One from the archives (2018): A live recording made from only two samples, using generative sequencing (using my own tools) and probably the (by far!) most amount of effects, layers & signal chains I've ever used on a track... Granular synthesis, time stretching/slicing, resonators, filters, erosion... it gets pretty wild & textured from ~2:30 once the cellular automatas controlling various granular synth params had a bit of tantrum for a minute or so... :)

Always wanted to hear that on a large PA. Some of the sounds almost remind me of the high voltage zapps produced by tesla coils...

The samples:
1) A needle skipping on a dusty vinyl record
2) An (unintelligible) voice-like AI sample...

https://soundcloud.com/toxi/20180922-machine-learning

#genuary2025 - Day 13:

Triangles and nothing else.

#machineknitting + rule 129

instead of writing rules directly, I now have a cost function (energy) and saying a cell can move somewhere if the total energy (in a local region - up to 2 cells away) does not increase. this is fun because it can create some unexpected behaviour.

here the energy is defined as abs(2-num_neighbours), so having two neighbours is optimal. but they can join into pairs and still move around. the little L-shaped things are technically loops as all the cells have two neighbours, but I want bigger loops.

green cells can move randomly but must have two neighbours (and the neighbours must have two neighbours) = membrane
#cellularautomata #alife #creativecoding

If you happen to be in Basel from June 10-16 for Art Basel, you can snap up one of 20 unique prints of my C-SCAPE endlessly evolving muti-cellulluar automata collection at The Digital Art Mile @ Space31, Rebgasse 31.

Just find the Generative Art kiosk organized & hosted by the fxhash team. The kiosk features a huge 86" screen showcasing realtime versions of generative art projects and single edition prints by 16 artists.

A small preview selection of C-SCAPE prints (30x30cm, 400g paper, high resolution) on offer (without watermark, of course)...

Noisy 1-D Langton's Ants!

Full Version: https://youtu.be/QWZrY-agZOA

A little video preview of a section of the upcoming new thi.ng website:

https://makertube.net/w/hDfuEUudsjskRtdLhVeiVC
(edit: moved from YT to makertube)

It's so nice for me to see these 10 computational art pieces & experiments all in one place (and most of them interactive & randomizable), also in the knowledge that apart from using @vite for bundling, everything else is entirely made using https://thi.ng/umbrella packages and tooling (three of the pieces are also partially written in #Ziglang / #WASM). Unlike the video (which at 1080p is ~110MB), on the website these ten realtime evolving animations together are only a ~650KB download (i.e. ~0.55% filesize) and all of them are running fluidly even on my old iPhone 11! Thanks to using `IntersectionObserver`, only a single piece is active at any one time...

Another side effect from this exercise: All these projects are only a small selection from the past 3 years, but most of them haven't been updated in the last 1-2 years. There were breaking changes (esp. the Zig parts, which I still have to largely address), but most of the supposedly breaking changes in #ThingUmbrella packages were actually super easy to address. I'm only mentioning this, since it's great to sometimes be completely in a "normal" user's shoes and see how painful (or not!) some of these changes are/can be... I'm often losing a lot of time contemplating making wide-ranging (but IMHO better & needed) changes, but always also trying to consider the effects of those on other people... This anti-bitrot exercise absolutely helped me to vindicate this approach!

Did some more brainstorming about a title for this project/piece and have settled on STRATA for now — these emerging structures/fragments very much remind me of them (rock strata and/or thin section microscopy) and the many folds & cross-stratifications observed on my hikes over the past few years have been a regular inspiration to keep working on this project...

Also see:

- https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/111173324137924265
- https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/109931051187422957

Been slacking posting more art here, so time for a teensy selection of an old generative/evolutionary system from 2014 (then used for my HOLO 2 magazine guest design). Originally written in Clojure, meanwhile ported to TypeScript & Zig, I've kept working on & experimenting with it ever since... 1000s of screenshots and 100s of versions to sift through. Loosely based on research done by Barricelli[1] since the early 1950s, conceptually and aesthetically it sits nicely between my C-SCAPE and De/Frag and has a similarly huge design space to explore (in some versions coupled with genetic programming to evolve cell replication rules)... There's a 1500 word draft blog post from back then too, which goes into more detail and history of this approach. Maybe its time to publish that one too at last... :)

[1] https://www.tim-taylor.com/assets/docs/barricelli-suggestions-for-starting-theoretic-papers-6-6-1987.pdf

On the topic of #CellularAutomata, I got Conway's #GameOfLife running with cellpylib, so that's nice.

Passively participating in #Genuary2024 — Day 9 ASCII. In summer 2022 I released ASCII-SCAPE, a textmode remix of my earlier C-SCAPE co-evolving multi-cellular automata simulation piece. Technially, it should been called UTF-SCAPE, but hey (some variations actually are strictly ASCII only).

The piece uses 1200+ handpicked rule combinations (based on custom rules & neighborhood configurations I generated/searched/collected/curated with my own tools over the past 20+ years), 32 character sets, 40 color themes, all creating literally billions of possible combinations... The piece also allows recording & exporting chunks of the simulation as plain text files (just press X to start/end recording)

https://art.thi.ng/ascii-scape/
(Reload for new random combination!)

The following keyboard shortcuts are available:

- space : toggle simulation updates (pause/play)
- r : randomize environment
- x : start/stop recording
- f : toggle scroll speed (fast/slow)

More info about both sibling projects at the links below:

ASCII-SCAPE
https://www.fxhash.xyz/generative/16205

C-SCAPE
https://www.fxhash.xyz/generative/13992