Phil BrookerMar 28, 2024

This morning, I did a bit of #GenerativeArt with our little Liverpool #Ethnomethodology group, wanted to share some thoughts on it as a work-in-progress type thing (i.e. like basically everything I post on Mastodon...).

So, I've been a bit interested in generative art and AI as a domain in which creativity meets code and so on. And, using my newly-acquired skills with electric-y stuff, I decided to make a generative art bot; a physical device which automates the doing of art...

Show threadPhil BrookerMar 28, 2024
...in order to get a handle on the (human) work required to get the machine to work. There's a kind of fallacy with current state-of-the-art GenArt tools - DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion et al - that they take an idea from a human, in the form of a short piece of written text or a request (e.g. "Give me an image of the work of being an academic, in the style of the early modernists, and fill it with religious imagery"), as a "prompt"...
Show threadPhil BrookerMar 28, 2024

...and that "prompt" will inform a graphical depiction of the text in a plausible way (i.e. it will do a decent enough job, a plausible job, of producing an image which will be recognisable as the thing you've asked for).

That's the kind of narrative around these systems, and I'm not going to go into how actually building such a system would deflate this narrative here (though that would normally be my go-to strategy). Rather, what I wanted to do was turn the problem physical, by building...

Show threadPhil BrookerMar 28, 2024
...a generative art robot so I could use it and then see what sorts of practices are required in order to produce something recognisable as the art it was tasked with generating. It's not AI-powered in any way, since I wanted to cut right back to a system that IN NO WAY could be called "intelligent", as that seems to be used as a way of conveniently black-boxing what goes on with these tools ("well, it's intelligent, so of course it can produce art by itself" is not a helpful starting point)...
Show threadPhil BrookerMar 28, 2024
...So, allow me to introduce my device - a highly-sophisticated piece of equipment which physically manipulates an array of artistry tools such that it can draw on a page according to a complex formula that draws on the device's physical aspects and capabilities (it's weight, it's power, it's balance in terms of pressure with which it contacts the drawing surface, it's how it can distribute it's weight along different planes/axes, etc) to navigate and select techniques with which to make art.
Show threadPhil BrookerMar 28, 2024
This is my GenArtBot; an upturned Bisto gravy carton, with five Sharpie pens duct-taped around it. It has a single AA battery on top of it, which is wired to an on-off switch and a small DC motor attached to the top with blu-tack. On the rod of the motor, I've wedged another piece of blu-tack, which, when the motor is turning and when the pen lids are taken off, acts as a changing centre of mass that causes the device to judder around on a piece of paper and make marks on it.
Show threadAdrian McEwenMar 28, 2024

@pdbrooker doodlebots are great fun!

Haven't tried the blu-tack approach, usually we do pennies taped onto the motor (either with or without a plastic cog to mount them onto). Usually go with three legs rather than four, as that's easier to get stable without needing the pens to be at similar heights 😁

Show threadPhil BrookerMar 28, 2024
@amcewen Ha, yes, I've really loved doing this, hoping to make some kind of publication out of it somewhere down the line, even despite this being something I saw in an email on "what to do with the kids on a weekend" kind of thing! The tweaking I found really interesting, blu tack was good for experimenting with motor placement and weight offsets and all that, though I would love to have a way of swapping out the pens easily too (maybe less pens, but fixed in a better way?).
Show threadAdrian McEwen

@pdbrooker your doodlebot looks more polished than any of the ones we built. Having a large supply of paper cups and gaffer tape allowed easier experimentation with different forms. I remember some of the kids chaining a few of them together to make more of a train; and lots of them battling with each other as access to the canvas was a free-for-all.

For a while the results from one #FutureMakers kids session adorned the wall of @DoESLiverpool (we'd laid strips of lining paper on the floor)

Mar 28, 2024 at 5:13pmWeb