Why use computers to make physical art (1m32s)

Charlotte Dann — front-end developer by day, generative artist by night — argues that computers are actually a better medium for art than carpentry: every iteration is free, every variation is one tweak away, and the loop from idea to output is short enough to fail fast.

"with code, you can build off what you already have, and you can make as many copies as you like along the way"

"imagine building a rocking chair and getting infinite variations of that rocking chair — that's basically what we have with code"

"making physical things from code usually involves writing code to tell a machine how to make something, which is still a whole lot less laborious than carpentry"

Generative CSS with nth-child (2m03s)

She demonstrates that generative art doesn't need JavaScript: a 10×10 grid of white squares, each containing a black circle twice as wide as its container, plus a few nth-child rules that flip the circle's position — and you get a series of strikingly different patterns from three lines of code.

"repeatability is the key thing that makes generative art possible"

"it's a visual result you didn't expect from three lines of code"

"you don't need to get what is going on — it just looks pretty"

Printing it onto a wall (4m38s)

She printed the best CSS results on a desktop printer (10p per A4 in a copy shop), sandwiched them between two thin sheets of acrylic, and hung them on her studio wall with binder clips and a nail. Most accessible "physical generative art" you can make: 20 lines of CSS and a stationery cupboard.

"every time I open the door, it made me so, so happy"

"I think the physical presence of having something you've made decorated your space is really powerful, and it clearly doesn't have to cost a lot"

"computers are constantly mode-switching... there is no permanence in what you're seeing on the screen"

Pen plotting with AxiDraw (6m42s)

Pen plotters fell out of favour in the 80s when inkjet got cheap, but generative-art Twitter has rediscovered them. The AxiDraw is the gold standard (£550 for the A3 model). The output has the same digital precision as a printout but with the irreducible imperfections of a physical pen — over-inking on contact, slight wobble, paper-grain interactions.

"you can have a very detailed millimetre-perfect drawing yet you get the spots where the pen over inks when it hits the paper... and I think that's really beautiful"

"when you look at a piece for a pen plotter, you can feel the hours that have gone into it"

"test everything on the rubbish paper first"

canvas2svg for vector outputs (9m48s)

Canvas is a raster output; pen plotters and laser cutters want vectors. The canvas2svg npm package gives you a drop-in 2D-context replacement that also records every drawing call into an SVG, so the same JavaScript that paints to canvas in the browser produces the SVG file the plotter needs.

"the canvas element is a raster output, so you can right-click it and save it... but you need a vector format to tell the pen where to go"

"you just define a context with the same width and height that you would have for your canvas, and it has the same methods of the 2D canvas rendering context — so you treat it exactly the same"

"this works from node canvas — if you want to do it from the server, I don't know why you want to do that but you can"

Laser-cut jigsaw puzzles (11m56s)

She's been spending weekends generating unique jigsaw puzzles where both the artwork and the cut pattern are algorithmically generated. Most jigsaws use a metal die stamp shared across thousands of puzzles; laser cutting lets every puzzle be unique, with the design constraint of "every piece is recognisable, but pieces group obviously".

"the challenge of designing jigsaws is about balancing simplicity and complexity in the design"

"I don't know if anyone has written an algorithm to generate random jigsaw puzzles? This is what you spend your weekends doing, it's genuinely so much fun"

"the alternative with that is laser cutting"

Materials, etching and scanner art (15m32s)

Different materials behave very differently in a laser cutter — paper cuts cleanly but is too delicate to handle once cut; foam board's foam melts faster than its card, producing odd depth-effects; MDF is consistent through its thickness but produces smoke that stains printed faces. The cross-domain trick is laser-etching a paper drawing into wood, scanning it back into the digital space, and using that round trip as the design.

"if ever you're doing laser cutting, try whatever materials you have around — I'm sure you will get interesting results"

"I made some sort of spilling algorithm to see how the water disperses among the water ways — and I laser-cut it out of paper"

"get access at hackspace, university, or pay-by-the-hour facilities... laser cutters are exorbitantly expensive"

Hexatope: Game of Life on hexagons (20m08s)

Her favourite project, Hexatope, started as a Computational Arts MSc final piece — Conway's Game of Life played on a hexagonal grid, where each active cell draws lines connecting it to its active neighbours using glyphs borrowed from the Generative Gestaltung book. After adding creator and destroyer cells, double-line variants and mouse interaction to draw the seed pattern by hand, she realised she'd accidentally made jewellery.

"I love hexagons — they have more sides, that will make this more interesting"

"I introduced the creator-destroyer relationship — Game of Life was happening a bit too quickly"

"I kind of got to this point of being like, oh no, I've made jewellery!"

From canvas to silver jewellery (28m51s)

The production pipeline: rewrite the canvas app in Three.js for a 3D wireframe, export the resulting model as an STL with a Three.js exporter, print it in the wax-castable resin on a Formlabs Form 2, then run it through the conventional centrifugal lost-wax casting process to produce a sterling-silver original.

"you can export STL files straight from Three.js — this is really mind-blowing"

"as JavaScript developers... you don't need to touch a Sketchup or Blender — you can do 3D modelling in the browser and have it print out"

"this is how 99% of jewellery is made, by the way"

Mass customisation and the future (39m18s)

A short tour of the rest of the field: Nervous System in upstate New York (generative jewellery and jigsaws inspired by nature), Unmade (mass-customised knitwear), and MIT's 3D printer for glass — which she flags as the most exciting development in the space because "eventually we'll be able to 3D-print literally anything."

"nervous system... 3D-print the mould, and then use traditional slip-casting techniques to make the thing"

"MIT has a fricking 3D printer for glass which is bananas"

"eventually we will be able to 3D print literally anything, and I'm really excited for that"