loading spinner with this step-by-step guide. We'll use attributes like stroke-dasharray and stroke-dashoffset to make it easy.

Book Reviews by Adam Majmudar

Adam Majmudar built a really cool page for his book reviews, with an interactive scrolling bookshelf that lets you click on the individual books to read their reviews:

You can check it out here:

https://adammaj.com

Books | Adam Majmudar

I'm a constant learner and aspiring technical generalist. I'm also a founding enginer at thirdweb and on gap year from the University of Pennsylvania.

And also have a look at the code here.

The Importance of Page Footers

I got sick again this week, and came down Tuesday morning with some sort of food poisoning, which left me bedridden for the most of Tuesday and Wednesday. The older I'm getting, the more sensitive my stomach is becoming it seems.

I did however come out on top of it pretty quickly, had a relatively clear head again on Thursday, and decided to pick up the re-design of the blog again as a way to ease myself back into things. I'd actually started working a little on designing a page footer back in January, hence it made sense to resume with that and try to finish it. A page footer is quite an important part of a webapge - some studies show that users will often scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page before actually reading any of the actual content of a page, usually in search of more information about the page, or alternatively as a navigation portal:

https://www.linkedin.com

Why Optimizing Your Website Footer is More Important Than You Think

The website footer is one of the most overlooked areas of a company's website. Learn why it deserves more attention and how to optimize it.

Here's what I have come up with so far - and I must say, I'm quite happy with how it turned out:

Wowowow, fancy schmancy animated cards. Figuring out the JS part that slides in the card description from below was actually trickier than I expected.

It's still a bit rough around the edges, and the layout of the footer card still needs to be fixed up a little - but I'm quite proud of the idea of including the footer as an element within an article grid, making it feel sort of like a business card, while also being somewhat modular in design such that I can include it on other pages and grids as well.

I also ended up spending quite some time designing the surrounding article cards, which I think will replace the current card design that you can find over on the article/archive page - that is currently a bit bare-bone. It's always a question of how information rich you want to make the elements, so that you catch the user's eye and make them want to click on it.

The trickiest part here was overlaying text on an image; if the images aren't hard coded, then you can't always predict on top of what color your text will be placed - sometimes there will not be enough contrast for the text to be readable. When using white text, a solution is to underlay the text section of the cards with a soft blur that transitions to a darker color towards the bottom. This way we bring back enough contrast and the text becomes readable again.

Also, you might've noticed the lack of a Gorilla Updates section - I thought I might try something a little different and give the section a proper title in context of what I've been working on in throughout the week. Expect a lot more web dev/design mini updates in the coming weeks!

Music for Coding

Neon Indian is one of those artists that has their very own sonic identity - it really isn't comparable to anything else. I thoroughly enjoy listening to his tracks every now and then. Drawing inspiration from 1980s pop and electronic music, with heavily analog and textured sounds, the overall mood he evokes is often described as nostalgic, capturing a sense of dreamy escapism:

And that's it from me this week, while I'm typing out these last words I bid my farewells — hopefully this caught you up a little with the events in the world of generative art, tech and AI throughout the past week.

Maybe you've noticed already, I've tried a little bit of a different tone/writing style this week, and now that I'm reading the previous closing statement, it's just a bit too meh for my taste, let's try something a bit more quirky - it was definitely a lot of fun putting together this week's issue.

And now that you've made it through this week's newsletter, you might as well share it with someone that you know who might enjoy this kind of content, or not, but send it anyway - what's the worst thing that could happen?

If you've read this far, thanks a million! And if you're still hungry for more Generative art things, you can check out the most recent issue of the Newsletter here:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Gorilla Newsletter 44

This week 📬 Lauren Lee McCarthy on Software Values - Intro to sizecoding with Mathieu Henri - Patt Vira tutorials - Tezumie's AIJS Editor - Vetro Editions at Galeria Data - The Confusing 2024 Crypto-Art Meta - OpenAI's text-to-video Sora model +++ lots more

Previous issues of the newsletter can be found here:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Newsletter - Gorilla Sun

Weekly recap of Gorilla Articles, Art and other interesting things from the world of generative art and creative coding.

Cheers, happy sketching, and again, hope that you have a fantastic week! See you in the next one - Gorilla Sun 🌸

If you're interested in sponsoring or advertising through the Newsletter - reach out!

Welcome back everyone 👋 and a heartfelt thank you to all new subscribers that joined in the past week!

This is the 44th issue of the Gorilla Newsletter - a weekly online publication that sums up everything noteworthy from the past week in generative art, creative coding, tech and AI - as well as a sprinkle of my own endeavors.

That said, hope you're all having a great start into the week! Let's get straight into it! 👇

All the Generative Things

Lauren Lee McCarthy on Software Values

Yet again, Monk blesses our timelines with a stellar interview, this time with none other than Lauren Lee McCarthy. Having created P5 back in 2013, and having been part of the board of directors for the Processing Foundation from 2015 till 2021, she's done tremendous efforts in creating a more inclusive and accessible community for those that have not historically had the privilege to learn code and tech literacy.

More than that, she is also an accomplished artist that creates profound conceptual work. In their conversation they address her most recent project 'Seeing Voices' that's releasing with Bright Moments as part of the Paris AI collection. The artworks are a curated set of collages, in which a system combines AI generated messages with generative compositions consisting of drawings by McCarthy.

The generated messages are an echo from her previous work 'Voices in my head' that she collaborated on with Kyle McDonald. Both pieces are about attributing meaning to software, asking questions about control and how software can influence and change us. McCarthy states that software is not a neutral product; that it inherits the ideas, biases and values of its creators.

I believe that this is an incredibly important topic that isn't talked about enough. We engage with software on a daily basis, what effect does it have on us? How are we collectively changing through our interactions with it?

https://www.lerandom.art

Lauren Lee McCarthy on Software Values

Lauren Lee McCarthy, celebrated artist, UCLA professor and creator of p5.js, spoke with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) about Seeing Voices, her first long-form generative art project. They also discuss collaborating with AI and inclusive community building, while questioning the inherent values embedded in software.

And if that's not enough Le Random for you, there's another interview with Linda Dounia, that I just haven't had the time to dig into yet:

https://www.lerandom.art

Linda Dounia on Memory Machines

Artist Linda Dounia spoke with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) about the potential of AI to combat cultural as well as biological loss, using her project Flore Perdue as a springboard.

Introduction to size-coding by Mathieu Henri

In last week's newsletter I mentioned Lovebyte 2024, a yearly online celebration of everything related to sizecoding and the demoscene. Although the 2024 edition of the event is over now, there's still a couple of cool things that I missed and that are very worth sharing still.

For instance, the closing ceremony that took place the same day I published the previous issue, in which all of the winning submissions were presented. The event concluded with a whopping 351 submissions from participants all around the world:

Another really cool recording that came from the event, is this awesome video seminar by Mathieu Henri who's been part of the demoscene since the very start, and still highly involved. In the video he introduces us to sizecoding in JavaScript and also tells us a little bit about the history of the demoscene:

Mathieu starts us off with some of the features that make Javascript a great language for sizecoding - pointing out its leniency and some of the shenanigans that allow us to shave off quite a few bytes from our code. He proceeds to give a recount about the early days of the demoscene, showcasing some of the very first competitions that were held in that context and pointing out the competition websites - that somehow still work today - where the participants' submissions were documented, such as Web4096 held in 1999, as well as the impossible 256B challenge in 2002, where you had to somehow make a sketch in only 256 bytes.

Mathieu actually documented his participation in some of these events over on his portfolio and even provides us with the code that he submitted back then, alongside modern equivalents - I was really blown away by his entry to the 256B challenge in which he made a Metaball sketch in just 256 bytes:

Patt Vira on the Persistence of Vision

I've become a huge fan of Patt Vira's content over on YouTube; her code-along tutorials are very polished and easy to follow - her video on marching squares got me back into exploring the algorithm in more depth for myself after Genuary concluded, and unlocked a lot of new ideas that I wouldn't have otherwise had.

