I’ve been thinking a lot about “art” recently. Specifically, what people call “generative art”, “algorithmic art”, “code art”, “math art”, etc. Here are some random thoughts.

Message

I’ve never been one to try to communicate some message through the things I create. I really only try to create things that are visually interesting. I can get very excited about the way a piece looks and I just want to show others and hope that they get a taste of that excitement too. Sometimes things I create can evoke various emotions – they can look ominous, dark, scary, energetic, fun, etc. I often find that when I feel a certain way about a piece, others tend to experience that same feeling. I guess you could call that a message if you want. But I don’t know that I’ve ever sat down to create some digital art with the thought, “I feel like creating something dark and ominous today,” or intentionally tried to create any emotion before I started.

Discovery

For me, creating art with code is way more about discovery. I play around with some technique, or combine one technique with another dis-related technique just to see what happens. Then I see something interesting and I zoom in on it. Sometimes this means literally zooming into some detail in an image. More often it means focusing on some combination of parameters that have created a particular result. There’s a promise of something even more interesting there. I start tweaking numbers to see if I can bring out more of that something. I increment a parameter a few times and that thing I saw goes away. So I decrement it and maybe that thing becomes bigger, or more clear, or more detailed. It’s more like mining than creating.

Math

I love math, or “maths” if that’s how you think of it. I love finding some new interesting formula. I subscribe to recreational math blogs, YouTube channels, Twitter feeds. I go to the math section of bookstores and libraries. I scroll through Wolfram and Wikipedia looking for new ideas. Old copies of Scientific American, Omni, Quantum and other math and science magazines. I get sucked in by anything that has a graph or an interesting diagram. It’s got to be visual. For me, math is the ultimate creative tool. It’s the canvas, it’s the paint, it’s the brush. Really, it’s the artist. All the images are already there. I’m just carefully extracting a few of them out of the sea of numbers. If I have to have a message in my art it’s “Look how amazing math is.”

Random

Random is evil. Random is lazy. Random is OK when you’re starting a new piece. It’s OK when you have a formula and you’re searching for an interesting range of input parameters. But once you find something interesting, lock in those parameters and start focusing. My code framework is set up to allow me to easily create animations by changing parameters over each of many frames. Sometimes I’ll generate several hundred frames all with random parameters. I’ll print the parameters right on the piece. Then I’ll sift through the frames one by one and find those that have something I like. I’ll grab those parameters and hard code them and start tweaking them as described above. But random should come at the start, not at the end. I never continue to use random parameters to generate a finished piece. I’m totally lying. I do it often enough. But I feel lazy when I do it.

Technology

People often ask me what technology I used to create my images. I think they expect that I’m using some app or framework that has all these kinds of image generation tools built into it. I don’t. I write mostly in Go (Golang). I have some custom Go bindings for the C library, cairographics. Cairo is a pretty powerful drawing API, but that’s all it is – it draws lines and arcs curves and rectangles, sets colors, etc. Nearly identical in most important ways to the HTML Canvas drawing API. That’s all I need – those 2D drawing primitives. I have a framework of my own that I’ve built up over many years that does all the complex fancy stuff. But it’s all based on those 2d primitive drawing actions.

Color

I love monochrome. Black and white. I love to be able to bring out form and emotion just by the relative brightness of black and white pixels. Sometimes I’ll experiment with color. I have a random RGB function that makes me feel guilty when I use it. I like using HSV colors better. You can create nice gradients. You can keep one hue and vary the saturation or value. You can create a range of colors with a similar hue. I’d like to take a deep dive into learning color theory some time. But I’m very comfortable with black and white.

Combination

One of my best techniques is a meta-technique. I mentioned it above. Every time I learn some new technique or formula, I do a mash up with that and some other technique I already know. I know I’ve talked about that in other posts in more detail. It’s the best way to discover something that has a chance of the elusive “nobody has done this before”.

