Living Tapestry

I rather like the concept behind this series of videos by Paul Soulos. They use image style transfer, but instead of using a photo as the content target, they use Conway’s Game of Life to drive it.

Paul Soulos has written a blog post about it. I like the discussion of using constraints as part of the design process–I think that thinking about constraints is an important part of learning to use generative methods.

A lot of artistic training is about learning what the constraints of a medium are, how to work with them, and how to overcome them. With generative tools we take that one step further: these magic paintbrushes can themselves be modified. Now we get to explore a meta-space, a space of all the images that could be produced with all the different kinds of paintbrushes. This meta-space has constraints of its own–and, on top of that, successful generative design often requires even further constraints, but this time constraints that harmonize with the goals of the generator.

You’re perhaps familiar with negative space–the empty void around an image, often just as important to the composition as the image itself.

Generators have a kind of mathematical, virtual negative space of their own, the possibility space that lies outside what it can output. This negative space often speaks loudly about what the generator is–what it could produce but chooses not to.

One of the points of the Library of Babel is that generation without constraints is infinitely everything and nothing. Each book contains every other book, if you only knew the correct cipher to translate it. Generation without constraints is endless, formless babble. You need negative space to give it structure and order.

Living Tapestry - The Scream from Paul Soulos on Vimeo.