Opiamas Trangelo

“Well the good news, we like the book so much we’re doubling the number of colour pages. The bad news, you’re gonna have to pull your finger out and create some extra content to fill them. Okay? Great, we’ll leave you to it.

Oh yeah, one more thing, it needs to look good set opposite the work of Robert Hodgin. S’that okay? Goooood.”

This, plus a few rejected covers, just added to my flickr stream.

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Generative Art Book – cover

Finally, my book has a cover.

One day, when I’m feeling particularly grumpy, I’ll write a blog post detailing the battle I have had with my (otherwise sane) publishers for a half-decent cover to wrap my words in, including images of some of the horrors that were proposed at various stages. But for now my mood is sunny, as I’m really happy with the one we’ve ended up with.

Naturally, being generative, I have several hundred wildly varying iterations of the cover image. Feasibly, every copy could have had a uniquely generated cover image, but I fear my publishers would have had suffered some form of prolapse had I suggested such an idea.

No release date quite yet (I’d expect it late Autumn), but the “early access” program should be rolling out any day now, if you are that desperate to have a peek inside. And, in slightly related news, 100 Abandoned Artworks is back from its little holiday. There is quite a backlog from my few months of writing, so yesterday I queued up 21(!) fresh generative scribbles, 17 of which include source code for the plundering. I am allowing them to trickle out one every five days, which should keep it going way into September/October. Schedule started yesterday with 71: Super Spiral.

Posted in generative art, generative art book | 4 Comments »

What Frosti Did Next

This is what my Frosti video ended up as. An experiment done in an afternoon has turned out to have a decent pair of legs on it. FutureDeluxe are the folk responsible for turning my austere little sketch into something so sexy.

The original Frosti (see here) is also now one of two films I have in competition at the Alys Beach Digital Graffiti festival next month.

I share the mathematics and methodology behind Frosti in the book, which I’ve now finished (first draft anyway). Hopefully I’ll be able to share with you a release date for this very soon.

Posted in generative art, generative art book, video | No Comments »

Wearied About Front Direction

More old media. French magazine Regards Sur Le Numerique, is running a well-cool two page spread on me in the latest issue. I’m so chuffed I can almost ignore the fact that it’s published by M*******t.

Being in French, it’s kinda difficult to tell what they are saying about my work. So I asked Babelfish:

Matt Pearson, alias Zenbullet, programmer in Brighton the day, is explorer in “abandoned” creation the night. He asserts this term of “abandonment” on two accounts. “I experienced my programs the night and gives up them, with the clean of term, front direction to be wearied about it. In addition, I approach these creations ‘with abandonment’, without restriction nor inhibition.” Its work, which raises of art generated hair, consists in using mathematical algorithms to produce random forms that model Matt and that it divides on line, thus opening them with other creativities. It does not expose, but dream to make use of a webcam and projectors for other projects.

Posted in culture, generative art, generative art book, old media, tech, web, writing | 1 Comment »

Further Adventures in Old Media

Quick update on the book. It’s been kinda quiet since xmas, as I’ve been busying myself with client work, trying to replenish my battered bank balance (the first brutal reality of writing a tech book – it doesn’t pay the bills). But I was around 2/3rds finished by then, and now I have a new editor onboard who is promising to whip that final third out of me by the end of next month. Then we are still on track for getting the sucker published by the summer.

The writing hasn’t been done entirely in a bubble for the last few months. The book has been through a review process, and a number of people have read various drafts. The feedback has been mostly very positive, although not entirely. Obviously, the more savage the criticism the more useful it is to me, but so far there has been nothing to make me tear it up and drag it to the roaring fire icon on my desktop.

Soon the book will be made available as part of MEAP, The Manning Early Access Program, which will give readers the opening chapters for free, and encourage feedback which may influence the rest of book. And if you pre-order it you will continue to receive chapters in this way as they are approved ahead of publication. There is already a green paper, a 10 page introduction, available as a free download here.

The title is now Generative Art: A Practical Guide Using Processing. I don’t have a cover to show you yet, as this is one element that has been proving a bit of a battleground. I’m so grateful to the various authors I spoke to before agreeing a deal who all advised me to ensure any contract I signed gave me some kind of say in the cover. Something a first time author might just assume to have, but is apparently quite rare.

Cover aside, the content is coming together nicely. The writing is shaping itself into two main threads, a mix of tutorial and theory. The didactive sections teach Processing with a gentle touch, from “hello world” through to OOP, maintaining a focus on the creativity. The theoretical thread complements this, allowing me to explore some of the crazier tangents that may be familiar to readers of this blog, putting the art of programming into a real world context that I always find absent from coding books. There are also plenty of pretty pictures too of course.

The main thrust of the book, my intention anyway, is to make Generative Art something that is both accessible and fun. I believe that the artistic potential of creative coding is barely off the ground yet. It is still stifled by being too exclusive a skill, the main work being done by a rare subset of talented individuals who have an aesthetic sensibility intersecting with hardcore coding skills. Generative Art is only really going to get interesting once it is more widely practised, once the programming can become more intuitive and naturalistic, and less of a barrier. If my book makes even a small step in this direction I will consider it a success.

Posted in culture, generative art, generative art book, old media, writing | 1 Comment »