Dislikes

• AI/ML/GAN stuff. It just does nothing for me. To me it just looks like Photoshop filters on steroids. I know there’s a lot of impressive stuff going on behind the scenes, but the result is not interesting to me.
• Glitch art. I think this is due to the fact that I grew up in the 60s and 70s and 80s. Everything was glitchy. I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now. I like that things are not glitchy now. I like that I turn on the TV and see a clear picture without bending the coat hanger stuck in the back into some new shape.
• 3D. By this I mean slick, realistic 3D stuff done in professional 3D rendering packages. I like occasionally hand-coding lofi 3D stuff.
• Shaders. In either 2D or 3D. I probably should like shaders. You can do some impressive math-based stuff with them. I’ve used them. I even written about them and touched on them in some videos, but they never stuck as something I wanted to continue working with.

OK, now here’s where you’re going to say, “You should check out _____ (AI/Glitch/3D/Shader thing).” And I’ll say, “Thanks, that looks cool. Maybe I’ll check it out.” But I never will. But really, thanks! I appreciate your enthusiasm. I’m not saying any of these things are inherently bad. Just sharing my tastes.

Not a big fan of music streaming.

I have a good size, custom curated, very well organized library of music on my hard drive. It’s taken me years to create, it’s all backed up. I have a subsonic server behind Wireguard so I can listen to it from my phone or other devices, and it’s all also synced to my Sony Walkman NW-A55 hi-res digital audio player that I use with my Ikko OH1 IEMs.

I’m really very satisfied with this setup.

But still, I find myself not being able to decide what to listen to way too often. The paradox of choice. Fairly often I’ll just throw the whole thing, or maybe some specific genre on shuffle, and that’s pretty good. But I also like listening to albums. When I’m just choosing an album myself, I’ll gravitate to the same few dozen or so artists. Other stuff might go months or years without being listened to.

I think my devices and software let me shuffle albums, but I wanted to create a long range plan to get to all of it over time. Here’s what I did:

1. Printed out a list of all artists. Literally just went to the terminal and did an ls in my music folder, directing it to a file.
2. Pulled that file into a Google spreadsheet, one artist per line.
3. Shuffled them.

Now I’m just working down the list. I just grab the next artist in the list and choose an album and start playing.

If I’m not feeling the vibe with that particular artist or album, I just move on. But I try to listen to at least one or two songs anyway.

When I move on to the next artist, I mark the previous one as done.

Here’s what’s on my playlist for today:

• Ministry
• Van Morrison
• Harry Nillson
• The White Stripes
• John Lee Hooker

I’ve really been enjoying this strategy. Been listening to music that I haven’t in a long time, not just the same albums over and over. And it’s all content that I’ve chosen to put in my library, so it’s all artists I generally like to some degree. And sometimes get totally different genres up against each other, which is fun.

This is going to take months to go through, but it’s been keeping things fresh.

In my last post I talked about my newest eInk tablets from Onyx Boox. Beyond reading ebooks and saving articles, the Note Air is a fantastic sketching tool. The Wacom layer and stylus is one of the big features that led me to look beyond Kindle devices. It was nice on the 7.8″ Nova Pro, but on the 10.3″ Note Air, I’ve really fallen in love with the drawing feature.

Preliminary Pen Points

The Note Air comes with a stylus that attaches to the side of the device via a magnet. All I can say is that it makes a good backup stylus.

Issues with the stylus:

1. The magnet is not strong enough to trust, so you wind up having to figure out your own way to keeping track of the stylus. Because it WILL fall off and get lost.
2. The stylus does not have an eraser feature. some styluses put an eraser function in the top of the stylus, where you’d find an eraser on a regular pencil. Others add a button that switches the stylus into erase mode. The default Note Air stylus does neither. So when you want to erase something, you have to choose the eraser tool from the tool bar, erase, then re-choose the drawing tool you were drawing with.

I wound up getting a Wacom One stylus.

It looks nice, feels nice, has an eraser button, and doesn’t break the bank.

