The Artist's Husband: Babel
· the artists husband generative art languages rust javascript p5.js clojure quil java kotlin go golang nannou processing 
This is my first real new post since 2020. All the ones posted at the end of 2023 were written back in 2020, and have been backlogged while we dealt with personal issues. New year, new posts! In my previous posts, I’ve explored some basic generative art in a variety computer languages and art frameworks. We tried Javascript with p5.js , Clojure with Quil , and Java and Processing . I don’t have any post to document it, but in the past few years, I also experimented with Kotlin and Go for artwork.
The Artist's Husband: Attractor Code
· generative art the artists husband de jong attractor svensson attractor attractor java clojure 
“Everybody should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.” — Steve Jobs I’ve shown many attractor images I have generated over the past few weeks, but how have I been drawing them? I have been writing code to do so, but stopped including it in the posts because it was getting long and complex. I promised that, someday, I would share the code. Today is that day!
The Artist's Husband: The de Jong Attractor
· generative art the artists husband clojure quil de jong attractor sierpinski triangle attractor strange attractor fractal 
In my last post , we played The Chaos Game and ended up with a Sierpinski Triangle. It’s quite nice as far as it goes, but there is not a lot of variation and visual interest beyond the initial surpise of finding it buried in the chaos at all. This time around, lets look at the de Jong attractor. First, some terminology! An Attractor is a dynamic system with a set of numeric values to which the system tends to evolve over time, no matter what state it starts in. An attractor is called a Strange Attractor if it contains a fractal element. The Sierpinski Triangle we came up with last week is an example of a strange attractor. It doesn’t matter what your starting point is (it could be miles away from the triangle), you will eventually get pretty much the same result for any given triangle. The de Jong attractor is another example of a strange attractor.
The Artist's Husband: The Chaos Game
· generative art the artists husband clojure quil chaos sierpinski triangle fractal ifs iterative function system 
Today, we’ll play The Chaos Game! It’s easy to play, and it goes like this: First, put three points on your paper. These will be the vertices of a triangle (so don’t put them in a straight line!) Any triangle will work, but be sure to leave lots of area inside where the triangle will be to make it easier to see what it going on. Next, you need a way to randomly choose one of those vertices over and over. You can roll a die, and if you get a 1 or a 2, that could reference the first vertex, a 3 or a 4 could reference the second vertex, and a 5 or a 6 could reference that last vertex. If you are a Dungeons and Dragons player and happen to have a 3-sided die, feel free to use that!
The Artist's Husband: Squares in Quil
· generative art the artists husband javascript p5.js clojure quil 
Let’s draw some squares! Last week I introduced Clojure as a possible replacement for Javascript for my generative art pursuits. Clojure has the Quil library that provides many of the same capabilities that p5.js provides to Javascript. Let’s look at a simple example. This Javascript/p5.js program generates an image like the one at the top of this post. function setup() { createCanvas(800, 800); background(240); stroke(0); let size = 500; let offset = 50; let centerX = width/2; let centerY = height/2; let topLeftX = centerX - size/2; let topLeftY = centerY - size/2; fill(200, 150, 250, 150); rect(topLeftX, topLeftY, size, size); rect(topLeftX-offset, topLeftY-offset, size, size); rect(topLeftX+offset, topLeftY+offset, size, size); } The program is fairly simple: create the canvas, fill in the background with grey, set the stroke (line) color to black, set the fill color, and draw three rectangles slightly offset from each other. If you’ve been following along with my previous posts, this looks pretty basic. The only remotely tricky thing going on here is that the fill() function has a fourth parameter. The first three set the red, green and blue components of the fill color, while the fourth sets the transparency. This is what allows us to see the through the squares, and is what causes the gradations of color where the squares overlap.
The Artist's Husband: And Now For Something Completely Different!
· generative art the artists husband javascript p5.js clojure quil 
If you’ve been reading my posts each week, you’re probably aware that I have been working mostly in Javascript, using the p5.js drawing library. There are many things to like about Javascript, but also many ways for it to slowly drive you bonkers. I won’t go into all those reasons here, but I will say it’s time to try something new. I’d like to try to do some generative art using the Clojure language. This is way out of my comfort zone, since I don’t actually know Clojure, and it is not a simple language, but I thought I’d share my experiences with it here.