Welcome back everyone 👋 and a heartfelt thank you to all new subscribers who joined in the past week!
This is the 81st issue of the Gorilla Newsletter - a weekly online publication that sums up everything noteworthy from the past week in generative art, creative coding, tech, and AI.
If it's your first time here, we've also got a discord server now, where we nerd out about all sorts of genart and tech things - if you want to connect with other readers of the newsletter, come and say hi: here's an invite link!
Before we get into the news this week, I want to use the small reach I have with the newsletter to share the current DMCA situation that OpenProcessing is facing.
Roughly a month ago Sinan from OpenProcessing received a take down notice from ARS—short for the Artists Rights Society, that describes itself as the preeminent copyright, licensing, and monitoring organization for visual artists in the US.
Currently it appears they are also protecting Vera Molnár's work, which was the cause for the take-down notice that Sinan that runs OP received; it's no surprise that her work is a big inspiration to many in the creative coding scene, myself included.
It's a bit of an absurd situation overall, I'm certain that Molnár herself would have celebrated these works rather than have them taken down. It's unclear at this point if much can be done to have this notice retracted, from an update Sinan posted it seems that it was not possible to prevent it.
That said, hope that you're all having a good start into the new week! Here's your weekly roundup 👇
All the Generative Things
1 — Genuary 2025 Page is Up 🔗: and as always, Piter has outdone himself with the animated banner, this time the headline seamlessly emerges from a tessellated and shattered polygonal region that iteratively fills in the canvas.
And just like in previous years, Piter shares the code for us to learn from. The prompts are not yet finalized, but I can definitely say that I'm already waiting for them with great anticipation. At this point my daily coding chops are quite rusty, and from what it looks like right now, the start of 2025 is going to be quite loaded in terms of work—so I'm not entirely certain if I'll be able to manage the dailies this year! How are you feeling about it?
2 — Finding Knots in the Menger Sponge 🪢: Back in 2021 Malors Espinosa and three of his high school students managed to make a significant breakthrough in mathematics by revisiting a century-old theorem. They proved that all knots can be found within a fractal called the Menger sponge.
In mathematics, a knot is a closed loop in 3D space, like a piece of string twisted and tangled, with its ends joined so it has no breaks or loose ends. Knots can have intricate shapes but are defined by their ability to loop back to the starting point without intersecting themselves. They are studied to understand properties like how they can be untangled or represented.
The Menger sponge on the other hand is a fractal, a shape made by repeating a simple process infinitely. Starting with a cube, you divide it into 27 smaller cubes (like a Rubik’s cube), remove the middle cube, and also the middle cube of each face. This leaves 20 smaller cubes. Repeating this process infinitely creates a sponge-like structure with exponentially increasing pores, giving it counterintuitively paradoxical properties: its volume shrinks to zero, but its surface area grows infinitely.
After Karl Menger had come up with the fractal, he proved in 1926 that the sponge could in fact contain any conceivable curve, like lines, circles, or tree-like structures. Meaning that these curves could follow the sponge’s intricate contours without breaking or intersecting themselves. For this reason, Menger called the sponge a “universal curve.” However, at the time he didn’t consider more complex objects like knots—tangled loops equivalent to a circle in that they have no loose ends and always return to their starting point.
This is basically what Malors Espinosa explored with his students, asking if the sponge could contain all possible knots, while keeping their twists and loops intact. Meaning that the knots could exist fully within the sponge’s structure without falling into its empty holes. The students succeeded ultimately succeeded at this, and extended Menger’s original theorem; in the aftermath their work was praised for revealing a new relationship between knots and fractals.
Gregory Barber
Yet again, it's none other than Dave Whyte that made the animated banner for the article.
3 — Electric Dreams: How Artists Pioneered Tech Art Before the Internet 🔌💭: a new exhibition at Tate Modern celebrates the early innovators of optical, kinetic, programmed, and digital art between the 1950s and the early 1990s, and offers a rare opportunity to experience vintage tech art in action. The exhibition showcases the artists who experimented with early home computing systems to mediate machine-made art and that imagined the visual language of the future.
Of course also make sure to check out Le Random's interview with Suzanne Treister, one of the artists featured in Electric Dreams.
4 — The Women Who Pioneered Early Computer Art 💻: a new ArtNet article shines a light on six of the unsung early heroes that paved the way for the computer art of today, and that contributed meaningfully to the field in the 1960s and 70s.
5 — Anna Lucia's talk at Responsive Dreams 🧣: I was happy to see that Anna Lucia's talk at the Responsive Dreams festival was actually recorded and uploaded to YouTube. It's a great intro to her work, what inspires her generative art, and her most recent series Oefenstof, also giving an overview of some of the projects that she's tackled over the past couple of years.
She explains that she draws inspiration from traditional crafts like weaving, quilting, and embroidery, and explores how these physical practices can be translated into an algorithmic form. Anna describes her process as iterative and playful, balancing between structure and randomness when refining her ideas and embracing unexpected outcomes when they occur.
Moreover she sees her work as a bridge between the digital and the physical, and as means to highlight and honor the historical and cultural significance of textiles, simultaneously experimenting with modern computational tools—that share many properties to
6 — How to make Sub-Pixel Art 🟥🟩🟦: In a recent video Japhy Riddle shows us how to make sub-pixel art—a thing that admittedly isn't really a notion outside of his video. Japhy shows that it's possible to turn on and off the individual color channels of pixels, and in this manner hacking the screen's resolution to be larger than it technically is. Japhy also demonstrates how to achieve this with photoshop.
