Gorilla Recap 4

Hey everyone 👋 and hello to all new subscribers that joined since last week! Thanks for signing up and joining along for the ride! This is the weekly newsletter, in which I recap everything noteworthy from the past week. Hope you have a good stay!

This week a post by Bjørn Staal made the rounds on Twitter:

To some extent I can sympathize with Bjørn's argument, it does feel like there's less educative material going around. This is just a sentiment however - plenty of coders are still creating and sharing resources on a regular basis. There's just been so many new things over the past 2 years, that the educative type of material has been drowned out by the noise.

NFTs did have a profound and transformative effect on the generative art scene. On the one hand, it made monetization easier than ever, encouraging coders to hanker down, work on their projects and focus more on the producing new works. On the flip-side, it did impact the open source culture in a negative way, where bad actors would simply rip sketches from OpenProcessing or the online P5 editor, and mint them for a quick buck. The space has matured quite a bit however; it's become much more difficult to sell a random piece if there's no cred it.

The community also quickly chimed in, providing many counterexamples to the claim and explanations why this sentiment might have grown stronger recently:

Piter sums it up pretty accurately: it's that the scene got much larger, maybe that's why there's a perceivable dip in the educative resources to people in the space ratio. I think it's on the upswing again though - been seeing a lot more educative material again lately.

And speaking of resources, I gotchu covered 👇

Gorilla Articles

Recreating Vera Molnar's Homage to Paul Klee

After diving deep into the life of Vera Molnar two weeks ago I couldn't resist trying to recreate one of her iconic works, her Homage to Paul Klee. While researching the piece I cam across a recode by Golan Levin that takes an interesting approach to the piece:

Recreating Vera Molnár’s Homage to Paul Klee

In this tutorial we’ll recreate Vera Molnar’s homage to Paul Klee. We learn how to draw patches of slanted lines to the canvas, a strategy for enumerating all possible combinations, and at the same time have a look at a recode from Golan Levin.

Gorilla SunAhmad Moussa

I also took a stab at recreating the analogue version of the sketch:

A closer look at EditART

During the weekend I published a feature piece about EditART, a young and independently run NFT platform on Tezos, that's been taking off over the past couple of weeks. I believe that it's important to spread the word about these platforms as they encourage a more diverse eco-system. We also asked it's creator Piero a couple of questions:

All Eyes on EditART - Interview with Piero

In this post we have a look at EditART, a hip new platform on the Tezos blockchain that revolves around customisable generate NFTs. We also ask it’s creator, Piero, a couple of questions to wrap it up.

Gorilla SunAhmad Moussa

Gorilla Sketches

I resumed work on this sketch of mine, refactored the code a little bit and added some details - it should soon be ready for FxHash:

Interesting Reads

Generative Art Is Stupid

This article by Ian Bogost caught my eye, in it he discusses the difference between generative systems and the new wave of everything generators, and why there's still a lot of merit to creating systems for specific purposes:

When you type something into ChatGPT or DALL-E 2, it’s like throwing a coin into a wishing well and pulling the bucket back up to find a pile of kelp, or a puppy, in its place.

Generative Art Is Stupid

And that’s how it should be.

The AtlanticIan Bogost

Artists enable AI art - shouldn't they be compensated?

The Gradient is one of my favorite sites for thought provoking articles on AI topics. In this post Devansh Lnu goes into the nitty gritty of how large companies acquire datasets for their models, as well as the ethics behind the process:

Artists enable AI art - shouldn’t they be compensated?

The debate around artist compensation in AI art, and some possible solutions to the problem

The GradientDevansh Lnu

Generative Quiltmaking

Anna Lucia has worked on a new generative piece that is based on the Gee's Bend quiltmakers practice:

All about them Convolutions

An informative post by kynd on convolutions and how they work:

Tip of the Week

Want to add GIF export to your Javascript or P5 sketches? Check out Matt DesLauriers' gifenc library:

GitHub - mattdesl/gifenc: fast GIF encoding

fast GIF encoding. Contribute to mattdesl/gifenc development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHubmattdesl

Alternatively you can use the new saveGIF() function that has been added to P5 not so long ago by Jesús Rascón - and uses gifenc under the hood!

Music for Coding

And the YouTube recommendation algo keeps delivering with awesome music, this week I particularly enjoyed the album Tomorrow is nearly yesterday and everyday is stupid by Crywank - and I genuinely can't decide what I like more, the title or the cover artwork:

And that's it again for this week's recap! See you next week ~ Gorilla Sun