A recent trip to the Boston MFA inspired me to try making more art for art’s sake. I’ve never been particularly crafty with a pencil or paint brush so I decided my artistic medium would have to be digital. I’ve been fascinated by generative art (the dot is black has always been a quality source for interesting pieces) so I thought I would take a whack at it.

Wikipedia says generative art must be created partially or entirely using an autonomous system, but I prefer Anders Hoff’s definition of the art form:

“I would argue that it does not really matter whether you are generating characters, dialogue or environments for a computer game, geometry as part of a building, digital or analogue art, a musical composition, or a poem. In all cases you are using a system of some kind to help you along. Either towards a specific goal, some unidentified result, or somewhere in-between. To me the main point is usually to experiment with a small system that consists of a set of relatively simple rules.”

With that in mind, I set out to see what I could create. While I enjoy the pieces I’ve seen, I found a lot of generative art lacked color. As a personal fan of color, I knew I wanted to somehow include some in my piece. This led me to a question: how would a color describe itself?

Without the ability to have personal discussions with a color, I opted to use a color’s own codified representation (specifically the binary representation of a color’s hex code) to generate each color’s pattern in the piece. Doing so led to the piece above.

Feel free to play around with it and let me know if you have any thoughts on it! Is this generative art? Is there a greater meaning behind this piece? Am I just a hack making pretty pictures? Let me know and I’ll let you know if I agree!