I read a lot of reviews about the Remarkable 2 Marker stylus that is made for the Remarkable 2 eInk tablet. It’s apparently really good, but pretty pricey. It does work on the Boox devices. Maybe I’ll spring for one some day, but I’m happy with the Wacom One for now. One of the pros of the Remarkable stylus is that the tips are made of a different substance than a lot of other styluses, which gives it a good amount of drag and makes it feel like a regular pen, rather than sliding a piece of plastic across glass. Remarkable sells replacement tips, which fit the Wacom One, so I got a set of them, and I can attest it does add to the experience.

To hold the pen when I’m not using it, I got some of these Ringke pen holders.

These just stick to the cover and have an elastic loop. Been working out perfectly.

Seriously Sketching Stuff

Now onto the sketching functionality of the device. The built-in notes app is where you do the sketching and it’s one of the main apps on the Note Air. This is what it looks like:

You can name your notes, organize them in folders, rename them, view them as a list or thumbnails, etc.

Notes can have multiple pages. You can see above the Notepad1(1) has a little “6” in the corner. This means that this note has 6 pages. While in the note, you can choose to see an overview of all of the pages.

You can delete, add, rearrange, export, and share pages here.

There are multiple sketch tools you can use:

I most often just use the default pen tool. All of the tools allow you to adjust their width. All but the ballpoint pen and marker are also pressure sensitive. You can change colors – various shades of gray mostly, but also a few real colors. Though you won’t be able to see these on a black and white eInk device until you export the note.

There’s all the usual other tooling, if all a bit basic. A few basic shapes, several different kinds of erasers, lasso tool for selecting and moving parts of your sketch, zoom, text, handwriting recognition.

It even has layers, which is pretty damn cool.

You can add layers, rearrange them, hide them, delete them. The bottom layer is a background template. It can be blank, our you can set it to just about anything. Above you can see a basic grid template. There are a bunch built in:

Three pages worth, for drawing, writing, penmanship, accounting, whatever. There are also ones you can download from the Boox cloud:

And you can add your own, just by putting the into the right folder on the device. Just do an internet search for PDF graph paper or pdf templates and you’ll find all kinds of useful stuff. Or you can just create any PDF you want and put it in there. Here are some I added:

You can turn the template’s visibility on and off from the layers tool, which is really quite nice.

On for drawing:

And then off:

I’m constantly using this to figure out stuff that I want to code. I have pages and pages of sketches like this. Most are just brainstorming or figuring out the math about something.

The touch layer of the device is totally separate from the Wacom drawing layer, so there’s no need to worry about putting your hand on the device as you’re drawing. When you want a new page in a particular sketch, just swipe with your finger, right to left, and you’re on a new page. Go back and forth to existing pages by swiping right or left.

You can set up notes to automatically sync to the cloud, using Onyx’s own cloud sync, Youdao (a Chinese service), Evernote, Dropbox and/or OneNote. Synced notes are available in the cloud as PDFs, but you can also export them as PNGs.

I always have the Note Air nearby when I’m doing some creative coding, so it’s easy to just grab it and work out some idea. I just create note after note, page after page. Space is no worry. They’re backed up and easily available on Dropbox, not floating around on pieced of dead tree pulp.

While the sketch/notes app is probably not something you’re going to create amazing art with, it’s super useful for sketching and notes. I also use it to take notes in meetings and interviews. Very nice for that.

I have to give a warning though. While the built-in notes app is super responsive and a joy to use, the Wacom layer is not optimized for third party drawing, sketching or note-taking applications on the web or Android apps. It will be a bad experience using apps like that. It would be nice if that got fixed, but not holding my breath. I did see where someone has put together their own libraries that make the experience much better in third party apps, but I have not tried it myself.

[Update 01/01/22]

The latest firmware for the Boox tablets has apparently improved the third party app sketching functionality. At least for popular apps like Evernote. I’ve not tried it out myself. Pretty happy with the internal note app.

TWENTY

DAMN

YEARS

September 11, 2001 is quite a memorable day for the obvious reasons. But for me, it holds an additional significance. Because on September 10, 2001 I registered the domain bit-101.com and on the morning of September 11 the first version of the site went live, only to be massively overshadowed by other events just a couple of hours later.