Patt has a knack for exploring interesting ideas. Here's one that I highly enjoyed, in which she explores the concept of 'Persistence of Vision' where a drawn cube only appears within a noisy grid of pixels when it is in motion:

Persistence of Vision is a phenomenon that occurs when the visual perception of an object remains for a few brief moments after the fact that it has actually vanished from our vision. A good example of this are lightning strikes at night-time, you can often still see their outline for an instant after they've struck. On the Wikipedia page there's a nice excerpt from Leonardo da Vinci's notebook on this:

This effect seemingly also works great in the setting of a noisy grid of pixels. Patt was inspired by a recent video from Chris Long, in which he goes over how he first discovered that effect back in the eighties, while experimenting with line intersections on his home computer - noticing that the apparent shapes could only be made out while they were in motion:

The comment section to the video is also highly interesting with other chiming in with their thoughts on the effect. Go and show both of their channels some love and leave them a sub and a thumbs up! Definitely recommend keeping up with what Patt's doing - I have a hunch that we're going to see a lot more stellar content from her in the coming months.

Tezumie's AIJS Editor Updates

Tezumie has been hard at work and consistently adding new features to his AI powered code editor - it's been really exciting seeing him turn his initial idea into more and more of a complete platform. Now it even boasts profile pages for users, the ability to save sketches, as well as an explore page and many more cool and convenient things. Tezumie frequently posts updates about it in the AIJS discord:

One update that I've been super excited about and have to yet take for a spin is the custom embeds, I mentioned it to Tezumie a couple of weeks ago, asking about it and explaining why I don't usually use the P5 editor's or OpenProcessing's embeds. It's mainly due to them slowing down the initial page load since they have to load in additional script files - if you have multiple embeds on a single page (a tutorial for instance) they don't share those resources, but rather, each individual embed needs to load in its own assets:

Checking out the docs for AIJS it's always a breath of fresh air when effort is put into that aspect of a software - I thought that it was a really nice touch to also support Farcaster frames as a potential embed:

I think what's really cool about AIJS, is that it's made by someone that is a creative coder and generative artist themself - building the relevant features that are useful for that specific workflow. Openprocessing, you better watch out, Tezumie's coming for you!

Web3 News

A Web3 Travel Guide for Paris

Next week is going to be big with everyone gearing up for the annual NFT Paris show - if you're visiting, you might also want to stop by some of the other spots in Paris that hold significance in the Web3 space. Ana Maria wrote a Web3 travel guide for the occasion over on Forbes, pointing out the important galleries in the area with some of their upcoming shows:

https://www.forbes.com

Web3 Travel Guides: The Parisian Crypto Art Scene

Paris, the City of Light, has long been a magnet for the cultural avant-garde. In the case of Web3 innovators, the same holds true.

Btw, if you end taking any cool pics or see any cool generative art and Web3 related things, send'em over, would love to include them in the next issue of the newsletter!

Vetro Editions at Galerie Data

If you end up finding yourself in Paris tomorrow (20th of February), you'll have to stop by Galerie Data, they're hosting our favorite genart publishing house Vetro Editions, celebrating the launch of four of their books alongside some of the artists featured in those books:

Their roster includes the second issue of Matt DesLaurier's Meridian art book, Julien Gachadoat's "Pathways" that recently came out, "Tracing the Line" that recounts the plotter work of many pioneering and contemporary generative artists, as well an entirely new addition, that just came out this past week for RCS:

RCS also published a complementary announcement post over on their site, in which Carla Gannis from the RCS team recounts the motivations behind starting the site, their position in amplifying the voices of the crypto art scene as well as a brief overview of what's happened in recent years. I believe that the book features the 250 articles that have been published on RCS over the course of the past 2 years, and likely more material. If you're interested in getting the book, you can learn a bit more about it here:

https://www.rightclicksave.com

ANNOUNCING THE RCS BOOK

After two years and more than 250 articles, it's time to put digital art's global community into print

Just to disclose, I'm not sponsored by any of the mentioned parties - I simply think that Vetro Editions makes really awesome books, and all of these are very worth having in your genart book collection.

The Confusing 2024 Crypto-Art Meta

Although 2024 is shaping up to be a year with many new and exciting Web3 developments, and while there's many efforts being made into making things more interoperable, it also seems that things are becoming more and more fragmented - I'm personally having a really hard time to keep up with everything, and I believe I'm not the only one in this.

Sgt_slaughtermellon wrote an interesting think piece about the current state of crypto art, providing us with the bigger picture of what's happening with the different marketplaces and chains, how to adapt as an artist, and that it's all just a bit too chaotic:

https://mirror.xyz

The Confusing Meta of Early 2024 Crypto-Art

If you're an artist who has been around NFTs for a minute but aren't considered "blue chip" - what's this year looking like for you? I'm going to take a second to offer some thoughts on the current scene, the market, and toss out some potential strategies.

Anna Lucia's Spellbound

One other thing that I wanted to share here is Anna Lucia's newest project over on fxhash, a redeemable collaboration with the German fashion lab Phoebe Heess. Conceptually, the artwork is fascinating: via fxhash's code driven parameters, collectors can record their voice or upload an audio file, where the waveform of that audio then determines the pattern visualized on the scarf:

Being the first manufactured redeemable on fxhash makes this one a very special digital token to collect.

Tech and AI

Mario Kart 3 in the Browser

A fan of Mario Kart? Well you can now play it in your browser here, and you can even build your own version of it using Alex Lunakepio's recently open sourced project:

Here's a link to the github repo, which has amassed a whopping 1.2k stars in just a couple of days - there isn't too much to say here, simply that it's a really cool project:

https://github.com

GitHub - Lunakepio/Mario-Kart-3.js

Contribute to Lunakepio/Mario-Kart-3.js development by creating an account on GitHub.

10 Minecraft Facts by Alan Zucconi

Minecraft has quite a long history, and was very popular when it first came out in 2009, but slowly fizzling away over the 2010s. The game then saw a massive boom in 2021 when PewDiePie returned to the game, popularizing it again and allowing it to have somewhat of a renaissance. And it seems to have retained its popularity even in 2024, with over half a million daily players.

I'm bringing all of this up because Minecraft is also interesting from a computational point of view, recently came across a re-tweet from Alan Zucconi, a thread that he'd posted back in 2022 enumerating 10 interesting facts about the game, mainly revolving around its world generating system, that I found highly interesting:

If you don't know Alan Zucconi, he's a bit of a super star in the game dev scene, having created an impressive number of tutorials on his blog - if you're getting into game dev things you need to check it out:

https://www.alanzucconi.com

Alan Zucconi

Developer, Lecturer & Science Communicator

OpenAI's text to video model Sora

It's been a minute since I've been genuinely impressed by AI, last time I was floored was when I took DALL-E3 for a spin (which is freely accessible via the Bing browser). OpenAI's new Sora model seems to take things to the next level by generating coherent and realistic high quality videos given an input prompt. OpenAI's already shared a number of videos in their announcement page showcasing some of the strengths and weaknesses of the new model:

https://openai.com

Sora: Creating video from text

Sora is an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions. Read technical report All videos on this page were generated directly by Sora without modification. We're teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction.

The videos aren't perfect - it's not so difficult to determine that they're still clearly AI generated with specific giveaway details - for instance, it doesn't really know too much about the physics of the real world. One of the generated videos that's been making the rounds features a team of archeologists where they dig up a plastic chair - the chair materializes from the sand and floats around the scene almost like it isn't a part of it:

https://openai.com

Sora: Creating video from text

Sora is an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions. Read technical report All videos on this page were generated directly by Sora without modification. We're teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction.

The chair was most definitely an unpaid actor in this scene. Another thing that immediately jumped out to me was how eerily synchronous motion sometimes is in the generated videos, like the manner in which pedestrians in the background walk or the waves crashing onto the cliffs featured in some of the other videos. It all feels a little surreal. But on the other hand it seems that we're incredibly close to what might just alter the entire movie, VFX and video game industry - not only can the model generate video based on input prompts but it can also do so from input images and videos. Here's a link to a more technical write-up from the OpenAI team:

https://openai.com

Video generation models as world simulators

We explore large-scale training of generative models on video data. Specifically, we train text-conditional diffusion models jointly on videos and images of variable durations, resolutions and aspect ratios. We leverage a transformer architecture that operates on spacetime patches of video and image latent codes.

