Through the looking glass...screen.

My use of code dates back to the internet social graveyard formerly known as Myspace. Back then, I would borrow bits of code to make the page look "cooler." (O, the great joy of Italics!) I collaged this mysterious web-based language to do what I needed it to but never understood it. It was like learning French (which I've been learning this summer btw) by piecing together all of the romantic languages and assuming it will translate. It might work, but probably not.

I used excuses to keep me from learning to further program: I'm an artist; I don't need to program. I am just more of a right brained person. Coding is too hard. All of which are ridiculous concepts that we use to justify quitting and constructions that divide disciplines, although no disciplines exist without the other. We accept ourselves as "not meant" to learn something when we fail. Worst of all, we assume the attaining of knowledge should be easy. If it's not easy, then I must not be able to do it. This is the biggest disservice to yourself because if it is not hard, then you are not actually learning. There should always be failure first. I hear these same excuses when someone tells me he/she can't do Art, Music, English, or anything else. Learn the rules, practice hard, try to fail, and test yourself by going further than the rules you were given and the excuses fall away.

Excuses aside, I've been (not so gently) nudged towards coding for the past 5 years. It makes sense. I work in Digital Art and should know what drives my medium better. Kodu, a free game development program made for children, introduced me to simple boolean logic. Construct 2, another free game development program, showed me the way towards a slightly more complex logic. The UnReal Engine continued the pipeline to programming knowledge. Maya's Mel Script demanded it. I kept tinkering with programming but felt very uncomfortable with it. I was not over the learning curve;  the magical place where it all suddenly made sense had not arrived yet.

Earlier this summer, I began experiments with Python (Automate the Boring Stuff with Python by Al Sweigart) and then traveled to Victoria in British Columbia for DHSI 2016. When we worked with Arduino Boards during my "Physical Computing and Desktop Fabrication" course, I realized I actually understood what we were doing. Surprised, I realized I knew the language and could manipulate and explain it. Motivated and finally feeling comfortable with programming, when I arrived home I started studying more intensely. Aided by Creative Coding versions 1 and 2 by Ira Greenberg, today I generated some aesthetically pleasing (to me) art work. For the programming gurus out there, shh. Let me have this. For those that don't know how to do this, cool, huh?

First experiments with generating a mandala. The variable in Processing in the right tab and named "star." The script in the main area call the "star" up and decides its number of points, fill, rotation, translation, etc. 

The exercises in the book referenced above do not provide information on how to experiment with color. Here, I pushed outside the bounds of the exercise to discover how to do this.

For this version, I figured out how to randomly generate these neutral colors as well as the mandala shapes. 

From here on, I pushed the bounds of the mandala generation to create these algorithmic paintings, then tweaked slightly as per my normal workflow in Photoshop.  I gravitate towards landscapes and the surreal in my work, so it only fitting that in this I see an ocean landscape of fantastic coral.