Recent content on Lars Wander
I started Recurse Center last week as a part of the Spring 2 2025 batch and am having a blast so far. This was my first mini project of the batch.
Ever since GPT-2 was announced, I’ve been curious whether or not LLMs can be funny. Somewhat surprisingly, the latest reasoning models are outclassing the majority of humans at mathematical problem solving, but at least anecdotally, they…
A study in the intersection between light, matter, and perception. Where is the line that separates observation from interaction?
I’m sharing this to give some background on my recent artworks exploring light, color, and perception through spectral ray tracing. This ray tracer that I’ve written has shown up in a few of my series, and I wanted to explain what “spectral ray tracing” even is. I have shared some outputs at the end of this writeup.
In computer art, the artist builds both a scene and a…
Recently I was given the opportunity to display some of my older works in a large, printed coffee-table book. The publishers were eager to see some of the drafts leading up to these pieces and even wanted to include prints of them as well. Unfortunately I had only rendered these at roughly 2,000px per side, which at the requested 400dpi would print at a measly 5 × 5 inches.
Despite keeping my…
Exploring the threshold where repetition meets randomness, revealing the universe’s penchant for both design and disarray.
Generative light and color. Physics re-imagined through the lense of the computer.
All 5040 ways to sort 7 items. An exploration in enumerative art, or, what is randomness in generative artwork?
Kubelka-Munk (KM) Theory models the color of a mixture of paints by using their spectral properties. As a computer artist, this is really interesting to me because it allows one to mix colors in a way that appears “natural”. For example, mixing blue and yellow paint produces green, but mixing blue and yellow RGB colors produces grey.
However, applying KM requires knowing the…
Using simulated light and physics to explore the surreal, in a way only possible with a computer.
The function I’m sharing here is probably my most used piece of code when it comes to making generative art. It shows up in practically every project I’ve worked on, and originated from my plotter practice. Most of the time, I use it to center and set margins for a piece after it’s generated during rendering (but there are many other scenarios where it’s useful as well that…
Debut Solo Show focusing on my plotted works from 2020-2022. Exhibited by Verse and curated by ARTXCODE.
Computer-generated, human-curated series of 19 generative gestural works.
First long-form plotter series. Each edition plotted and shipped once free. Released on Plottables.
Packing shapes edge-to-edge, and exploring the patterns they create. Released on fx(hash).
Patterns made by folding, and then unfolding a sheet of paper. Released on fx(hash).
First long-form generative series. Released on fx(hash).
How many ways can you fold a rubber band with N bends?
Pen plotter artwork has gained a lot of traction these past few years, with many, great, resources published on how to get started. Personally, having been fortunate to WFH during the pandemic, I found pen plotting to be a great distraction from the rest of 2020. In the process, I discovered Licia He’s work, and process writeup using watercolor with her plotter. Immediately inspired, and…
I’ve posted pictures of my plotter-annotated pieces before, and have gotten some questions about what is being written to the back of each piece. I’ll use this post to describe what’s being annotated in a little more detail. Hopefully you can incorporate some of these tips into your own work!
Organizing physical media After several months of pen plotting I’ve managed to…
Pen plots can fail for a variety of reasons: a pen can run out of ink, paper can be misaligned, the servo lifting the pen can break… but the most nailbiting is watching the plotter repeatedly cover the same spot in ink until the page tears!
Circled in red you can see where the paper tore while plotting this pattern. Bits of ink-laden paper trail the pen's path leaving the tear; the…
Pen-plots of virtual “ribbons”.
As I was working my way through Melbay’s Complete Book of Harmony, Theory & Voicing, I realized that I had no way to verify solutions to the exercises the book prescribes. So I built a tool to help.
Usage:
$ ./gchrd --help usage: gchrd.py [-h] [--chord_name CHORD_NAME] [--chord_voicing CHORD_VOICING [CHORD_VOICING ...]] --root ROOT [--drop DROP] [--invert INVERT] Guitar voicing…
Browsing /r/perfectloops I came across this fun animation:
Not only is it fun to watch, but you quickly start to wonder what it looks like on the inside after a few loops. It’s constantly being distended, so whatever the walls of this infinite macaroni are made of keep getting thinner. Does the cross section change? If so, what’s the pattern?
Let’s assume that when the…
I’m a programmer and computer artist. My practice focuses on the intersection between computation and perception. I write code to explore ideas that are best handled computers.
You can find me on twitter, and sometimes instagram.
Some of my work is hosted on lars.computer.
Contact I’m represented by ARTXCODE. Please reach out to toni [at] artxcode.io for commissions, shows…