AlphaCode2: Gemini for Competitive Programming

Google recently replaced their previous AI powered chat partner Bard with a more powerful LLM called Gemini:

https://blog.google

Introducing Gemini: our largest and most capable AI model

Gemini is our most capable and general model, built to be multimodal and optimized for three different sizes: Ultra, Pro and Nano.

And it seems that there are quite a few differences, with Gemini leveraging a more modern model architecture similar to the other chat-bots out there, multi-modality being an important feature to have for it to compete. What's more is that they built another model on top of Gemini that's specifically devised for solving programming problems - even at the competitive level - called AlphaCode2. They announced it in the following video:

The cool thing about AlphaCode2 is that it not only provides an answer but also the reasoning and how it approaches the given problems:

As of now it is not a public model and is still kept secret, so we'll have to take their word for it - looking into the previous AlphaCode model I also couldn't really find any concrete pointers to where it can be taken for a test run, or if it has been open sourced somewhere except for this demo. They do however have an interesting writeup on the model back from 2022:

https://deepmind.google

Competitive programming with AlphaCode

Solving novel problems and setting a new milestone in competitive programming.

Gorilla Updates

What have I been up to this week? I resumed my exploration of marching squares - extending the code to also become able of finding the contours of arbitrary polygonal shapes. Here's what this looks like:

I think there's already some interesting possibilities here that are worth exploring more in depth in the future. The trick to do this is by using raycasting to check if grid vertices fall under the areas of the polygonal shapes, setting them to active if they do, such that the marching squares algo can subsequently find the contours. This can be extended with a point-line distance function to determine how close the grid vertices are to the polygonal region, and setting them to an active value based on proximity - which leads to this nice rounded off look of the contours that I thought looked really great.

This all started after browsing Pinterest for inspiration, a platform I've grown to love more and more over the past year. I found an interesting artwork that immediately drew me in:

I couldn't find the artist behind the drawing (image on the left, if you know that artist let me know), but I thought that it was brilliant and gave me many ideas - I immediately had to ask myself what it would look like in generative form. The first step would be to figure out how to create the shape of a puzzle tile algorithmically. And it turned out to be trickier than I initially assumed.

Whenever you're trying to make any shape that's a bit more complicated than a simple circle or a convex regular n-gon you run into all sorts of problems. Although marching squares is a viable approach, it also comes with a lot of problems. For instance, the smoothness of the final 'rendered' shape entirely depends on the resolution of the underlying grid that's used to trace the contours - and the higher that resolution of that grid, the longer it takes for the shape to render.

The code ended up being an absolute mess when I finally managed to make it produce a the shape of a puzzle tile, which can be done by lining up 4 circles at the edges of a square and then letting the contour algo do its magic. Inward dents are achieved by setting the circles as "negative" and making them toggle off the grid vertices. One thing that I really wanted was the round and organic feel that many puzzle tiles have, which was difficult to do with how the vertices of the final shape were distributed along its contour.

After spending nearly three days on this exploration, I ultimately came to the conclusion that marching squares was not the right approach for this task - I probably could have spent some time optimizing my code but I just wanted to get the idea to work and see what it looked like. I ended up using the polybool.js library that allows the compositing of geometric shapes via boolean operations, a topic that I'm likely going to talk about more at some point. Here's what I ended up with:

Happy with where it's at now, but this is still not the final form of it.

Music for Coding

The opening to Evangelion is an absolute masterpiece; arguably one of my favorite songs of all time - I must've listened to a few dozen different versions of it over the past years, and I recently had a craving to listen to it again. One of the results that popped up in YouTube search was this a Capella version by Ignite Vocal, and I was instantly floored - what an absolute banger:

The group's simply stellar, there isn't a single thing to dislike about their rendition. Their other stuff is great as well. I'm surprised that they only have 619 subscribers on their channel (at the time of writing this) - I think they deserve at least a hundred times that number.

And that's it from me this week, while I'm typing out these last words I bid my farewells — hopefully this caught you up a little with the events in the world of generative art, tech and AI throughout the past week.

If you enjoyed it, consider sharing it with your friends, followers and family - more eyeballs/interactions/engagement helps tremendously - it lets the algorithm know that this is good content. If you've read this far, thanks a million!

If you're still hungry for more Generative art things, you can check out the most recent issue of the Newsletter here:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Gorilla Newsletter 43

A la recherche de Vera Molnár - Poems in Code - Pioneers of '80s generative art - Matt DesLauriers' Sierra - Lovebyte 2024 - Jeres' Heuristics of Emotion - Simulating Infinite Grids - State of the Long-Form Generative Art Market +++ lots more

Previous issues of the newsletter can be found here:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Newsletter - Gorilla Sun

Weekly recap of Gorilla Articles, Art and other interesting things from the world of generative art and creative coding.

Cheers, happy sketching, and again, hope that you have a fantastic week! See you in the next one - Gorilla Sun 🌸 If you're interested in sponsoring the Newsletter or advertising - reach out!

Welcome back everyone 👋 and a heartfelt thank you to all new subscribers that joined in the past week!

This is the 43rd issue of the Gorilla Newsletter - a weekly online publication that sums up everything noteworthy from the past week in generative art, creative coding, tech and AI - as well as a sprinkle of my own endeavors.

https://www.gorillasun.de

Gorilla Newsletter 43

A la recherche de Vera Molnár - Poems in Code - Pioneers of '80s generative art - Matt DesLauriers' Sierra - Lovebyte 2024 - Jeres' Heuristics of Emotion - Simulating Infinite Grids - State of the Long-Form Generative Art Market +++ lots more

If you're interested in sponsoring the Newsletter - reach out! That said, hope you're all having a great start into the week! Let's get straight into it!

Generative Art goes International

It seems that everyone's properly recovered from Genuary 2024, and that a whole slew of generative art exhibitions are afoot around the globe - from Budapest to London, and all the way to Japan 🌎

À la recherche de Vera Molnár

Vera Molnár passed away early December of 2023, just a month prior to what would have been her 100th birthday - she lives on however, not only through her art, but also through the new generation of generative artists for many of which she is still a big inspiration. Just two days ago on the 10th of February, the exhibition À la recherche de Vera Molnár kicked off at the Ludwig Museum for Contemporary Art in Budapest to celebrate her life's work:

https://www.ludwigmuseum.hu

À LA RECHERCHE DE VERA MOLNAR - Artworks by Vera Molnar and Homages by Internationally Acclaimed Artists

The Ludwig Museum's exhibition titled À la recherche de Vera Molnar pays tribute to the artistic legacy of Vera Molnar, who passed away shortly before her 100th birthday. Born in Hungary and educated at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Molnar lived and created in France from 1947 until her death.

A highlight of the exhibition's opening ceremony, was a talk given by Frieder Nake, another one of the generative art OGs. From what I see in the picture, it's remarkable how many people came together to celebrate Vera Molnár that day:

Moreover, two tribute pieces were presented, one from Mario Klingemann and another by Iskra Velitchkova:

In light of the exhibition, Aurèce Vettier was asked by the centre Pompidou to reflect on his collaboration with Vera back in 2023. He wrote a beautiful article in which she pays tribute to the Grande Dame, describing how she never lost her passion for making art even with old age:

https://www.centrepompidou.fr

AI, NFT: Vera Molnár, a step ahead

As early as the 1960s, Vera Molnár was exploring the infinite possibilities of computer-assisted art. A few months before her death at the end of 2023, at the age of 99, she was working on new works generated using... artificial intelligence.

Over on Twitter he also lets us in on a little personal anecdote :

Many more words and resources about the exhibition and Vera Molnár were shared over on social networks - I merely tried to showcase the highlights here. If you somehow find yourself in Budapest, the Ludwig Museum is definitely worth a visit, with several other simultaneously ongoing exhibitions.