Initially the site was a single page with a Flash application containing a calendar that linked to various interactive experimental pieces. I’d started doing the experiments in late August, so I was able to launch BIT-101 with fourteen experiments. It ultimately grew to over 600.

This was the previous site that was retired on 9/11/01, also fully Flash:

That KP logo came in with a really cool animation and there was a funky 5-second free music loop that I snagged off of FlashKit, which got really annoying after roughly 10 seconds.

A later version of BIT-101:

Yeah, I liked the Papyrus font back then. Also… what are lower case letters? All those sections were draggable and closable windows. Peak 2002 “web design”.

BIT-101 lasted in this general form, with various interface changes up until the end of 2005. There were many months I posted something new every day. Towards the end, it got a bit slower.

While all this was going on, near the end of 2003, I started the first BIT-101 blog. I say the “first” one because in late 2017 I did a blog reboot, to the new blog that you are reading here. The old one had a good 14 year run though. And is immortalized here: http://www.bit-101.com/old/. Amazing to think that the blog reboot is now almost 4 years old, which is about as long as the first old Flash site lasted. Time keeps moving faster.

Changes

Things sure have changed since that first site 20 years ago. Back then it was all about Flash for me. I was not working full time as a programmer, but I had a steady flow of side jobs doing Flash work. I’d written a few Flash tutorials on the KP Web Design site and those had done really well. In fact it led me to contributing to my first book, Flash Math Creativity.

This led to many more books, mostly with Friends of ED and Apress, but also OReilly.

In 2003 I was invited to FlashForward in NYC where I was a finalist for their Flash awards ceremony in the Experimental category. I remember being so starstruck meeting all my Flash heroes there – many of whom I consider good friends to this day. As it turns out I won the award, which was amazing. I went back to my day job the following Monday. I was working in the estimation department of a mechanical contracting company. I hated that job. I was thinking, “Why am I here? I am a published author and I just won an award for Flash. That’s what I should be doing.” Amazingly, when the boss came in, he called me into his office. Apparently I had screwed up delivering an estimate the previous week and he fired me. What I remember most clearly about that conversation was trying not to smile as I realized I was free. The next day I went to talk to a company in Boston that I had been talking to about doing some Flash work on the side and said I was ready to go full time. They hired me and thus began my official career as a “professional” developer.

Of course, Flash officially died earlier this year. But I had really moved on from it in early 2011, when I did my “31 days of JavaScript” series on the old blog. The inaugural post here: http://www.bit-101.com/old/?p=3030. This series got a lot of attention and by the end of it I had personally switched over to doing all my personal creative coding using HTML5 Canvas.

In 2018 I started looking for some other platforms for creative code. I discovered Cairo Graphics, a C library that is pretty similar to the canvas api in JavaScript. It has bindings for many other languages. I tried it with Python and liked it, but wanted to learn a new language. I’d been interested in both Rust and Golang. I converted my JS library over to Rust and got it working well. But Rust is a pretty exacting language. I found it hard to work with for something like creative coding. I spent more time trying to satisfy the compiler than I did writing any interesting code. So I tried Go and that really hit the spot. It’s been the mainstay language for my creative work for the last three and a half years, though I still keep active in JavaScript as well.

Work-wise, starting from first job in 2003:

• Exit 33 / Xplana Learning
• Flash Composer
• Brightcove
• Infrared5
• Disney
• Dreamsocket
• Notarize

I started all of those jobs as a Senior Developer/Engineer/Programmer. At Notarize I am now an Engineer Manager, managing 10 other engineers and not really doing any hands-on coding myself. That’s fine with me. It’s a totally new challenge and I’m enjoying it, especially seeing and helping new grads out of school growing into amazing engineers. Interestingly, only two of those jobs required a formal interview. The rest of them were almost straight to offer from people I had gotten to know well through the Flash community.

Summary

It’s been an amazing 20 years. I had no idea where this was going when I randomly came up with “bit-101” and registered the name back then. But it’s worked out pretty damn well. What about the next 20 years? If I’m still breathing and able to type coherent code, I’ll be cranking out something for sure.

