Lately I’ve been thinking about clarity of purpose and the role of writing in developing that purpose. Sometime in the past couple of years I started daily journaling. Initially, the ideas were pretty messy. Over time they started to get clearer. Late last year I expanded my daily journaling to include writing out goals. It […]
I’m short on time so today is an abbreviated, image and links only post with a quote. This feels like it sums up the week: “My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as […]
I’m guilty of introducing complexity into my pursuits and I’ve decided that it’s time to simplify. Specifically, I’ve decided to revise the format of Existential Friday going forward. The new format will have a much shorter chunk of writing (300 words max), one image, and the miscellany links. The goal is the same. It’s to […]
Data visualization is powerful because it can change the way you see an issue. A simple visualization can reframe a question in a way that numbers in a table can’t. A good visualization communicates more quickly, effectively, and looks pretty too. Even though data visualization is interesting, randomness and noise seem more interesting (at least […]
There’s a strong relationship between how we act, think, and perceive the world. The past few weeks I’ve been thinking about the difference between practitioners and theorists. Note: The idea of practitioners and theorists isn’t some proven thing. This is just Dan making up theories that seem reasonable enough. The definition of a practitioner is […]
Do you ever think about how the things you saw and experienced growing up shape the way you see the world today? I grew up surrounded by different types of art and one of the significant pieces was a large metal sun. The sun is around 4 feet across and made with some type of […]
I’ve never been particularly interested in drawing pictures of real things. For whatever reason, attempting to mirror reality feels stifling and stressful. I prefer Abstract Art because it evolves organically and provides a way to see things differently. Abstract art frequently develops without a specific destination. You might start of with a direction, idea, or […]
Generative art is frequently an iterative process. I might start out with an idea of where I’m going, but that idea acts more as a direction than a destination. Moving in some direction leads to unexpected outcomes. It’s easy to develop a number of different ideas on the way to arriving at the original one. […]
One of the more interesting aspects of generative art is creating and managing randomness. We tend to have an intuitive understanding of randomness, but magnitude and type impact the nature of it. The parallels with life are notable . . . The computer is a simple thing and when you ask it to generate a […]
This week we’ll continue the historical look back at early Generative Art. 10 Print is a well known example of generative art that was first produced in 1982. It was created with a single line of BASIC code and simply displays back and forward slashes like \ or / in a random order. As the […]