As an addendum, towards the end of the exhibition page, a nice little booklet is linked which I thought was very well made, but also very easy to overlook - here's some excerpts:

Poems in Code

Poems in Code is a beautiful single screen exhibit set up in the middle of Ebisu square, a big open space located in the heart of Tokyo:

The massive screen showcases animated pieces by Shunsuke Takawo, Zach Liebermann, Casey Reas, Seohyo, Alexis Andre, fingacode, and many other Japanese and international artists. Don't be scared by the following big block of Japanese text, you can find a complete list of artists + showcased artworks in this event page - translating it through your browser should do the trick:

https://ccbt.rekibun.or.jp

CCBT×恵比寿映像祭2024「Poems in Code--ジェネラティブ・アートの現在／プログラミングで生成される映像」 - シビック・クリエイティブ・ベース東京 [CCBT]

CCBTの未来提案型キャンプを発展させ、大型ビジョンによるジェネラティブ・アート作品の上映を恵比寿映像祭202

Zach Lieberman solo Exhibition

Over in London, Zach Lieberman kicked off his very first solo exhibition with Unit London, filling an entire exhibition space with his trademark circular gradients and biomorphic blobs:

I've been a big fan of Zach's approach ever since I discovered generative art for myself. His concept of poetic computation, that likens writing code to writing poetry, really resonated with me and was one of the ideas that got me hooked on creative coding as an artform.

One the first few videos I ever saw on creative coding was actually by talk by Zach, in which he talks about his concept of poetic computation, showcases his process, and live codes a little squiggly shape to demonstrate what it's all about:

If you're in London, definitely go check out the exhibition - I'm actually going to be in London towards the end of February, so I'll definitely stop by. You can learn a little more about the exhibition and see a list of the presented Lieberman works over on the exhibition page:

https://unitlondon.com

Zachary Lieberman | Circles, Blobs, Ripples | Unit

Zachary Lieberman's first solo exhibition with Unit explores the unexpected effects of geometries crafted with code, revealing how a systematic approach to image-making can transform shapes into mesmerising visual experiences.

All the Generative Things

And here's some other generative news that you can enjoy no matter where you currently are in the world right now 🎨

Pioneers of '80s Art & Innovation

Le Random has been going strong in the past weeks, not only consistently expanding their timeline, but also putting their best foot forward in terms of Twitter spaces and publishing the recordings in podcast format. In the most recent talk they invited 9 of the pioneers that were at forefront of generative art in the 80s, letting them present their stories and reflecting with them on the practice at that point in time:

We often talk about the pioneers from the 50s and 60s, but not much about the following decades, and I believe that the artists from those eras are in many ways overlooked and not given the credit that they deserve. Le Random steps in as the middle-man to introduce us to them - I'm a bit embarrassed to admit, that I didn't know any of the invited guests other than Geoff Davis prior to listening to the talk. You can also find the group talk in video format here if you prefer that:

I know, at this point I'm sharing a piece of Le Random content about every other week, but they're simply doing efforts in the genart space that no one else is - quite literally documenting the entire history of it. Go support them and share their content! Also looking forward to Monk's next article!

Matt DesLauriers' Sierra

Following his previous project Hachure, which exhibited with Verse towards the end of 2023, Matt DesLauriers returns with another Web Assembly project in which he takes a step back from the long-form approach in favor of letting his system fulfill a more curatorial role in the art making process:

https://avantarte.com

In conversation: Matt DesLauriers | Avant Arte

Generative artist Matt DesLauriers and Master printmaker Tom Murphy discuss the process behind Sierra, a print that explores systems in colour and systems in printmaking.

Matt DesLauriers details the making of Sierra in form of a meticulous project page over on his site, that isn't just a treat for the eye, but also reveals and explains to us the code that brings the single output to life:

I really appreciate how much thought and care Matt puts into presenting and documenting his works - something that I don't see from many artists. I think it's really important to capture these moments in time for future reference. Here's also a link to the Github repo in which he open sources part of the code that helps in creating the screen print:

https://github.com

GitHub - mattdesl/lcms-wasm: a WASM reboot of lcms.js (Little-CMS for JS)

a WASM reboot of lcms.js (Little-CMS for JS). Contribute to mattdesl/lcms-wasm development by creating an account on GitHub.

Now you might ask, what actually is WebAssembly? Often abbreviated as wasm, it's basically a technology that allows developers to run high-performance code on web browsers. It's like a common language that different programming languages can be translated into, enabling them to work together seamlessly on the web. A good starting point for Web Assembly is the mdn web documentation:

https://developer.mozilla.org

WebAssembly | MDN

WebAssembly is a type of code that can be run in modern web browsers - it is a low-level assembly-like language with a compact binary format that runs with near-native performance and provides languages such as C/C++, C# and Rust with a compilation target so that they can run on the web.

It's interesting to see Matt shift to this more curatorial approach considering that he's previously previously mainly been making long-form projects, most notably Meridian and FOLIO. I wonder if it's to adjust to the current generative art market. We'll talk a bit more about that in one of the following sections.

Lovebyte 2024

I only learned about Lovebyte through a tweet by Frank Force, in which he announced that he was working on a tiny demo for the event - the demo itself is super impressive, considering that it's roughly 1kb in size, and also generates music in addition the animation:

And it seems that Lovebyte is an absolutely crazy event, that comes to life in its entirety through a number of live streams, where coders present their bytesized creations and also live code them. You can find some of the recordings over on their Youtube channel, including this year's opening show - if you're into size-coding this is going to be a treat for you:

Here's a link to the event page, as well as an overview to all submissions.

Jeres' Heuristics of Emotion

Jeres wrote a beautiful article accompanying his newest generative art project 'Heuristics of Emotion', which is an attempt at giving shape and color to the digital emotions of the machine:

https://jeres.xyz

Jeres | Heuristics of Emotion

JERES * Heuristics of Emotion Presented by Ivan Zhyzhkevych & Verse&nbsp⤤ * February 8th, 6pm UTC (10am PT) Short-cuts: Curated outputs, Color, Mechanics, Rendering, Custom sizes for prints, etc This project is ultimately about machines learning to feel, and trying to visualize that in some abstract way.

I really love the blend of essay-like introduction, intertwined with anecdotal storytelling and technical details sprinkled on top - it seems Jeres is not just great at making generative art, but also at putting his thoughts into written form. If you're going to read one thing this week, I recommend that you read this one.

Creating an Animated 3D Starfield Effect

One interesting tutorial I came across this week is over on the kirupa site, teaching us how to create a 3D Starfield Effect - basically an animation that simulates the POV of flying through a starfield in space:

https://www.kirupa.com

Creating an Animated 3D Starfield Effect

Learn how to create this fun effect where we simulate us flying past endless stars in outer space.

This was interesting to me because I attempted this myself at some point, and found that it's a nice little illusion that can actually be achieved entirely in 2D, but is still kind of tricky to get right - you can find my sketch over on OpenProcessing. Over on kirupa they do it entirely with the canvas drawing API without P5. Now I'm really tempted to give it another go 🤔

I also recommend checking out the rest of the site - it's actually quite massive and a really good resource for beginners to intermediate coders, specifically if you're trying to get better at JavaScript coding. They've got tutorials about making animations, dealing with the canvas element, as well as more general JavaScript things:

https://www.kirupa.com

Working with the Canvas

Learn all about this thing called the canvas and how it helps bring pixels to life using just JavaScript!

Simulating an Infinite Grid

Giorgio Fnool shows us how to create a fake infinite grid, which basically is nothing more than a draggable grid that creates the illusion of being infinite by wrapping around on itself when items leave the viewport - the 'making of' style video he shared already gives a good idea of how it's done, but he further elaborates in the replies to his thread:

Giorgio Fnool

@gfnool

Creating a fake infinite grid with @greensock GSAP and @PixiJS

I had fun building this, so I'm going to share it here.

@isipisi23 designed a homepage that loads products from the CMS and presents them as a draggable, infinite mosaic of animated cards.

342

10:59 • 8 Feb 2024

This reminds me of a tweet from Juhani Halkomakki back from early 2022, in which he created a similar proof of concept:

Juhani Halkomäki

@JuhaniHalkomaki

#creativecoding #p5js

Made a proof-of-concept of endless scrolling for an irregular grid. It's not infinite, the whole grid is only about four times the size of the canvas. I found it pretty and interesting, and also pretty interesting.