Well it’s been a few days since I gave in and decided to check out the world of NFTs. It feels like a few months. Figured I’d just post some thoughts and observations.

What I thought

I think my biggest confusion when I started this whole thing was, why the hell are people buying NFTs.

Initially I thought there was some kind of confusion going on where buyers thought they were actually buying rights to the artwork in some way whereas in fact, buying an NFT by itself gives you no rights to the original work. But as I talked to people I discovered that while people generally understood this, nobody really cared. It’s not like people were buying NFTs in order to use them in their corporate marketing campaigns or something. They just wanted to “collect” the art.

This just caused more confusion for me. Surely there is no inherent value in buying them, I thought. They’re either buying them as investments or buying them to support artists they like.

While I assumed that people paying thousands of dollars (or even millions of dollars) for big name NFTs are doing it as investments of some sort, I did not believe that the average hic et nunc user wasn’t doing that.

So it had to be about supporting artists, which I thought was nice, but frustrating because I’ve had a donation link up for ages and I get $5 or $10 a couple of times a year. So why were people so happy to support artists via NFTs, but not directly?

I was wrong

Just about everything I thought was wrong.

1. People do find (massive) inherent value in buying NFTs.
2. People do use NFTs as short/mid-term investments.
3. The whole supporting-the-artist thing exists, but it’s a pretty minor aspect.

Value

Yeah, people are crazy about collecting NFTs. Especially from some known artist. Honestly it’s been a bit of an ego trip because people seem to know who I am in this community (getting a shout out from my old friend Mario Klingemann does not hurt either). Feeling a bit of a taste of the (very low level) rock star vibes I had in the 00’s and early ’10s on the Flash conference speaking tour. It’s nice.

Anyway, yeah, everything I’ve put up on hic et nunc has sold out in minutes. I’ve just been experimenting with prices and amounts and it doesn’t matter, it just goes like that. But it goes beyond that. People are DMing me on twitter begging me to let them know the next time I mint something. Or asking if they can buy something from me directly. When people manage to buy something before it sells out, they’re over the moon about it, like they just won the lottery. Get that – they gave me money and they feel like they won something huge. People are HUGELY passionate about collecting stuff.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around it because it seems really, really bizarre to me. It makes absolutely no sense in my brain. But I’m trying to roll with it. It’s just all very surreal.

Investments

This is a way bigger part of the system than I thought. For my first NFT I minted 10 editions at 1 tez each. No idea what to expect. Within a couple of hours of them selling out, one was re-sold at 150 tez! There’s one of those still for sale at 3000 tez!!!

Yeah, so IF that sells (I can’t imagine it will), the seller will have made a 3000% profit. Currently 1 tez is around $4 usd. You do the math.

Of course, once something gets into the realm of capitalism, all kinds of ugly stuff starts cropping up. I discovered there are bots people will set up to buy NFTs in bulk from popular artist at low cost and immediately resell them at a huge markup. This generates a bunch of anger in the community, from individual collectors who are mainly just into collecting work from artists they like. The bots make it hard for them to get the pieces they are trying to collect.

tldr; it’s a complex and complicated space.

Supporting the Artists

Like I said, this is there for sure, but it’s not a huge part of it, from what I can see. I think the music industry is a good example. Yeah, there are lesser known indie groups who have the support of loyal fans hoping they’ll eventually make it big. But you wouldn’t say that most people buy music because they want to support the artist. They buy it because they want the music.

The Future

I have no idea where this is all headed. On one hand I feel like this can’t last. It’s like a gold rush. Pokemon cards, Beanie Baby stuff. The bubble is gonna burst some day. On the other hand, this probably will pave the way for the future of how art is bought and sold… maybe. I have no clue. I guess I’m just going to surf this wave for a while. And not quit my day job just yet.

OK, y’all wore me down. After multiple messages per week from friends and strangers urging me to put my work on hic et nunc, and many long, drawn out debates with people I respect, I finally gave in and created an NFT.

