how I came to terms with the whole NFT thing. disclaimer: This article is by no means an invitation to use crypto assets. It explains the thought process I went through to make peace with this block of technology. If anything, it’s an invitation to remain critical, take your time, make your research and make your … [Read more…]
I worked on a quick project for Google Arts & Culture in partnership with the Mo Amin Foundation. the foundation opened up their archive allowing everyone to access Mohamed (‘Mo’) Amin’s legacy. to be honest, I had no clue who he was so I was pretty surprised to discover his life and work. he documented … [Read more…]
last year I was contacted by la phase 5 , they needed help with the WebGL part of their 2021 wish card. they’re based in Marseille, the second biggest french city, by the mediterranean sea. it’s quite a unique city, both classy and cheap, packed and desert, La Phase 5’s plan was to write a love letter to … [Read more…]
this article was initially published on Medium, I’m posting it here for the record.
For a recent project I had to manipulate a potentially large number of meshes. I chose to use THREE.InstancedBufferGeometry as it is very efficient ; it allows to draw the same mesh many times, with different attributes, in a single drawcall. Working with instances is slightly different from using regular meshes. In a nutshell, you give the … [Read more…]
I was doing some R&D for a project with my BROS Frank & David when I came across a problem I had thought of for a while but never tackled for real. the idea is to distribute (scatter) a set of random 3D points inside a volume, preferably an arbitrary mesh. distributing random points in geometric volumes is … [Read more…]
quick post about something I did last year for a project that never went anywhere. the Active Contour Model (ACM) is an old fashioned way of vectorizing the contour of an object. it works very well when an object is isolated on a flat color but the principle can also be used “live” to determine where the “border” … [Read more…]
last christmas I offered a series of prints and plots as gifts to my family & relatives. for some of them, I used vector maps as a way to seed a graphic post-processor. it looked like this: rue Lecourbe, Paris. rue Pelleport, Paris. l’opéra de Paris. detail Notre-Dame de Paris these are the steps I followed: collect a set … [Read more…]
this post explains how I produced the following series of images: all the images are based on photos from Archive.org. I didn’t have anything special in mind, I just found these objects moving ; they were like action figures from long ago. the statues are quite small too, the printed version is roughly their actual size, small … [Read more…]
this is a reply to @upupzealot asking for more details about this pen. there is no random so to speak, the PRNG (Pseudo Random Number Generator) creates a seed-based (& therefore reproductible) series of seemingly random numbers. the first thing I do, line 1 is to create a self contained PRNG object (it’s a Mersenne … [Read more…]
I worked for the past 3 months on a website with the good people at Upian for the good people of La Fondation Cartier, pour l’art contemporain. It is called: Le Grand Orchestre Des Animaux (The Great Animal Orchestra) and is based on the work of Bernie Krause, a man who dedicated his life to recording the sounds of nature and raising awareness about its degradation … [Read more…]
I just came back from Lisbon, each and every friend of mine told me about a very enjoyable place with lovely people, none of them – fools ! – told me about Azulejos. when I unknowingly found the first wall covered with them, I thought it was some fancy pants landlord trying to show off, but after passing in front of dozens … [Read more…]
tracing is one of the earliest forms of computer arts, a good read if you’ve never heard of it via retweeted by BitcraftLab. the more recent takes, with bigger formats and the use of colors always strike me with the complexity of their patterns and yet plotters use the simplest tools available: points, lines and curves. there are so many things … [Read more…]
last december, the nice people at Cher Ami (“dear friend” in french) contacted me to give them a hand on a little animation / wish card they wanted to release in january, I gladly accepted which gave birth to this refreshing little thing http://www.ashortjourney.com/ Cher Ami has qualified people in house, a creative director, a copywriter/musician, a front end developer (Etienne … [Read more…]
a Graph is a series of vertices (nodes) connected by edges (“segments”). it can articulate data, perform operations and provide insights on them. data visualization makes massive use of 2d planar graphs (you’ve probably seen many Force Directed Graphs) but a display list, a 2D polygon, a 3D mesh, a roadmap are also graphs of some sort. in its simplest … [Read more…]
update 210525: Mario Carrillo was kind enough to port the code samples to ES6, something I’ve been willing to do for years. so check out his repo: https://github.com/marioecg/gpu-party/ ( and check out his work while you’re at it ) particles are awesome. I can’t tell how many particle engines I’ve written for the past 15 years but I’d … [Read more…]
Ray marching is a technique used to render complex shapes and lightings, it’s been around for years but got some huge momentum in the past 5 years. I had some spare time and decided to give it a spin. there are some really good online tools if you want to play around : shadertoy glslsandbox shdr glslb.in the … [Read more…]
a quickie to celebrate holidays! to stipple (verb) to paint, engrave, or draw by means of dots or small touches. here’s why english is a beautiful language. stippling is a graphic way of rendering masses. I must admit I’m obsessed with stippling for years now, I wanted to give it a try for a while and never found time … [Read more…]
I’m trying to get a proper quilting algorithm to work, one of the important steps is to cleverly “cut” a portion of the image that is going to be drawn on top of another. so I was thinking of how I’d work around this and came up with something I thought was worth sharing. the idea … [Read more…]
Justin Windle is a very talented creative developer and I’ve been following his work for years, check his website if you’re not convinced. he started an enterprise called stuvio ; the goal is to allow generative artists to exhibit and sell prints of their works. he gathered a selection of creative coders / generative artists … [Read more…]
“Harriet” is the name of a project I did for the Christmas Experiments 2014. if you don’t have WebGL, you can still watch this video: if you do have WebGL, you can try it out here. there’s a github repo here : Harriet’s Github Repo. ( some ugly things there… ) the initial idea was to create a generative toy … [Read more…]
a short post about the marching squares algorithm, a technique mostly used to vectorize the outline of a binary image. it’s a very well known & very well spread technique, I happened to have some spare time & the urge to do something graphic. for a start let’s look at how things work. the idea is to draw … [Read more…]
a month ago, for no specific reason, I decided to implement a 2D top-down visibility algorithm. I always found the output beautiful both graphically & conceptually yet, as I don’t make games, I never tacckled it. visibility algorithms are often used to simulate lights ; to determine which areas of a space are enlightened and which … [Read more…]
Hydra is a generative shadowplay. you can see it here http://barradeau.com/2013/hydra/ I had the idea of doing this for a long time and being unemployed due to Flash’s death, it turned out to be both a good way to learn HTML and the right time to do so. this article is about how it works, the … [Read more…]