I never expected my glimmering nonsense to feel so plausible

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. 💖

Hello!

I’ve been creating things in two directions for the past couple of weeks. This goes against most current art-making and algorithm-pleasing advice as we’re supposed to niche down but, that’s where I’m at, and I have some nice things to show you!

As we hurtle/plod towards the new year, I’ve been thinking about reframing this newsletter. Over 2025 I’ve managed to send an update about half of the weeks and I’m proud of that but also questioning if it’s the right approach. I’m thinking perhaps monthly essays, with shorter emails when there is something in particular to share, might work better.

I’d love to know what you think - if you are enjoying these emails as they are or would like to see something else, let me know!

For now, let me show you what I’ve been working on!

Things I’ve done recently

Acrylic plotter painting

I continue to enjoy getting acrylic paint on parts of my plotter that should not have acrylic paint on them.

This piece went through some stages of experimentation. I did a couple of passes of simple marks, had a bit too much paint, lifted some off and then did more marks.

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Lifting the paint off led to some interesting effects which it could be great to harness with more intention in the future.

On the left, the result of pressing a piece of card onto the wet paint and lifting it. On the right, the result of scraping paint up.

After that one, I did another similar piece, starting with less paint. Here are the two together.

Here’s a video to show the shimmering colour variations.

It’s hard to capture honestly. I have had these around the studio for a few days now and when I took them into the living room just now to shoot those videos in the better light, I was surprised at how much additional colour I noticed.

I’ve also been trying some spiral layouts and, while there is finessing needed here, I think the potential of these is exciting!

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New approaches to meaning

I’ve explored some new meaningful phrases, combined with some of the aesthetics from my generated diagrams. If you’re not familiar, these sentences are generated using sentence structures and curated word lists, you can read more about it here.

This is a new-ish set of “personal” structures, which include lots of I-statements.

This one in particular felt like the algorithm giving me a wink:

I created a new set of letter paths in a different “font” design:

I was finding the handwriting style to be limiting when I wanted to create something with typographic design type effects, whereas this style lends itself more towards that.

I’ve been working on ways of moving from one sentence to the next, passing along a connecting word.

This animated version of that was a head destroyer to code and I think it is very cool, but I also feel like it needs more going on visually.

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Things I’ve enjoyed recently

• This machine that hopes it finds you well.

• elekktronaut’s dreamy vision, created using a Touchdesigner shader from prismatic.visuals.

• This sewing machine playing a midi player, which is simultaneously like ‘okay, but why’ and also like, ‘of course’.

That’s all, thanks again for joining me!

I’ll leave you with this shot of a rock, which is over 2000 million years old, sitting and issing, and I’ll see you again soon.

Amy ⭐