"Reveries Automata" is a generative project that combines AI Art with creative coding. This project was made to be minted on Fxhash and it's inspired on my previous collection "Reveries" where I explore the abstract nuances of art using diffusion models.
The main idea is to generate a version of the artwork every time the code is executed. It was a big challenge as this was my first experience with creative coding, but thanks to the help of good friends I managed to reach the goal of finishing the project completely satisfied. It took two months of research, study, problem solving, creation, production and, most importantly, a lot of learning.
THE CONCEPT
As the creative process was flowing, the concept was adapting to the needs. The art presents as main elements pillars and interferences. These allude to life itself, where each individual goes through problems and concerns, but we always have pillars to hold on to. But showing that a life with many interferences can be beautiful like all the others. So, to reinforce this same theory, I decided to use the royal color palette that represents all the preciousness of each being.
THE CODE
The main idea was to blend my AI abstract outputs with code in a way that was not just stacked .pngs. I wanted to explore this field of image composition inside creative coding. The solution I came up with was to reveal the images using coded masks.
There are 3 main functions for that:
The Pillars - made basically tiling a separate layer proportionally in the canvas with random sizes, position and rotation (just 2 options for this one, 0 or 90 degrees). Then using this layer as a mask to my base image. Tinted in the colors white, black, blue, red, gold or green.
The Splashes - A function that makes random ellipses around the canvas in a separate layer, attached in the back and front pillar. And, again, using this layer as a mask to my base image. Tinted in the same color the pillar received.
The Interferences - Probably the one that gave me more trouble to adapt. This funcion is a flow field that uses the color and brightness of my base image to draw and color itself. First I plot particles to use as initial position of the flow and make them draw based on the difference in brightness of my base image. The flow is coloured getting the pixel position of that base image. Tinted in the colors white, gold or black.
THE IMAGES
To support those code functions and to make sure that the outputs will have many variations, I've prompted and composited 40 base images that are used as background, patterns, textures, flow drawing/colouring and frames.
There are concrete textures, painting flow textures and golden foil textures for background and pillars; Rough contrasted painting flows (white and gold) for the interferences; Labyrinth, Rectangular and Copacabana patterns; 6 paper frames variations to finalize the composition.
Huge thanks to friends that helped me making this possible: Morbeck, Ed Alves, Edux, Ad Mortem Festinamus and, especially, Kukuti that stood with me and taught me the whole process from scratch.