487

19:21 • 4 Dec 2022

And on a related note, if this idea is something that interests you, definitely also give Amelia Wattenberger's article 'Evolving the Infinite Canvas' a read:

https://wattenberger.com

Amelia Wattenberger

Amelia Wattenberger's personal website

State of the Long-Form Generative Art Market

If I've learned one thing from putting together this newsletter over the course of the past year (almost a year now), it's that the Web3 space is evolving at an insanely rapid pace. It's often hard to keep track of how things are advancing, what the different players in the field are up to every week, and what the new trends are. I believe that it's really important to stay on top of things in that way, especially when you're an artist that's trying to get a foot in the door.

Having curated an impressive number of projects with Dawn Contemporary, Haiver has some of the best insights when it comes to artists trying to make a living from generative art - in a long-form tweet of his, he provides us with some of his thoughts about how the market has changed over the past three years and gives some words of advice on how artists can adjust:

Fact is, the space has gotten a lot more competitive — the art's gotten a whole lot better, and collectors have gotten a whole lot smarter at detecting what good art is, whether it's the aesthetics of it or the conceptual idea.

With the advent of long-form generative art and the underlying blockchain technology that makes it possible, selling out fast has become one of those hot topics that's established itself as an important factor in determining the value of a collection - one of the points that Haiver tackles in his tweet. Recently however, it's been less and less the case that projects sell out instantly.

But did we actually all really think that everything would sell out all the time? One thing that I want to stress here right off the bat, is that selling out should not be one of the factors that your happiness and mental health depend on. If you're an artist that's been consistently selling out with every project, and it's the first time that a collection isn't an instant complete, it might hit you very hard. Maybe not if you're a seasoned veteran and have been in the art game for a long time.

With some of my own earlier works that didn't sell out I'd be lying if I said that it didn't hurt a bit, especially with those projects that were labors of love. At the same time however, it's a very sobering experience, and presents you with a different reality - it requires you to take a step back and objectively assess in which ways your work fell short. There's really no point in blaming yourslef, or the market, because after all nobody owes you anything, but rather take it as a chance to learn from and grow as an artist. I don't go into releases anymore with the romantic idea that they will be smash hits.

I mean, what are you gonna do if your project doesn't sell out? Throw in the towel and just stop making art altogether?

Maybe instead of bragging about how fast our collections have sold out, we can brag about who collected one of our works? When I released Hex Appeal back in December, and saw that two of my internet friends showed up so quickly to mint the very first 2 iterations, it felt as if the collection was already complete:

Thank you meezwhite and Melissa, it genuinely made my day when I released the project and it still brings me joy to see you two pop up whenever I look at the collection.

A relevant statement on this matter is from Kevin Abosch:

I believe that there's a lot more that can be said here, because it's a topic that I've thought about a lot and that I've tried to understand - it's definitely an important part of the generative art game that we're all trying to play. I'm certain however that in a couple of months things will have changed drastically again, and that there's going to be different rules to the game. Best thing we can collectively do is try to steer the space in a better direction where we talk in a balanced manner about the art and the underlying market dynamics.

Web3 News

Foundation Exhibitions

And while we're talking about Art, NFTs and the market, just a couple of days ago, Foundation announced a new feature that's coming to their platform, with the self-explanatory title "Exhibitions":

There isn't much information about how it'll work at this point, but I'm assuming that it'll be some sort of combination between web page editor and curatorial tool that's native to foundation, where curators and artists can showcase their works and provide additional information in form of text and supplementary material - I'm purely going off of the little 'Add content' popup that's shown in kayvon's tweet.

Conversations and stories quickly get lost on social media, hence I think that this is a great initiative from Foundation, providing artists and curators means to document their work within little self-contained spaces. The feature is planned to go live for everyone on the 26th of February, but they've already got a few exhibitions lined up to kick things off - a list of partners can be seen here:

https://exhibitions.foundation.app

Exhibitions by FND

A new era of Exhibitions. Coming 2.26.24.

I'm also still eagerly awaiting what fxhash has planned in this regard, in an interview with Le Random, Ciphrd hinted that a curatorial tool was in the works, but that was the only mention of it. But from what it seems, 2024 is shaping up to be the year of curatorial tools.

arltcollector in conversation with Han

I love me a good interview, and this one from arltcollector with Han fit the bill just right - if you're not familiar with Han, he's an architect turned NFT artist, and the creator of Crypto Cubes, arguably one of the earliest instances of generative art minted on the blockchain. In the interview Han talks about his practice, reminisces about how the Crypto Cubes project came to be back in 2020, and also tells us about his upcoming endeavors:

https://www.artxcode.io

1 of 1 Art Pieces with Han - ARTXCODE

Han is most well-known for his early OG generative art NFT collection that was launched in 2020 called CryptoCubes. If you were around back then you would know how collectible and exciting these cubes were. It's the end of 2023 and Han hasn't stopped innovating.

I don't fully understand how Han's new project works, because my technical knowledge of smart contracts is limited, but it seems that he's creating a series of 1/1 pieces, each of which consisting of its very own smart contract that enables it as a marketizable piece of digital art.

Tech, Code and Web

There's also a lot of other interesting things that I found on the Web in the past week - here's a little sampler of different Tech and Code related thingamabobs 👇

A Self-balancing Cube

Willem Pennings designed a mechanical cube that balances itself on one of its corners:

As he points out himself in the explanatory article that he posted, there isn't much practical value to this esoteric gadget, but still a worthwhile idea to explore - he details the technical aspects of it:

https://willempennings.nl

Balancing cube

This cube manages to balance itself on a corner, and can simultaneously rotate around its axis in a controlled manner. It does so using clever controls and a set of three reaction wheels. The original idea for this device comes from researchers at ETH Zürich, who demonstrate their "Cubli" in this video.

A Search Engine in 80 Lines of Python

We already talked about size-coding earlier, but this takes it to the next level - with an itch to learn how search engines work, Alex Molas decided to create his own from scratch, and ended up doing so in just 80 lines of code - the interesting part of it at least. He details how he did it in this write-up:

If you've ever wanted to build your own search engine, this might just be your starting point. It turns out that you don't actually need that much: obviously a first is some data (pages) to actually search, then an index to store references to this data based on the information that occurs in this data (keywords), followed by a ranking mechanism that produces a curated list of outputs from a query, and last but not least also an interface through which all of this can be accessed by a user.

The Cursed Library

The Cursed Library is not really a game, but rather an interactive web experience, in which you explore books in a library, each of which tells a different sordid tale through meticulously crafted 3D scenes - I'm not going to lie, the little experiment immediately took me in and transported me away into another world:

The little interactive page was put together by EPIC - not the games launcher Epic Games, just EPIC - a digital agency from Belgium, that describes itself as a group with a unique blend of technical, strategic and creative skills. Check them out, they do all sorts of interesting Web experiments.

Curated: A Web Design Inspiration Catalogue

Pinterest is usually my go to resource when I'm in need of inspiration when I'm trying to get in just the right mood for my next generative art project, but when it comes to web design and styling something in CSS, I find it best to look at other pages and borrow visual concepts from them - and recently came across Curated, an aggregator site that collects and showcases elegantly designed pages across the web:

https://www.curated.design

Curated web design inspiration catalog

Unleash your creativity with out-of-this-world web design inspiration from across the web.

Trillions to reshape the Semi-Conductor Industry

Altman has been one of the most polarizing individuals in the world of AI last year, being ousted from OpenAI back in November of 2023, and quickly being reinstated in a matter of few days after the incident triggered a wave of resignations, or at least threats thereof.

Currently there's no public knowledge if his current plans are in relation to this incident, but there's reports of him seeking funding for a prospective chip venture just prior to that. Now it seems that he is looking for a much larger sum of money, to completely dwarf the current chip industry:

Gorilla Updates

I've also been up to some shenanigans of my own. In the first half of this week I explored Reaction Diffusion again after roughly two years of having first encountered it. I think I have acquired a much better understanding of it now, and how to actually get some nice looking patterns out of it. Here's a little demo of what I ended up making:

Ahmad Moussa || Gorilla Sun

@gorillasu

Explored Reaction Diffusion today also managed to implement it as a shader, but still need to figure out a couple of things there #creativecoding #genart

106

18:40 • 8 Feb 2024

Reaction Diffusion is really cool, it basically simulates the change in concentration of two chemicals, where the concentration thereof is representing through the color of the canvas pixels. Reaction Diffusion brings to life a multitude of intricate and organic patterns, that are also more commonly known as Turing Patterns.

