At the core of the generative process is creative coding. To put it simply, it’s about writing programs that generate artwork. The deep involvement of the computer’s native language - programming instructions - informs everything about how his work is structured and about its ultimate appearance. Learn more about Tyler Hobbs’ unique process from start to finish.

IDEA CREATION

I start new works with very simple ideas. Those ideas come from many places, so I don’t always have the same starting point.

I like to draw and paint in a small sketchbook. Sometimes I accidentally stumble across something I’d like to turn into a finished work. Other times, I kind of know what I want, but I need to sketch out ideas on paper to get a better feel for it.

Other times, I simply start a brand new program from scratch, and start experimenting without any clear direction.

More often, I begin with another idea I was working on recently. I can take a portion of that program, copy it into a new project, and start changing it. These chains of exploration can be very productive.

PROGRAMMING

This is where the magic happens. My programs and programming environment (details to follow) look like this :

As you can see, I’m sort of writing the “raw” code for these programs, not using something like Photoshop. I can run the program, and it will output an image that I can view.

I don’t write the whole program at once. Instead, I start with a very simple program, I run it, and I see how it looks. Then, I make a change to the program, and re-run it to see how that change looks. I repeat this cycle over and over, changing and running. It is not unusual for me to go through one or two hundred cycles like this before the program is finished.

This cycle of programming is very experimental and exploratory. I’m looking for new things, testing out wild ideas, and occasionally adding bugs to the program that accidentally make it way better than it was before.

Curating

Most of my programs have a lot of variety in their output due to the randomness that I carefully build into them. For these programs, my second to last step is to generate a large number of images - often 100 or 200 - and to go through and select a few of my favorites from that set. I try to quickly and instinctively select the ones that stand out to me. Ideally, I also select works that showcase some of the “range” that the program is capable of. The selected images will be used for only one print/drawing/painting each, making them unique works.

CREATING THE PHYSICAL OBJECT

There are several ways that I take the digital image and turn it into a physical object.
The most common is for me to commission a local fine-art printing shop to create an archival pigment print. I create only a single print of each image. I also create a large number of works utilizing a plotter. This is a simple robotic device that you can put a pen in, and give it instructions for something to draw.

I’ve also created a number of plotter paintings (painted by the plotter) and hybrid paintings (drawn by the plotter, painted by me). Of course, for these plotter works, I need to carefully plan the design to ensure it will work with the execution method, so type of work that I create this way tends to be fairly different from my printed work.

If you want to dig deeper into how my work is created, browse the essays section of this site, and read the FAQ below.

FAQ

DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE OUTPUT IS GOING TO LOOK LIKE BEFORE YOU RUN THE PROGRAM?

Sort of.
My programs are typically more like loose guidelines than an exact description of what should be drawn. Randomness is carefully worked into many aspects of my programs. So, when I alter a program, I have a pretty good idea of how that's going to change the image, modulo the randomized aspects. Of course, sometimes my mental preview is incorrect, and it's worse (or when lucky, better) than what I expected.

DO YOU HAVE A FINISHED COMPOSITION IN MIND WHEN YOU START?

No. I usually start with a very simple concept to play around with. Maybe an idea about a process, a mood, an old approach to modify, or a combination of multiple techniques. From there I experiment with different approaches, attempting to solve basic visual problems. My use of randomness comes in handy here, occasionally suggesting solutions that I hadn't considered. I may modify and rerun the program several hundred times while developing a work.

IS THIS DRAWN BY HAND?

No, the vast majority of my works are created entirely through custom programming. However, I have over the past few years become more interested in using hand-drawn elements as a type of “input” to the programs. Some times those are abstract curves, other times they might be the outline of a figure, flowers, or a portrait.

WHAT PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE DO YOU USE?

I use Clojure, a Lisp dialect that runs on the JVM. This is a very powerful, but pragmatic language. JVM support means that it's easy to use Processing for basic graphics. Using a Lisp means that I can say a lot with very little code. And, because nobody else has to understand it, it doesn't matter if I write weird code, so the usual Lisp objections don't really matter. Plus, I can drop into Java if I really need to optimize something (which is rare).

HOW DO YOU GET THESE ONTO PAPER?

I generate high resolution images, which are sent to a local fine-art printing company in Austin. They create the prints using a multi-pigment wide format Epson printer. The paper and pigments are archival quality, meaning that the prints are rated to last approximately 200 years. In short, these are extremely nice prints.

HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE YOU TO WRITE AN ART PROGRAM?

It depends. My typical range is probably five to ten hours. Sometimes I get lucky, and something good falls into my lap two hours in. Other times, I may grind it out for twenty to thirty hours.

Of course, I also tend to reuse parts of older programs, even if those works were discarded failures, so it’s hard to say exactly how long any given work took to create.

HOW DID YOU START DOING THIS? WHAT'S YOUR BACKGROUND?

I have a degree in Computer Science, and worked as a professional programmer (specifically, on and around Apache Cassandra, a distributed database). I also have always loved to draw and paint, and studied traditional oil painting and figure drawing. When I began to focus more on artwork, I tried to figure out what unique skills or knowledge I could utilize to make my artwork more interesting. Programming came to mind and I sort of thought, "what if I wrote a program that created a painting?" It turns out that's an interesting question, and one that I'm still investigating.

IS ANYBODY ELSE DOING THIS?

Yes, there are other generative artists out there. In fact, generative artwork started back in the 60's, mostly on early science and military computers. Today, you can find a decent survey of active generative artists on the /r/generative subreddit. It's still a fairly small community.

With that said, I consider my aesthetic approach to be wildly different from other generative artists. I'll leave my work to speak to that subject.

WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN (X)?

Probably.

DO YOU USE PHOTOSHOP?

No. I do create digital paintings for the hand-drawn elements mentioned above (portraits, specific landscapes), but I almost never edit or manipulate abstract components with an editor.

DO YOU INCLUDE THE SOURCE CODE WITH PURCHASES?

With my Original and Iteration works, I include a signed printout of the source code as well as a signed certificate. You'll probably be the only person other than me to see the source code, as I don't usually open source my work. I also don't generally polish this code before printing it, so don't judge me. It's more interesting that way.