I saw the post earlier about making maps using Python. I thought that was a really cool concept as I love seeing open art projects like that. Do you know any other projects that allow you to make art with code?
Ah, the real generative art, before ‘AI generative “art”’
You should look into shader art. Basically “drawing” using code that runs purely inside GPU. Which reminds me I recently found an artist that does this with code that fit within Twitter character limit. Sadly I can not remember the name rn.
Edit: the artist I was thinking of is XorDev
Any recommendations on what languages/libraries to use for that?
GLSL. Start here.
Even if you don’t intend to learn to write shaders, this has a very approachable and fun explanation on how everything works.
In case you weren’t aware, there is actually a whole mastodon instance dedicated to this subject! Take a look at https://genart.social/tags/genuary2026 for some recent examples. Many posters include details of what software they are using or links to their code
Processing and its descendants, p5.js, p5.py. Nannou for Rust.
vpype is a really powerful python library/toolkit for generating art for plotters (drawing robots).
Blender with python scripting is also widely used.
Some relevant keywords: “procedural art”, “generative art” (generative AI is kinda killing this one), “creative coding”, “algorithmic art”, “plotter art”, “pen plotter”, “live coding” (for music with code)
The fediverse (mostly mastodon) has a decent presence of artists, usually tagging works with some of the above keywords.
That sounds like some great places to start, much appreciated!
Also, these are more targeted at beginners to programming, but Daniel Shiffman has a youtube channel and a free book about creative coding with p5 (The Nature of Code) that is very good. Depending on your background, it may contain a lot of remedial material, but there’s some really great ideas on how to think about designing dynamic systems that make cool images and interactive art in there, especially in the later chapters if you skip around.
I’m usually programming, but I’ve got a few bits and pieces that can be shared:
- Weird blobs
- made while offline on a plane, uploaded later
- https://codepen.io/spartanatreyu/pen/mydyrea
- Cellular automata experiment
- A classic for anyone exploring creative coding
- https://codepen.io/spartanatreyu/pen/ExEqmaJ
- CSS-only mosaic pattern
- Was exploring how different browser engines render the same instructions differently, ended up with this. Changing the zoom also affects the visual
- https://codepen.io/spartanatreyu/pen/Yzbmvbr
- Fixed grain noise texture overlay on animated elements
- Was experimenting with a textured shadow effect inspired by the music video Lorn - Anvil
- https://codepen.io/spartanatreyu/pen/qBKBgPN
- CSS/SVG water color text effect
- A friend wanted a water color effect on a website, I knew that a simple SVG shader could do it and came up with this as an example for them that they could customise later. For those who don’t know SVGs were originally intended to be a shader language. Plus by using an SVG as a shader instead of canvas, the text is treated as text (selectable, accessible, etc…)
- https://codepen.io/spartanatreyu/pen/xggjWz
- An animated background experiment
The rest are too experimental, or are released commercial projects.
- Weird blobs
During covid I tried out processing with python, I threw my code up on github: https://github.com/GammaGames/processing
Random rainbow with a gamma that I sometimes use for my banner:
Some blossoms I got from unsplash:
I also made a “procedurally generated ruleset” mostly so I could use a generated texture pack from 2019, but also because I wanted to mess with yaml. It runs in the browser, kinda!
I personally enjoy playing around with fractals - I’ve built several fractal rendering programs (this is the latest), and they are quite fun to play around with. While they are more art from math than art from code, there are a lot of creative things you can do in code to visualize different features of fractals - Inigo Quiles has great examples of this, as well as non-fractal procedural art such as SDFs.
I made a sorting algorithm visualizer.
https://sciactive.github.io/libsortjs/demo/
It’s not really any different than a lot of other sorting algorithm visualizers. It has some additional features, like different visualizations, but it doesn’t have sound.
I didn’t do it to make something better though, I did it to make it myself. I wanted to implement all of those sorting algorithms myself, which was very fun.
I don’t know if you consider that art, but I think it can be beautiful, so maybe.
(Btw, it will happily crash your browser if you try to sort an enormous list using a really inefficient algorithm, so be careful.)
I get wanting to just do it yourself. That’s part of why I asked the question because I want to be able to design my own algorithmic art pieces.
I haven’t used it myself, but you might want to check out Processing.
I would recommend Julia. I switched to Julia from Python because (IMO) it’s much faster and has better libraries.
For example, when I made videos with Python, I would have to save images and then convert to video with ffmpeg. But Julia has a library to generate videos on the fly without saving images. This is massively faster. They might have a library like this for Python now, but I’m not going back.
I don’t want to post any of my work because of anonymity, but it’s mostly animations of fractals, dynamic systems, etc.
Are there any libraries in Julia that you’d recommend?
Does writing SVGs by hand count?
Have you actually done that???
A couple times. Also modified some in text format. Not as an everyday activity, though.