The most popular way to implement a Reaction Diffusion system is via the Gray-Scott model, that basically postulates of a set of two equations which simulate the interaction of the two chemicals at any given pixel and how this concentration should evolve over time:

I'm not certain if you can call this a cellular automaton still, but it's also a kind of system where cells (pixels) update their state based on the state of adjacent cells. I'm working on putting together a proper tutorial for it at the moment, so I'm not going to dive too deep just now - but if you want a great introduction and a guide to implementing it for yourself, I recommend this video from the Codingtrain:

What's more, is that I also actually managed to implement it in form of a shader - but since that's not really my fortee there's still a lot of things that I need to figure out there to bring it closer to the pixelized aesthetic that I achieved in JS:

Besides Reaction Diffusion, I also spent a copious amount of time on making weird pixelized generative numbers and packing them on across the canvas - goal for this one is kind of ambitious, and I'm already happy with where it's at:

I'll likely have more updates about it in the coming week - keep your eyes peeled!

Music for Coding

Last week while I was collecting pieces for my personal Genuary 2024 recap, I featured a sketch by Roni Kaufman, and came across his gorgeous portfolio page - found out that he'd done an album cover for the stellar guitarist Adrian Holovaty. The album leans quite heavily into gypsy jazz with the chugging rhythm guitar and arpeggiated melodic elements layered on top:

http://bandcamp.com

Melodic Guitar Music, by Adrian Holovaty

Melodic Guitar Music by Adrian Holovaty, released 12 September 2023 1. Grand Ole Bopry 2. Mrs. Mills&#39; Guitar Party 3. Tendering 4. Senseless Swing 5. Bluespop 6. The Aching Waltz 7. The Old Guard 8. Flutter 9. Walking Away 10. Song For Roy 10 original instrumental guitar tunes, inspired by Django Reinhardt, The Beatles, Chet Atkins and Roy Orbison.

I've been a big fan of Django Reinhardt for years, so this really did it for me - I found that the tracks were quite a treat for the ear, while I was chucking away at some code!

And that's it from me this week, while I'm typing out these last words I bid my farewells — hopefully this caught you up a little with the events in the world of generative art, tech and AI throughout the past week.

If you enjoyed it, consider sharing it with your friends, followers and family - more eyeballs/interactions/engagement helps tremendously - it lets the algorithm know that this is good content. If you've read this far, thanks a million!

Here's a link to the original version of this newsletter over on the Gorilla Sun Blog:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Gorilla Newsletter 43

A la recherche de Vera Molnár - Poems in Code - Pioneers of '80s generative art - Matt DesLauriers' Sierra - Lovebyte 2024 - Jeres' Heuristics of Emotion - Simulating Infinite Grids - State of the Long-Form Generative Art Market +++ lots more

If you're still hungry for more Generative art things, you can check out the most recent issue of the Newsletter here:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Gorilla Newsletter 42

Warpcast and Farcaster Frames - Genuary 2024 Concludes - Harold Cohen Retrospective - Infini Craft by Neal Agarwal - Generative audio with vanilla JS - Custom Highlight Embeds - Artblocks Acquires Sansa - Digen Open Call - Interop 2024 +++ lots more

Previous issues of the newsletter can be found here:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Newsletter - Gorilla Sun

Weekly recap of Gorilla Articles, Art and other interesting things from the world of generative art and creative coding.

Cheers, happy sketching, and again, hope that you have a fantastic week! See you in the next one - Gorilla Sun 🌸

This is the 42nd issue of the Gorilla Newsletter - a weekly online publication that sums up everything noteworthy from the past week in generative art, creative coding, tech and AI - as well as a sprinkle of my own endeavors.

https://www.gorillasun.de

Gorilla Newsletter 42

Warpcast and Farcaster Frames - Genuary 2024 Concludes - Harold Cohen Retrospective - Infini Craft by Neal Agarwal - Generative audio with vanilla JS - Custom Highlight Embeds - Artblocks Acquires Sansa - Digen Open Call - Interop 2024 +++ lots more

Otherwise, hope you're all having a great start into the week! That said, let's get straight into it!👇

Warpcast & Farcaster Frames

Let's start this week's issue with some words about Farcaster - a big chunk of the generative art community has recently joined the budding Web3 social media platform, and it's overall been gaining a lot of traction as a Twitter alternative for the Web3 crowd.

Warpcast is a relatively new social media platform that's built on top of Farcaster, which is a Web3 protocol for building decentralized social media apps, conceived and developed by Dan Romero - I actually signed up to Warpcast about a month ago, without knowing too much about the platform, after I saw a Tweet from Romero in which he attempted to address and clear up some of the notions that were cause for confusion:

Maybe it's erroneous to compare the two, but I think a good point of reference is the Fediverse if you're familiar with it. In the last two years we've seen a big migration of people over to Mastodon, in the aftermath of Musk's Twitter takeover, which is a decentralized social media platform that exists in the larger context of the Fediverse, in which the different entities make use of the ActivityPub protocol to communicate with each other. This means that things in the Fediverse are interoperable, due to them using the same underlying protocol.

Farcaster is similar in this manner, that it's also such a decentralized protocol, with the big difference that it's built on Ethereum, enhancing it with blockchain powered capabilities. For isntance, your identity on Farcaster is tied to your wallet address, and is also one of the primary ways to interact with apps and features that it integrates. In this scenario, Warpcast is simply the interface that you use to interact with the Farcaster protocol:

The following post provides a good explanation and some insights into all of this:

https://blog.thirdweb.com

What is Farcaster? A Beginner's Guide (2023)

Farcaster is a decentralized protocol for building web3 social media apps. Learn more about what it is, how it works, and how to build on it.

Picture it as a unified platform where social apps like X, Instagram, and Facebook coexist and users can connect them all with one decentralized ID. This means even if any app imposes restrictions, users still have their identity and can seamlessly migrate their connections to alternative apps on the network. 

If this has piqued your interest and you're interested in joining Farcaster, you can use this invite link, which gives the both of us warps - a kind of token that can be redeemed within the Farcaster eco-system. It's important to note here that Farcaster costs 5 bucks a year, which is used to cover the associated gas fees.

One of the biggest developments in the Farcaster eco-system so far happened last week, where a feature called Frames was introduced: a new kind of interactive embed that Farcaster users can build themselves and inject into the Farcaster feed. This probably sounds a little bit esoteric, but in other words, people can now code their own little embeddable apps and share them directly as casts on Farcaster - think of them as interactive media tweets. some notable examples of this are Onframe Chess by 5/9 and Base Quest by Sean:

Basically you can now play Chess as well as a text adventure directly in your Farcast feed, I believe that this really sets Farcaster apart from other social media apps. If you're curious about learning more about Frames, here's another recent article that introduces them with a little more context than I do:

https://medium.com

What Are Farcaster Frames? Discover the Top 5 Best Frames So Far!

The introduction of Frames by Farcaster is a game changer in the Decentralized Social Media space, significantly boosting Warpcast's daily active users to 15k daily users. Let's dive into what Frames...

And if you're interested in building your own Farcaster Frame, you need to check out Nader Dabit's tutorial that he's posted over on TwitterX:

Alright, that's enough about Farcaster for starters, lest this sounds more and more like some made up technobabble straight from r/VXJunkies, I'll cut things off here and move on to the regular Newsletter segments. Let me know if you end up joining! And especially if you build some interesting Frame!

All the Generative Things

Of course there's also been a bunch of interesting developments in the genart space over the course of the past week 👇

Genuary 2024 comes to an End

Most notably, Genuary 2024 concluded on the 31st of January. With hundreds of participants and thousands of submissions across multiple platforms it's unarguably been the biggest iteration of the event yet. Albeit I'm a little sad that it's over, since it's such a great way to get so many ideas out of your system, I'm at the same time excited to spend some more quality time on some of my favorite ideas that came to be throughout the month.