At some level I feel like a sellout. On the other hand, I was feeling way too stubborn and dogmatic about my resistance to try it. It was a serious internal struggle for the past few months.

Long story short, people seem to want to give money to digital artists via NFTs. Lots of money. But not any other way. I still have misgivings, but I’m going to assume that people know what they are doing and if they want to support me in this way, I’ll accept it.

So here’s my very first NFT:

https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/215806

Make it rain, fans. 🙂

I’m starting a newsletter. I’ve been hearing more and more buzz about newsletters these days. I always assumed these were just cheap marketing gimmicks. “Sign up for my newsletter so I can spam you with info about this thing I’m trying to sell.” But apparently it’s become the replacement for RSS for a lot of people. Who knew? Probably everyone but me.

Anyway, I’m going to start one. For the most part it’s going to be quick summaries and links to stuff that I post right here, with maybe one or two other links or items of interest. I thought about doing more complete articles in the newsletter, but I’d rather keep my content centralized here, so summaries and links it is.

For now, it’s totally free. If it takes off and people seem interested, I might experiment with doing some kind of additional paid content. Undecided at this point. One step at a time. Anyway, sign up here:

https://bit101.substack.com/p/coming-soon

First issue should go out Wednesday morning, 8/18/21.

I’m a firm believer that creative coding is a very different activity than the kind of coding that most people do for their day jobs. In feature / application / systems programming, there’s usually a fair amount of planning, scoping and architecting that comes before you start coding. Ideally, when you start coding, you have a pretty good idea of what you are going to make and how you’re going to make it.

But creative coding, for me at least, starts with “what would happen if I did this…?” and generally follows that line of logic all the way until I have something published.

So I’m always going to this value or that, deleting “true” and typing “false” or vice versa. Or, I’m using a sine function and want to see what happens if I use cosine. Or tangent. Or I want to swap greater than with less than and see what that does. Or change plus to minus or minus to plus.

After way too many times doing this type of thing, I figured there must be some plugins that would make this easier. And so there are! I use vim, and found several. I tried a few and had almost settled on vim-toggle and then checked out switch.vim, which I found to be the most powerful of the lot.

I recognize that most people probably use VS Code or Sublime Text or other editors. A quick search informed me that there are similar plugins for those editors as well (all links below). I haven’t tried the non-vim ones, so I can’t vouch for their quality, only their existence. There may be better ones, so do your research.

The way these work is you put your cursor on the word or symbol you want to change and hit some keyboard shortcut. For switch.vim, that’s gs. Each time you hit that shortcut the word will toggle back and forth between, say, “true” and “false”. Or “on” and “off” or “1” and “0”.

Most of the plugins come with several obvious definitions pre-defined. But make sure you find one that will also allow you to set up custom toggle sets. Some of the plugins only support binary switching between two options, but some, like switch.vim, will let you specify a list of as many items as you want. It will cycle through all of those options when you hit the shortcut key over any one of them. Here’s just a few of the custom toggle sets I set up:

["width", "height"]
["moveTo", "lineTo"]
["x", "y"]
["-", "+"]
[">", "<"]
["cos", "sin", "tan"]

And there are more niche ones I use in my day to day creative coding using cairographics bindings for Golang (blgo). Sometimes I’ll be making a piece where the background is white and the foreground is black. I use a function, ClearWhite to clear the surface to white, and set the drawing color to black using SetSourceRGB(0, 0, 0). but occasionally I want to invert these to use a black background with white shapes. So I set up some toggles like so:

["ClearWhite", "ClearBlack"]
["0, 0, 0", "1, 1, 1"]

This lets me easily make the change in just a few key strokes.

switch.vim even allows you to set up toggling rules using regx, which seems super powerful, though I haven’t dug into that so far.

So far, I’ve found these immensely useful. Maybe you will too. Here are the links:

Vim / Neovim:

• https://github.com/AndrewRadev/switch.vim
• https://github.com/lukelbd/vim-toggle

VS Code:

• https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=silesky.toggle-boolean

Sublime Text 3:

• https://github.com/gordio/ToggleWords