Tech & Web Dev
1 — Designing a New Web Performance Score for Fair and Meaningful Comparisons 🌐: web performance consultant Harry Roberts designed a new web performance scoring system to simplify competitor analysis for clients and stakeholders. Recognizing the limitations of Core Web Vitals for direct comparisons across websites, he sought a way to create a single, comparative score that respects both the thresholds (e.g., Good, Needs Improvement, Poor) and the continuity of metrics.
The new scoring system, called CrRRUX, simplifies web performance evaluations into a single number while balancing simplicity and fairness. It achieves this by normalizing Core Web Vitals metrics to a comparable scale, aggregating them, and incorporating thresholds and passingness for a more representative view. The method enables intuitive and accurate cross-site performance comparisons, making it useful for both technical and non-technical audiences.
Harry Roberts
2 — Bluesky sees massive influx of new users:— t̶o̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶a̶r̶g̶e̶ ̶e̶x̶t̶e̶n̶t̶ mainly due to the political events that transpired earlier this month. This sudden growth has forced the platform to drastically increase their moderation team, they address this in a massive post of theirs.
3 — How to Host Websites on Bluesky 🌐: turns out that the decentralised protocol that Bluesky is built on, namely the AT protocol, allows for creative use cases, such as hosting a simple website. Daniel Magnum reports on how he hacked the protocol for this purpose in an article of his.
Bluesky primarily uses two data types: records (structured data like posts) and blobs (unstructured files like images or HTML pages). While blobs are typically hidden unless linked to records, Daniel managed to upload and make a webpage accessible by creating a custom record type, bypassing the usual constraints of Bluesky’s system.
4 — Paul Butler's Treeverse, a Bluesky Conversation Viewer 🌳: another cool Bluesky thing I came across, from 2014-2023, Treeverse was a bookmarklet and later Chrome/Firefox extension for visualizing Twitter conversations as exploded tree views. That version was killed by changes to Twitter's API, Paul Butler has however revamped the tool since and made it to work with the Bluesky API.
5 — Art Blocks on On-Chain Preservation for Genart 🎨: for the occasion of Art Blocks' 4 year anniversary, they made a big announcement that now 90% of projects across its ecosystem can be fully generated from the blockchain—simply using a web browser. While projects were already on chain previously, supporting scripts, and external assets/libraries still had to be hosted off-chain. This has now been amended, simultaneously being open sourced, and marking a step forward in genart preservation.
6 — Botto: Redefining the Concept of Art through AI, Token Networks, and Community Governance 🤖: In a recent analysis, the crypto investment firm 1kx, shares why Botto is one of the most important digital art projects of the past decade and explains its facets in detail, from an investment POV. Botto is a conception by Mario Klingemann (Quasimondo), and to put it mildly, has made a splash in the art world over the past couple of years.
Botto combines AI, blockchain technology, and community governance to not just power a decentralized autonomous artist (DAA), but essentially to create a sustainable and autonomous artistic entity. It essentially emerges as a community driven entity that's challenging traditional notions of artist-hood, and introduces a new blockchain paradigm that mediates a form of multiplayer creativity.
7 — David Aerne's CSS Color Shooter 🔫: our favorite color hacker shared an old CSS experiment where mouse clicks shoot out colorful splatters across the canvas. By popular demand he shares a codepen with the code that makes it happen.
AI Corner
1 — Evolving an AI worm for 1000 years 🪱: cozmouz's YouTube channel revolves in its entirety around training AI agents to perform different tasks, such as outrun the police, do parkour, or spar in boxing matches. In a recent video that went quite viral, he evolved an worm-like creature to seek and move towards a target in its vicinity.
At some point I'd like to try and recreate one of these experiments—these videos always make it look so fun an easy— famous last words... 😄
2 — On not using Copilot 🧑✈️: Tom MacWright questions if our AI powered coding assistants truly lead to productivity gains or just shift the dynamics of labor. Are they actually saving us time, or are we simply doing a different kind of work? And from my own experience this thought resonates with me; overall my sentiment is that writing code via an AI assistant just becomes a different kind of programming.
Music for Coding
Guys, it's happened... AI won. The playlist I shared last week was actually AI generated—and I absolutely didn't notice 😅 let's amend that this week (not that I mind AI music, but prefer featuring artists in the flesh).
This week I enjoyed the second album from Colorado based folk/alt-rock band Richy Mitch & The Coal Miners, where the YouTube version comes with an exclusive track on no other streaming service as the description states! At 18k views this album is heavily underrated, it's easily one of the best things I've listened to in the past couple of months after sifting through more than a couple dozen albums:
And that's it from me—hope you've enjoyed this week's curated assortment of genart and tech shenanigans! Oh and btw, before I forget it, here's the official article that Trilitech posted over on the official Tezos website about the workshop—it's an absolute honor to be featured on there.
Tezos
Now that you find yourself at the end of this Newsletter, consider forwarding it to some of your friends, or sharing it on the world wide webs - more subscribers means that I get more internet points, which in turn allows me to do more internet things!
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And if you've read this far, thanks a million! If you're still hungry for more generative art things, you can check out last week's issue of the newsletter here:
Ahmad Moussa
And a backlog of all previous issues can be found here:
Cheers, happy coding, and again, hope that you have a fantastic week! See you in the next one!
~ Gorilla Sun 🌸