For the occasion, the Le Random team came together with Joyn, organizing a Twitter space in which they invited Piter Pasma, who's in charge of organizing and selecting the prompts for Genuary every year, as well as some of the participating artists, such as Darien Brito, Ella, and yours truly, to talk a little about the entire experience - the Twitter space has been recorded and can be found in a shortened version (minus all of the fluff) over on Apple Podcasts:

I thoroughly enjoyed the thoughtful questions from the Le Random team as well as Piter's thoughtful answers to them, providing insights and reflecting on how Genuary has grown over the past 4 years and now occupies an important spot that ties the community together every year. As a platform independent event, generative artists get the opportunity to connect with each other simply for the joy of making generative art, without any other incentives.

Besides that, we also find Monk out in the wild with an exclusive article for Joyn, complementary to the Twitter space, covering some of his favorite artworks for 10 of the Genuary prompts that he found most interesting:

https://www.joyn.xyz

Celebrating Genuary

I'm Peter Bauman, or Monk Antony, and I do the content at Le Random. Freed from Le Random's tyrannical editor (me), I share my thoughts on Genuary's unique ability to propel communal creativity before reflecting on the #genuary2024 prompts and pieces I found most compelling.

In the Twitter space I was asked about how the overall Genuary experience was like. And I had actually thought a bit about it beforehand - to me the beauty of Genuary lies in the creative interpretation of the prompts. It's not as much of a coding challenge as it simply a creative challenge, where you aim to make something that will surprise in the context of the given prompt. I try to not look at anyone else's creations before I've finished my own, while it keeps what I make authentic, it also makes discovering what others made so much more fun.

Piter tells us that the set of prompts that he had conceived for the very first Genuary mainly revolved around programming techniques and algorithms, which then changed quite a bit when he asked others for suggestions, pitching ideas that were not necessarily directly related to any programming specific things.

Another big factor is the time limit, of course there's no hard rule to do the prompts within their allocated day, but I believe that it adds another aspect to the challenge that will frequently push artists outside of their comfort zone. This makes me think back to an article that I've shared a couple of weeks ago, a piece by Ralph Amer, where he talks about the Creative Playground - "Creative limitations set our creativity free":

https://ralphammer.com

The Creative Playground - Ralph Ammer

Have fun with drawing! Create yourself a creative playground we need a goal and rules. Here is why and how:

Others also like to create additional challenges factors of their own, like Roni Kaufman, who chose to only create static artworks for each prompt, even when some of them were inherently referring to concepts that are associated with movement, like prompt #15 that asks you to use a physics library, or #19 that simply states 'flocking'.

Or for instance Raphaël de Courville's AI assisted Genuary speedrun. Some people do the prompts on their allocated days, others spread them out over the entire year, and Raph just wants to see the world burn and do all of the prompts in a single sitting. His final time clocks in at 1 hour 46 minutes and 56 seconds. you can watch a recording of his stream here:

http://www.twitch.tv

Genuary 2024 Any% Tool Assisted Speedrun - sableraph on Twitch

sableraph went live on Twitch. Catch up on their Art VOD now.

Towards the end of the stream Raph challenges Shiffman to also attempt the speedrun and see if he can beat his time. We now eagerly await his response. Also subscribe to Raph on Twitch, when he reaches 2000 subs he'll record another funny bird sound that we can then trigger through the Twitch chat.

Genuary is just such a beautiful event, and the community never feels more alive than throughout it's course - I'm already looking forward to next year!

Harold Cohen Retrospective

Last week the Harold Cohen Retrospective exhibition showcasing his AARON works kicked off at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhatten:

Harold Cohen is one of the earliest names that experimented with AI for the purpose of making art, most notably he conceived a set of algorithms under the name AARON:

AARON is the collective name for a series of computer programs written by artist Harold Cohen that create original artistic images. Proceeding from Cohen's initial question "What are the minimum conditions under which a set of marks functions as an image?", AARON was in development between 1972 and the 2010s - excerpt from the AARON Wikipedia page

Although the source code for AARON is not publicly available, it likely is a vastly different type of AI that we are familiar with today. Harold Cohen was also one the first that explicitly asked questions about the collaborative practice between artist and machine, and being a catalyst for the conversation around authorship and agency. Naturally, we can count on Le Random for stellar coverage, interviewing Christiane Paul, the curator in charge of the AARON exhibition:

https://www.lerandom.art

Christiane Paul on Curating Cohen's AARON

Christiane Paul's curation of the Whitney's Harold Cohen: AARON informs a conversation with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony), where they discuss Cohen's persistent impact to this day while reflecting on the nature of digital expression.

It was interesting to see Sougwen Chung being brought up, which I also immediately had to think of when I saw pictures of the AARON plotters - in many ways she follows in the footsteps of Harold Cohen, Le Random also did an interview with her a while back.

I believe that only a fraction of the newsletter readership is actually physically somewhere near Manhatten, we do however get a glimpse into the exhibition through ClownVamp's excellent Twitter thread, in which some highlights are showcased:

Infini Craft by Neal Agarwal

Neal really outdid himself again with his latest project Infini Craft - an LLM powered crafting game:

And as its name suggests, it's an infinite one at that. If you remember a game called Little Alchemy from way back when, it's essentially that - a sandbox game in which you can combine elements by dragging and dropping them onto each other, where they'll then combine into new elements that can be used to discover even more elements and so on. There isn't really a specific goal to it, the entire fun of it stems from trying out different combinations and seeing what it'll produce.

I remember that Little Alchemy would quickly get frustrating once you'd tried out most of the combinations and weren't able to really progress anymore, naturally the combinations in the game are hard coded so once you've got everything it's done. Throwing an LLM into the mix that can endlessly conjure new combinations of things makes this infinitely more exciting:

I'm not entirely sure about how it's implemented, there probably is an input prompt that asks the language model "What do you get when you combine X and Y?" in addition to some database that stores combinations that have already been discovered, it is deterministic in the sense that combining the same two elements will always yield the same output - but sometimes you'll get a notice under an element indicating that it's a first discovery, meaning that no one else has managed to discover it previously:

David Aerne somehow managed to produce an Obamacrab - and if that doesn't make you want to try the game out for yourself, then I don't know what will. Let me know if you end up getting any cool combos:

https://neal.fun

Infinite Craft

A game about crafting

Generative Audio with Vanilla JS

While putting together my top picks for Genuary 2024 (which should come out sometime next week), I was scouring the r/generative subreddit to see what the folks did over there, and came across an interesting generative audio demo (I think that it was a creation for the final prompt) that claimed it was done entirely in Javascript with zero dependencies, which I thought was quite impressive:

Link to Reddit Post

I'd always assumed that you need some library to make Javascript produce any sort of sound, like Tone.js, but that doesn't seem to be the case, as JS actually comes with its own Audio context that can be used for this purpose - I'm guessing that Tone.js is actually built on top of that context:

https://developer.mozilla.org

AudioContext - Web APIs | MDN

The AudioContext interface represents an audio-processing graph built from audio modules linked together, each represented by an AudioNode.

Manav Rathi aka u/thousandsongs wrote a brief introduction to the audio context here:

This post is complementary to another one in which he explains the demo, introducing Euclid's algorithm that seems to be a potent method for creating interesting rhythmic patterns - you can read about it here. So that was definitely a treasure trove, Manav also shares a fully commented synth implementation in Typescript with zero dependencies:

https://github.com

mrmr.io/pages/raag/synth.ts at main · mnvr/mrmr.io

words | colors / music *◦◎◉⦿ code - https://mrmr.io - mrmr.io/pages/raag/synth.ts at main · mnvr/mrmr.io

Web3 News

There's way too much going on in the Web3 x genart space to cover every week, but besides the big traction that Farcaster has recently been getting, here's some of the things that I think are worth mentioning 👇

Custom Highlight Embeds

Highlight now makes it possible for artists to share and distribute their generative mints directly from their own websites with custom embeds - here's a quick video run-down of how it works:

Seeing that the Gorilla Sun blog is my main home on the internet, this is super exciting to me - essentially saving the trouble of having to redirect people to another page to mint something. I have yet to release something over on highlight, but there's a couple of ideas that are already brewing - I'm definitely releasing something this month.

Overall I'm really impressed with how many new features Highlight has put out since their launch last year, and this is definitely a big one, giving artists even more control over how they release their artworks.

