Living Systems
An ongoing body of computational work exploring how simple local behaviours become collective form.
SimonHarrisCo
I'm Simon, a founding engineer at SwiftKitchen. I code my own tools, make art from living systems, and occasionally write.
Latest posts
Using React with canvas, WebGL and custom renderers.
How I use React UI library with Javascript rendering engines, handling the difficulties of making reactive UI and OOP WebGL canvas engines work togethers.
Taste is the last commodity for artists in the AI age
Generative AI is eating into the skillset of traditional artists, but it doesn't really matter. The taste economy is here.
The emergence of LLM sympathy in our codebases
With the rise of LLM code generation, how are we these tools shaping the way that we work?
What makes a good explanation & how to make better decisions.
How can we responsibly use data to make good predictions? What separates good theories from bad ones?
The continued success of my excessively decoupled React SPA architecture
I use an unconventional React SPA architecture to great success. Here I share the details of the architecture and the reasons behind it.
Explorations in Vellum
A 2021 series of soft-body simulations exploring how simple material rules produce intricate, organic forms.
Fragments
A 2021 shader study imagining the parallel processing hidden inside a rendered image.
How I built a barebones WebGL PBR renderer in Nodes.io
This article describes how I implemented a PBR renderer with image based lighting in Nodes.io.
Algorithms, Elves and Recycling. Not every idea has to be original.
Learning any artistic skill feels like a loss of innocence. An exploration of what studying Tolkien taught me about creating art.
Organised Reality - Generative art and source code
This article shows a basic script for some generative art you can make in the browser