Generative art was my first love. By accident, I ended up being a student of the great Frieder Nake (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frieder_Nake) and that changed my future trajectory.
These were great times, but I think the book is not worth buying anymore. Sadly, AI-generated imagery sort of killed the mojo of algorithmic art for me, and I've been trying to get back to it for the last few years.
I spent a fair amount of time with p5 etc, but the results always felt limited and brittle. You need a lot of complexity before anything really interesting happens, and Processing lacks features like gradient fills that limit what's possible. It helped there were people like Jared Tarbell who (IMO) were way ahead of what most people were doing, and were willing to share their code.
I wasn't unhappy with some of the results, but it was an interesting and frustrating struggle.
> I spent a fair amount of time with p5 etc, but the results always felt limited and brittle.
I wrote a JS canvas library[1] partly because existing libraries of the time (2013) didn't do what I wanted a canvas library to do. Things like animated gradients and patterns, etc. I'm still working on the library today - so thats 12+ years of my spare time gone!
Generative art - such as challenges like Genuary[2] - is a key tool for giving me ideas on how to develop the library further. I keep CodePens of some of my better efforts[3] around as a set of extra tests to check for breaking changes as I fiddle with the library.
> Sadly, AI-generated imagery sort of killed the mojo of algorithmic art for me
I used to (and occasionally still do) make generative art and found this too! Although I'm not really sure why - I still love good generative art and don't really consume any AI generated art intentionally.
I think possibly one of the main things that happened was a lot of online generative art communities got flooded first by NFTs, and then AI generated art. I find it a lot harder to reliably find other people's generative art these days.
That is quite wonderful.
> Sadly, AI-generated imagery sort of killed the mojo of algorithmic art for me,
I am surprised you did not specifically mention Nake's provocative writing "There Should Be No Computer-Art" : https://dam.org/museum/essays_ui/essays/there-should-be-no-c...
His argument is still 100% relevant in the age of AI.