Artblocks Acquires Sansa

Art Blocks made the announcement that they're acquiring Sansa with the goal of integrating their versatile marketplace into the Art Blocks eco-system:

I think we're all familiar with Art Blocks at this point, the pioneering platform that made generative art NFTs possible on the Ethereum blockchain. As far as I understand, Sansa was later developed independently from the Art Blocks platform, enabling a secondary market place for generative artworks on ETH, due to Art Blocks not having its own proprietary secondary marketplace - I think OpenSea was one of the few options for this purpose.

Art Blocks wrote a little announcement post explaining a bit how this is going to go down and the road-map is:

https://www.artblocks.io

Spectrum: Welcoming Sansa to the Art Blocks Family | Art Blocks

Art Blocks welcomes Sansa to its family! Discover how this acquisition is set to fuel the evolution and growth of on-chain generative art.

Digen's Digital Me Open Call

After their successful soft launch at the end of December, DiGen Art has been hard at work putting together their inaugural group show "Digital Me" - and they're inviting artists from the MENA region in their open call:

If you are an artist from the MENA region or know someone that is, consider applying, you can learn more about what they're looking and the criteria with which they will select the artists through the exhibition page and the accompanying brochure:

Tech and Code

Interop 2024

The results from Interop 2024 just dropped, and it's looking good - the modern web is more interoperable than ever!

https://webkit.org

The web just gets better with Interop 2024

The web is amazing.

The Interop project is essentially a yearly big comparison between the different modern ever-green browsers where some of the differences are ironed out making it such that features work identically across the different browsers. Jen Simmons from the Webkit team recapitulates the findings from 2024 in this article, going over each one of the different focus areas, explaining the issues and elaborating on what's been done to remedy them.

12 Modern CSS One-Line Upgrades

CSS has been evolving more and more over the past years, gradually accommodating the increasing needs of the modern web. We're frequently seeing new rules being added that previously had to be implemented in a hack-y way by combining several different statements, for purposes that they weren't originally designed for. Stephanie Eckles writes about some of these new one-liners:

https://moderncss.dev

12 Modern CSS One-Line Upgrades | Modern CSS Solutions

Sometimes, improving your application CSS just takes a one-line upgrade or enhancement! Learn about 12 properties to start incorporating into your projects, and enjoy reducing technical debt, removing JavaScript, and scoring easy wins for user experience.

One other resource that's mentioned, and that I think is worth sharing here as well, is the SmolCSS page; basically a library of small (smol) CSS snippets that accomplish a lot of the reoccurring general purpose tasks, like reoccurring types of layouts, various types of grids, etc. - definitely worth a bookmark:

https://smolcss.dev

SmolCSS

Minimal snippets for modern CSS layouts and components, created by Stephanie Eckles of ModernCSS.dev

Making Sense of Senseless Javascript Features

Javascript may be the most popular programming language today, but at the same time has quite a few quirks that will most likely leave you scratching your head when you encounter them for the first time - this article by Juan Diego Rodriguez goes over some of them and tries to explain what is going on:

https://www.smashingmagazine.com

Making Sense Of "Senseless" JavaScript Features - Smashing Magazine

JavaScript may be the most popular client-side language in the world, but it's far from perfect and not without its quirks. Juan Diego Rodriguez examines several "absurd" JavaScript eccentricities and explains how they made it into the language as well as how to avoid them in your own code.

I've shared it before, but if you haven't seen it yet, you need to watch this iconic talk that Brian Leroux gave at dotjs back in 2012, in which bravely descends into the madness of Javascript all while demonstrating the language's most bizarre features in a live coding session:

OLMo: An Open Source Language Model

Arguably the biggest news in the AI world from the past week is the release of OLMo: an open source state of the art large language model. The Allen Institute for AI aims to democratize this type of new technology, to help researchers better understand the inner workings of LLMs, experiment with their capabilities, as well as enabling developers to create interesting LLM powered applications in which they have full control. Here's a quick run-down of the features that come with this project:

If you're doing anything with AI, this is probably something you'll want to keep an eye on:

https://allenai.org

OLMo - Open Language Model by AI2

OLMo is a series of Open Language Models designed to enable the science of language models. The OLMo models are trained on the Dolma dataset.

Gorilla Updates

Hot off the Press

Last week I put together one big recap of everything that I made over the course of Genuary 2024 - turns out that you end up making quite a few interesting things when you make a thing everyday for a month. Wrote a little commentary for each one of my creations, explaining what's going on and covering the inspirations and concepts that inspired each individual sketch:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Genuary 2024: A Personal Recap

Genuary 2024 is now officially over! And while we emerge with folders loaded with sketches and ideas to work on throughout the coming weeks, here's my personal celebratory recap of everything I've made in Genuary.

Another thing I'd like to mention here, for documentation purposes, is that I was mentioned in the Collector Stories Season 2 Episode 4 by SUBI at around the 1 hour 30 minute mark - this is in light of SUBI, a collector that's primarily active on the Solana chain, making the decision to join Tezos with my token 'Somewhere in Between' as their first mint. I'm really honored that they chose one of my works:

Here's a link to the recording of the Twitter space, in which some interesting points were raised:

Fresh off the Easel

Besides wrapping up those final Genuary prompts, I actually found some time this week to start investigating some of the ideas that started taking shape over the course of Genuary. After redoing a Marching Squares algo for the 12th prompt "Lava Lamp", it got me thinking that I don't necessarily need to use it for anything animated, but could be an equally potent method for generating static shapes, especially in the scenario when it's difficult to construct a shape with a geometric approach - this might sound a bit esoteric, but if it unfolds as I'm envisioning it, you might see some of those in the next Newsletter.

Here's two WIP outputs, which might not look like much at first glance, but I'm quite happy with what I achieved in them:

Besides just being able to find the contour of some regions on the canvas, I'm also able to determine the individual regions in addition to the their vertex information, which means that I can freely control the contour and do more stuff with it, like deforming it, or rounding off the corners, etc.

If you're not familiar with Marching Squares: it's a neat algorithm that works in 2D and 3D, and lets you draw the contour of certain regions in a grid depending if the values at those grid points exceed a certain value - in the examples above this value is determined by the proximity of a grid vertex to the surrounding circles. Each of the cells in the grid, depending on which one of it's four vertices is active, will draw a certain type of line, outlining the active region. It's smart and feels a little like magic because the concept is so simple. Wikipedia gives a good overview of the algo:

Naturally, it's not as easy as it sounds, and you'll run into some complications when you're trying to do more with later on down the line. There's also more advanced versions of the algorithm that are more powerful, but at the cost of more complex code - over on Farcaster, Claus Wilke chimed in with a larger project that he's worked on which involved isobands that are more difficult to implement, he also points out that Wikipedia is a really good resource for this algorithm in particular:

Music for Coding

This week I've got a blast from the past for you all, and it's... drum-roll - Weezer!

It's a bit of an odd choice, since it might not be the best music to code along to, but after discovering that the singer and guitarist of the band Rivers Cuomo is currently actually active over on Github and a significant amount of time on programming, it was a no-brainer to include:

It seems that he is mainly working on a discord bot. Another interesting piece of Trivia that I discovered by going down this Rabbit hole, is that the music video for Buddy Holly was actually included with the Windows 95 installation CD:

The interesting part of this is that the band had no idea about this until afterwards, after being pissed initially they came around to realise that it probably played a factor in the song becoming as popular as it is today:

And that's it from me this week, while I'm typing out these last words I bid my farewells — hopefully this caught you up a little with the events in the world of generative art, tech and AI throughout the past week.

If you enjoyed it, consider sharing it with your friends, followers and family - more eyeballs/interactions/engagement helps tremendously - it lets the algorithm know that this is good content. If you've read this far, thanks a million!

If you're still hungry for more Generative art things, you can check out the most recent issue of the Newsletter here:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Gorilla Newsletter 41

This week 📬 the Tickle #90 - Falling Sand Simulation with the coding train - Maxime Heckel on Caustics - Building 3D scenes for the browser by Yasmin P. - Snippets for Art by Chris McCully - Zed going Open Source +++ lots more

Previous issues of the newsletter can be found here:

https://www.gorillasun.de

Newsletter - Gorilla Sun

Weekly recap of Gorilla Articles, Art and other interesting things from the world of generative art and creative coding.

Cheers, happy sketching, and again, hope that you have a fantastic week! See you in the next one - Gorilla Sun 🌸