My Art for Genuary 2024, Part 1
Inktober for programming nerds
Happy new year! Let’s kick it off with some programming art.
I’ve decided to participate in Genuary 2024, a procedurally generated art project. The Genuary website provides a prompt for each day in January 2024, and we as the artists program a generative art piece based on the prompt.
I’m mainly going to use the p5.js library, a JavaScript interpretation of the Processing sketchbook. While this isn’t my first time using Processing or any of its derivatives, I’m not very familiar with JavaScript and this is my first time using p5.
I’d like to give a shout-out to GusBus, who shared the Genuary project in the 32-Bit Café Discord server and indirectly inspired me to do this project.
This page contains graphics or animations that could cause problems for people with vision issues. Viewer discretion is advised. If you have trouble viewing bright colors or relatively fast animations, I suggest clicking elsewhere.
Prompt 1: Particles, lots of them.
Gradients don’t exist in the base p5.js library; instead, I just drew a bunch of thin rectangles and linearly interpolated (a.k.a., LERPed) between the start and end colors.
I used an array of arrays to keep track of the particles’ properties.
Prompt 2: No palettes.
This prompt’s subtitle was “generative colors, procedural colors, emergent colors”; I decided to just choose colors at random and interpolate between them to make my own palette.
Prompt 3: Droste effect.
I don’t think I did this prompt proper justice; this piece fits the prompt “recursion” a lot better. However, the Droste effect is a specific type of recursion, so I guess it works.
Prompt 4: Pixels.
For some reason, I wanted to go overboard with this prompt and build a 2D cellular automaton! Each cell has an equal probability of moving into one of its three neighbors below it, and each cell slowly decays over time. The effect reminds me of falling snow.
Prompt 5: In the Style of Vera Molnár (1924-2023).
Vera Molnár’s work is fascinating. This art piece was inspired by many of her works titled Structure de Quadrilatères (Structure of Quadrilaterals). The one that I liked the most was called sans titre (1987) (Untitled (1987)).
Prompt 6: Screensaver.
This one’s a little bit simple, but it does the job. I always really liked how the bouncing DVD logo looked.
Prompt 7: Progress bar / indicator / loading animation.
The animation’s gonna show up soon, you just have to wait for it to complete loading.
Just kidding! This is the animation. Did you know that loading icons are also called throbbers? I don’t like that name.
Prompt 8: Chaotic system.
Chaos theory is very cool. It studies the properties of chaotic systems, repeatable rulesets that make hard-to-predict patterns. A small change in a chaotic system’s internal ruleset or initial conditions drastically changes how the results evolve over time. The Lorenz system that I’ve programmed here is a classic example of a chaotic system of differential equations.
Other Prompts
Unfortunately, having so many active animated sketches on the same webpage can make it lag. So, my Genuary 2024 article is split into three parts. You can view the other parts on my website using the links below.
This post is part of a series called “Genuary 2024”.
- My Art for Genuary 2024, Part 1 (Prompts 1-8)
- My Art for Genuary 2024, Part 2 (Prompts 9-16)
- My Art for Genuary 2024, Part 3 (Prompts 17-18, 20, 22, 23, 25, & 26)