ars ex machina

I made these pictures during the Covid-19 pandemic, between 2020–21. I wrote a basic routine in Processing, a set of graphics programming tools, to generate initial geometric compositions.

I wanted to see if a simple set of instructions repeated multiple times could build complex variations. I modeled my emergent process on Sol Lewitt’s wall drawing instructions, but where Lewitt used a crew of assistants to execute his routines, I used a computer program.

After the initial drawing process was complete, I manipulated colors, values, and opacities using Adobe Illustrator.

This earlier group was composed in a similar manner, but I drew their initial shapes freehand in Adobe Illustrator. Those shape units then became the pieces Processing used to generate these compositions.