Ming + PHP5 + AI = Pretty

cyberscribe writes "Project K++ just released its first alpha version today. The project aims to explore computer-generated abstract art using PHP and Ming. The name of the project is an homage to Wassily Kandinsky, father of abstract art. Caution: the Flash movies can be intensive on your graphics card. Other caution: hitting reload to see the next cool computer-generated abstract 'painting' can be highly addictive."

Comments

Re:More Minimalist really ....

[abscondment]

I guess the disclaimer was for you:

DISCLAIMER: This software is graphics-intensive. The author is not responsible if viewing these Flash movies causes your web browser or computer to crash. It's not my fault if your video card can't handle it. :-)

Re:Desktop Wallpaper

[spectral]

One thing I miss from windows is drempels. It's not abstract art like this, but just weird swirly patterns and stuff. You can set it to handle any overlay color, so for a while I had the backgrounds of a lot of windows set to rgb(1,1,1), which I set drempels to overlay. This way black things didn't get messed up if they were meant to be black. A great majority of the time it didn't choose certain bright colors, so use those for text.

Anyone know of anything similar for my GNU/Linux/XFree86(Soon to be X.Org)/KDE machine? :)

Wassily Kandinsky...

[EricKoh]

I think the father of abstract art just turned in his grave....

Re:What?

[rebeka thomas]

I hope they know where to send the bill after their server has been reduced to a useless pile of molten plastic.

Common misconception, but a complete myth. A slashdotting has no more chance of melting or burning a server than does ping flooding it. The worst that can happen is a server side crash caused by misconfiguration, and that won't damage the hardware.

Similar Project Evolvotron

[knightshrubs]

Evolvotron

From the page: Evolvotron is an interactive "generative art" application for Linux to evolve images/textures/patterns/animations through an iterative process of random mutation and user-selection driven evolution. It's not running in Flash, you may render all images to arbitrary resolutions and is perfect for creating new desktop backgrounds... Also check the Gallery and Animations.

The code is licensed under the GPL. It uses Qt and is multi-threaded.

Generated Art

[mr i want to go home]

The idea of 'generated art' is pretty cool I think. It's certainly a big step back to the roots of Modernist art - which was about explorations of tone/colour/form/balance and not necessarily subject. Unfortunately lots of art at the moment is really quite selfish - Tracy Emin's unmade bed for example...it seems to be a symptom of the voyeristic phase our culture is going through (Big Brother, Blogging, etc)

This k++ (or whatever) is an ok example, but there are some truly fantastic sites around..Try Pray Station or (one of my hero's) John Maeda. John's work is incredibly beautiful, and he's a half decent coder to boot.

Re:I'm sorry, but this looks like crap

[darkain]

I have talked w/ brennan about the pr0n last week, and he gave me the link the application dynamically pulls all of the images from: random images - WARNING, potentially NSFW, its random.

Re:I'm sorry, but this looks like crap

[t0qer]

Hey folks...

Badmofo is getting hit pretty hard, i've set up a mirror here . If you're having problems accessing badmofo, just use my mirror.

(PS Sorry if this hit you too hard Brennen)

--toq

sure it's art -- it's just bad art

[spot]

try this for something with more substance:
Electric Sheep.

What does this have to do with graphics cards?

[arekusu]

Since when does Flash run on the GPU? This is entirely CPU-bound.

It ain't Kadinsky

[ortholattice]

While it's interesting in a crude sort of way, it just doesn't capture the intensity, spirit, and complexity of the real thing. You might want to look at what it's trying to imitate. Some samples: Kadinsky, Composition VIII (1923) , Kadinsky, Yellow-Red-Blue (1925), Kandinsky, Decisive Pink (1932). Wouldn't you rather have these on your wall?

Re:Why PHP?

[Anonymous Coward]

ActionScript doesn't do scripted shape-tweens (altho you can fake them ofcourse, but fake is still fake), so no, these pieces can not be created from scratch thru pure AS.

Re:Desktop Wallpaper

[B1ackDragon]

Yeah, I used to get a kick out of this and run my wallpaper as ifs or the OSX screensaver knockoff:

/usr/lib/xscreensaver/xflame -root

The /usr/lib/screensaver part is there because its not in my path, so I have to tell it where the screensaver (in this case xflame) is, and the -root option tells it to display on the root window. I'm not sure how well this will work on Gnome etc., as they might handle their root window a lot causing them to disrupt the 'saver, but for simple WMs it works great.

There are a lot of extra flags for each screensaver too: man xflame

And if you put it into a startup script (such as .xinitrc) with a & after it, it will tell it to run the command in the background and move on.

Cool ways to eat CPU. Also, might I suggest www.electricsheep.org

Re:Why PHP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash is available on Windows & MacOS (and Linux thru Wine), but you don't need Flash to create an SWF, only to create a FLA which can then be pusblished to SWF. Plenty of other programs that can output SWF's, KineticFusion for instance is a Java-program that can create (and rip) SWF's from RVML, an XML-based textformat, including AS.

Re:art?

[alex_tibbles]

You might want to look at Harold Cohen, the author of AARON. You might also be interested in a talk he did after retiring at the Tate (real format). I don't think that it's entirely clear whether the paintings are the work, or the program is the work.
AARON however, was capable of creating representation images, which requires AI work in of itself. I am not sure (without perusing the code) much K++ is intelligent.