I picked up a copy of the absolutely-beautiful book Generative Design recently and I am loving it. It’s a perfect resource for where I’m at – exploring generative art, wanting to learn more but don’t need someone to teach me the basics of programming.
It’s been great to find out how many techniques are much simpler to code than I’d expected. For example, I decided to code my own copy of this noisy motion sketch which creates fantastic wispy-smoke-like patterns. I’d seen work like this before and assumed some amount of complex simulation was going on. Turns out it’s just taking Perlin noise and using it as a sort of vector field, defining an angle for particles to move in from each spot. (Which sounds fancy but it’s basically just a few lines of code.) Huh! Easy-peasy, tiny code, fun results.