It is a commonplace among artists and children at play that they're not aware of time or solitude while they're chasing their vision. The hours fly. - Steven Pressfield

I’ve been reading the book “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield and found several quotes that have resonated with me over the last year. Specifically when it comes to knowing how to continue. Creativity and its call can be such a driving force….

Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.

But several opportunities come up, and they all start coming together and finding themselves in a crux.

Many pedestrians have been maimed or killed at the intersection of Resistance and Commerce.

Especially when you are so close to finishing some projects and then having to take them across the finish line…

The danger is greatest when the finish line is in sight. At this point, Resistance knows we're about to beat it. It hits the panic button. It marshals one last assault and slams us with everything it's got.

But the worst thing about putting art there is this resistance.

Resistance is not out to get you personally. It doesn't know who you are and doesn't care. Resistance is a force of nature. It acts objectively. Though it feels malevolent, Resistance in fact operates with the indifference of rain and transits the heavens by the same laws as the stars. When we marshal our forces to combat Resistance, we must remember this.

Much of his writing has been helpful to take in chunks this week and think about, and these have been helpful to reframe my thoughts as an artist.

I hope you all can glean something from these thoughts as I have.

Have a wonderful week!

Chris Ried

P.S.

A few inspirations from the week:

If you haven’t seen the work of Anna Lucia, here is just an excellent piece that is simple yet complicated as she continues to follow her passion for textiles

Anna Lucia @annaluciacodes

Just starting my morning ☕️

You can check out his work here…

zach lieberman @zachlieberman

watercolor landscape

And as always, particularly of late - Zach Liebermann’s work has been so intricately laced… it’s crazy.

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🖌️ Unconventional Media

Serendipitous Circles Explored

In “Serendipitous Cirlces” by D J Anderson and W F Galway a simple algorithm for generating computer art was described. The algorithm basically consists of computing a series of (X,Y) pair and displaying them on a graphics device.

Between Poetry and Painting

The work presented in this exhibition crosses the frontier between two quite clearly defined fields of creative activity - poetry and painting. There may be no single accurate definition of this hybrid form of expression - one thing is quite clear, nevertheless - visual poetry is its various forms constitutes the first international poetry movement.

The book was written/compiled by Jasia Reichardt, and the book is such an inspirational piece to browse and even think about putting together.

📰 Technical

The uniqueness of the infinite cluster is known for the d-dimenional lattice since the works of Aizenman, Kesten and Newman - [Uniqueness of the infinite cluster and continuity of connectivity functions for short and long range percolation (1987)] and Burton and Keane - [Density and uniqueness in percolation (1989)]. It does not hold in general: when the graph in question is a regular tree for example, there are always infinitely many clusters during the supercritical phase.

🤖AI Art / Techniques

CLIP-based Neural Neighbor Style Transfer for 3D Assets

We present a method for transferring the style from a set of images to a 3D object. The texture appearance of an asset is optimized with a differentiable renderer in a pipeline based on losses using pretrained deep neural networks. More specifically, we utilize a nearest-neighbor feature matching loss with CLIP-ResNet50 to extract the style from images. We show that a CLIP based style loss provides a different appearance over a VGG-based loss by focusing more on texture over geometric shapes. Additionally, we extend the loss to support multiple images and enable loss-based control over the color palette combined with automatic color palette extraction from style images.

Diffusion Bee - Stable Diffusion GUI App for M1 Mac

Diffusion Bee is the easiest way to run Stable Diffusion locally on your M1 Mac. Comes with a one-click installer. No dependencies or technical knowledge needed.

Suppose you haven’t had the opportunity on Midjourney or DALLE2 and want to try it on your machine without having to do all the “coding” setups here. This Diffusion Bee UI was an easy way to try it out. The above images all came from my local implementation!

🎼Generative Music

Unfortunately, you will need to have PhasePlant do the following. However, as I love sound design and music generation, Dash Glitch does a fine job explaining how he uses PhasePlant to create generative music. Pro Tip: The remap plugin is an essential function in generative art.

🚤 Tools

Fragment

The new tool Fragment is an IDE for creative coding created by Raphaël Améaume. It has similar features to Matt Deslaurier’s canvas-sketch however does have a dedicated view for things such as adjustable parameters, It’s currently in alpha, meaning the developer is actively developing the tool, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check it out!

📚Books

If you ever need to look at other books, I do keep a Github page of generative books here.

Please send me your inspiration...

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Generative Arts / Creative Coding Weekly

The "War of Art" and Painting Poetry