When you combine code + art you end up with Generative Design. I love messing around with generative design because often what you create is not what you had in mind.
I use Processing to create most of images you'll see below. Processing is a Java based app. What's great about processing is that you can create awesome visuals in no time at all. Although most of the stuff I've worked on here is manipulating images, you can do pretty much anything with Processing.
I took this shot last summer (2013) with my iPhone 5. I created small app in Processing that can create shapes based on the colours in an image. It can be customized pretty heavily, but for the second shot I've used rectangles, with the size and rotation being driven by the colour behind it. The third shot is pretty similar, except it's using circles, and the scaling factor is much smaller. For the fourth shot, the rectangles width is determined by the brightness of the colour behind it, with a very high scale factor. I've also re-coloured this in Photoshop to give it a bit more of an 80s vibe.
Another shot taken with my iPhone, this one has a lot of similar effects as the pink flowers. The size and shape of the rectangles and circles are all based on the brightness of the image.
For the last image in this set, the sizing is set really low, which gives it matrix-esque appearance.
Boids are a programming technique that gives each of these objects that of flying birds. It’s a really cool way to get organic effects. There’s a lot of complex rules going on in the background.
We built the underlying system in university with the help of James Acres, and I went back and adjusted the appearance, which made for some pretty neat images.
If you are interested in this kind of thing, Processing has a great tutorial, which you can check out here.
I took this shot back in January, the range of colours made it really interesting to work with. For these shots, I’ve used rectangles of varying width and height.
This photo was taken around sundown, and was then recoloured in Photoshop. For the various shots, I was experimenting with random rotation and size, as well as size and scale.