Field Experiments

I’m an artist and creative technologist. I write about generative art, code, creativity and other interconnected topics. You can expect a diary on Fridays sharing the things I’ve been working on. Thanks for joining me here. 💖

Last week and some of this week was spent at a festival down in Devon which was lots of fun! My friends and I have a little chill camp where we make cheese toasties, and I took along 100 generated messages to hand out. I think the toasties were probably more appreciated, but it is hard to compete with hot cheese that appears seemingly out of nowhere in a field at 3am.

This is an evolution of a series called 56 Truths. With this new set, I adjusted the sentence structures to be more personal. Where the Truths could be seen as observations about the universe, these Messages address the reader more directly - almost every one contains the word “you” or “your”.

Each Message comes in a gold envelope and is stamped with a number. Here are some approaches I tried out for the envelopes (and some cool looking misprints).

I was worried stamping individual letters might take too long so I tried printing labels but I didn’t like the look. I also tried using letters from different sets so I could tape them together and stamp the whole word in one go (see the envelopes to the right of and below the printed label), but it looked a bit like a ransom note.

There was extra ink appearing in squares around the letters (see middle bottom row) and I had to use a knife to cut away pieces of the stamps to fix this.

In the end I worked out a system of stamping about 12 envelopes at once, doing all the m’s, all the e’s, etc etc in turn. It was pretty enjoyable and I love the aesthetic of the imperfect stamping.

I plotted 10 messages per sheet of paper, with small pencil cut marks plotted ahead of the words, so I could easily slice them up with my slicer.

It’s one thing to give someone a piece of paper that says “A mountain is a useless construct.” and quite another if it says “You are a useless construct.” so I pruned the word lists to remove negative adjectives and avoid overly difficult concepts.

I also added grammar for adverbs for the first time so now you can, for example, be advised to do something “electrically”.

The festival I was at does have a culture of gifting, but it’s quite nerve wracking to offer a stranger a tiny artwork, especially when it has words on it and you don’t know yourself exactly what it’s going to say because all the envelopes are sealed. I got a bit over-thinky about it and only handed out some of the Messages, which I regret.

I think part of the problem is that I still haven’t quite pulled together my “I generated it / it’s a message directly from the universe / it’s not AI” elevator pitch, so that is something to work on.

This is really really almost done now, and I’ve added a bunch of features over the last couple of weeks, like…

Management of the symbol choices (so that some outputs have all the same symbol, or symbols that go particularly well together), a greyscale palette…

…longer symbols, like these zig zaggy and wavy lines, larger symbols…

… several options for these messy, longer wavy lines, options for colour placement (random, gradient, noise)…

…options for the amount of collisions that are allowed, many colour palettes, and all sorts of options for how everything goes together.

Actually I did this one before I went away and I shared some photos last time, but I didn’t edit the timelapse video in time to make it in to the newsletter, so you get it now!

You can also watch it with subtitles on your platform of choice:
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That’s all, thanks again for joining me!

I’ll leave you with this shot of my current embroidery hobby piece, and I’ll see you here next week.

Amy ⭐