I remember, when I was pursuing my MFA in writing, coming across a robot poet. It was an algorithm that used some rules of syntax and grammar, choosing words randomly, to generate prose and poetry. Racter’s work was published in a book called The Policeman’s Beard is Half-Constructed. Reading such lines as “They have love, but they also have/typewriters. That is interesting,” I realized that robotic artists had the potential to be more talented than human ones, unencumbered by the artifice of ego. In steps SimpSymm, a software for generating beautifully complex shapes for 3D printing.
In development by Christoph Bader and Dominik Kolb, SimpSymm is a program for the Microsoft Surface Pro 2 tablet that takes a simple geometry and, through a series of “generations”, turns it into a symmetrical topiary of intricacy. The generations are manipulated by users through parametric criteria, such as rotation and offset, resulting in clean, continuous, and, most importantly for the sake of 3DPI, sealed objects for 3D printing. Watch a video of the software in action below:
The output generated by SimpSymm already resembles some of the other 3D printed artwork out there. When made available to the public, SimpSymm will make it possible for anyone to become an artist. One can easily imagine the program taken a step further and set to “autopilot”, in which the shapes could be generated entirely at random by the software itself. Bader and Kolb have performed similar experiments with a program called QUADDEL, which generates coral-like structures through an automatic growth process. See below:
Though I’m not sure whether these algorithms will be made public, you can purchase some of the works created by Bader and Kolb with SimpSymm and QUADDEL on their Shapeways page.
[nggallery id=167]It may intimidate some artists out there to see beautiful work created so simply, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind when considering programs like Racter or SimpSymm. For one, the true art at the heart of such projects may be the programming itself, with Bader and Kolb or, in the case of Racter, William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter, artistically crafting beautiful algorithms. Moreover, when the mystique is taken out of artistic output through computerized randomness, you realize that art is not defined by a gilded frame and that artists aren’t defined by their credentials, training, or background; art is everything, everywhere. Let us all be artists all of the time and the universe be our masterpiece. Racter said it best:
Enthralling stories about animals are
in my dreams, and I will sing them all
if I am not exhausted and weary.
Source: Creative Applications
