Table of Contents

Copyright

Brief Table of Contents

Table of Contents

List of Artworks

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

About this Book

About the Author

Introduction: The Organic vs. The Mechanical

one. Creative Coding

Chapter 1. Generative Art: In Theory and Practice

1.1. Not your father’s art form

1.2. The history of a new idea

1.3. The digital toolset

1.3.1. Perpetual impermanence

1.3.2. The latest in primitive technology

1.4. Summary

Chapter 2. Processing: A Programming Language for Artists

2.1. What is Processing?

2.1.1. Bold strides and baby steps

2.1.2. Hello World

2.2. Programmatic drawing

2.2.1. Functions, parameters, and color values

2.2.2. Strokes, styles, and coordinates

2.2.3. Variables

2.2.4. Fills, alpha values, and drawing order

2.3. Structure, logic, and animation

2.3.1. The frame loop

2.3.2. Writing your own functions

2.3.3. Operators

2.3.4. Conditionals

2.4. Looping

2.4.1. While loops

2.4.2. Leaving traces

2.4.3. For loops

2.5. Saving, publishing, and distributing your work

2.5.1. Version control

2.5.2. Creating stills

2.5.3. Using a still as an alt image

2.5.4. Creating video

2.5.5. Frame rates and screen sizes

2.5.6. Mobile devices, iPhone/iPad, and Android

2.6. Summary

two. Randomness & Noise

Chapter 3. The Wrong Way to Draw a Line

3.1. Randomness and not-so-randomness

3.2. Iterative variance

3.3. Naturalistic variance

3.3.1. Perlin noise in Processing

3.3.2. Creating your own noise

3.3.3. A custom random function

3.4. Summary

Chapter 4. The Wrong Way to Draw a Circle

4.1. Rotational drawing

4.1.1. Drawing your first circle

4.1.2. Turning a circle into a spiral

4.1.3. Noisy spirals

4.1.4. Creating your own noise, revisited

4.2. Case study: Wave Clock

4.3. Summary

Chapter 5. Adding Dimensions

5.1. Two-dimensional noise

5.1.1. Creating a noise grid

5.1.2. Noise visualizations

5.2. Noisy animation

5.3. The third dimension

5.3.1. Drawing in 3D space

5.3.2. Three-dimensional noise

5.3.3. The wrong way to draw a sphere

5.4. Summary

three. Complexity

Chapter 6. Emergence

6.1. Emergence defined

6.1.1. Ant colonies and flocking algorithms

6.1.2. Think locally, act locally

6.2. Object-oriented programming

6.2.1. Classes and instances

6.2.2. Local knowledge (collision detection)

6.2.3. Interaction patterns

6.3. Summary

Chapter 7. Autonomy

7.1. Cellular automata

7.1.1. Setting up the framework

7.1.2. The Game of Life

7.1.3. Vichniac Vote

7.1.4. Brian’s Brain

7.1.5. Waves (averaging)

7.2. Simulation and visualization

7.2.1. Software agents

7.2.2. Human agents

7.3. Summary

Chapter 8. Fractals

8.1. Infinite recursion

8.2. Coding self-similarity

8.2.1. Trunks and branches

8.2.2. Animating your tree

8.3. Exponential growth

8.4. Case study: Sutcliffe Pentagons

8.4.1. Construction

8.4.2. Exploration

8.5. Summary

Index

List of Figures

List of Tables

List of Listings