Creating Art With Code

Some artists prefer code to chisels or brushes.

In their new book "Form+Code," Casey Reas and Chandler McWilliams catalog over 250 works in which code is applied to a range of disciplines from industrial design to gaming to graphic design to cinema. Both teach in the department of Design Media Arts at UCLA, and the book comes out on September 1.

The five main chapters detail how code can be used to repeat, transform, parameterize, visualize and simulate elements to create art. Each of those topics comes with corresponding example scripts (screenshot above). The scripts were written in the Processing programming language, which has been used by a number of artists since it was created in 2001 by Reas and Ben Fry, who now works for a design and software consulting firm.

We scoured some of sites of the artists featured in the book and put together the following slideshow featuring eight works created using code in some way. Check it out:

[via O'Reilly Radar]