Getting creative with algorithmic art

Mike Bedford demonstrates how you can exercise your left and right brain simultaneously by generating algorithmic art.

- Mike Bedford

OUR EXPERT Mike Bedford is firmly of a technical persuasion, yet has loved to exercise his more creative skills since he first got to grips with computer programming.

It has been suggested that creating artwork and computer programming are diametrically opposite. After all, art involves exercising creativity, while coding involves providing a fixed set of instructions that will be followed verbatim. More generally, the divide between the arts and the sciences is often considered unbridgeable. We'd beg to differ as, no doubt, Leonardo da Vinci would have done. As one of history's best-known polyglots, his achievements included the painting of The Last Super, a mural that can be seen in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, his writings on a wide range of scientific disciplines including anatomy, botany, astronomy, mathematics and geology, plus his many inventions, perhaps most notably flying machines. With such an esteemed artist-cum-scientist as our inspiration, we feel more than justified in introducing you to the subject of creating art using a sequence of instructions. In some cases, we're looking at how to do that using software that others have created, but if you are itching to write code yourself, we look at how you can do so to create your own unique algorithmic art.

The early days