Not everyone thinks of computer programming as an artist's medium, but I find it a great way to make art with a bit of unpredictability. Lately I've been using the programming language Processing. Here are some of my projects:
Altered State Park is a video DVD of selected computer-generated collages.
You can see the
An earlier version of this piece was in a couple art shows last year: Mask, Meaning & Metamorphosis at Flying Leap Art Space, and the 2011 Fine Art Exhibition of the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines.
Tint City is an online collage generator.
View it here:
You can also download a version that lets you save your favorites as numbered jpgs: TintCity.zip (418k, Windows only).
The Bottomless Portfolio is an online piece from 2010.
You can let it run as a slideshow, or hurry it along by clicking the mouse.
Clicking before it's had much time to draw produces mere line fragments, but clicking
a little later can yield compositions pleasing in their simplicity.
View it here:
Or try a version that uses the whole browser window as its canvas, and you
(Note: I don't really recommend this, but on some browsers you can use the F11 key to go fullscreen,
then click on the "watch it draw" link above to get a true fullscreen experience. Proceed with caution,
however, because there will be no
Better yet, download a full screen watch-it-draw version:
BPwatchItDraw.zip (178k, Windows only, designed for a
1920 x 1080 monitor but will work on other sizes too).
Icon Poet is an interactive writing toy. More at iconpoet.com.
Uncle Weevy is a talking head from 2001. With a
vocabulary of 360 oddly-inflected words, he will ramble on indefinitely until you click the mouse.
In 2011 he was part of the Platine Festival in Cologne, Germany, with collaborators
Holger Heckeroth and
He has also provided vocals for recording artist
To install Uncle Weevy on your Windows computer, run
Here's 42 seconds of Uncle Weevy on YouTube.
My older computer art pieces were written on the Amiga, a brilliant but largely forgotten
computer that is neither a PC nor a Macintosh.
Here's how to run them using Amiga emulation software.
I have also posted videos on YouTube, though that loses the charm of having different output every time.
Picture Garden is a collage generator, a 1996 update of a program I originally made in the late '80s. It creates and displays a new picture every three seconds. Here are some images from Picture Garden on YouTube, with added music.
Steve Headroom is a 2D random talking head,
a 1993 forerunner of Uncle Weevy. He has a vocabulary of 190 words.
Here's Steve Headroom on YouTube.
A Season in RAM is a poetry generator inspired by
the works of the French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891). It has a vocabulary of 6,000 words, and
I wrote it in AmigaBASIC in 1988. Here's
