Click here to access the website
Click here to see my code on Github
PAM MUSEUM
– Modern Art Generator
The elevator pitch
This project is a combination of an online art gallery and an artwork generator. Together with the introduction and famous works of two artists, Mondrian and Monet, the project enables users to generate artworks with similar styles to these two artists in an interesting and interactive way.
Abstract
This project is inspired by two of my favorite artists, Piet Mondrian and Claude Monet. Basically, for both the parts of these artists, the project can be divided into three parts, introduction, gallery, and artwork generator. In the introduction part, there is a brief description of the achievement of the artist with a self-portrait. Then four of the most well-known artworks of the artists are shown. Finally, users can try to generate artworks with similar styles to the artists, like the abstract art of Mondrian and the impressionism art of Monet with the functions provided by the project. The generating process can be quite interesting with multiple interactions. In Mondrian’s part, we generate artworks by clicking different buttons. Different geometric shapes will be generated randomly with the same color used by Mondrian. And in Monet’s part, the impressionism style is expressed by the pixel portrait. With a little bit of randomness of the circles, the portrait will present as an impressionism art piece.
Though inspired by modern art, this project also aims to encourage users to rethink the value of modern art.
For extremely abstract art, the art pieces can be imitated easily by a simple coding process. So does that mean that minimalist art can be mass-produced? Or is there anything deeper-lying underneath the surface?
For impressionist art, how does the impressionist portrait look different from the authentic portrait? What is the unique beauty of this art style?
here are some artworks generated by the project:
Reflection
Process: My project is hugely different from my initial plan and my proposal. At first, I wanted to create an interactive painting game. However, the plan is simple but hard to realize with a good aesthetic. The turning point is when I encountered Mondrian’s piece and suddenly found that I can generate some similar artwork by p5 codes. So that came the real prototype of my project – an artwork generator.
Design: there are three parts of my project, introduction, gallery, and artwork generator. The main interactive part is the artwork generator.
In Mondrian’s generator, users can interact with the project by pressing different buttons.
And in Monet’s generator, users can interact with the project by turning on the web camera and creating a pixel portrait.
Technical: I really tried to add more artists to the project, like Takashi Murakami. But adding that pattern is challenging for me as I tried to enable users to control the color and shape of the “flower”. So finally I compromised to the time and technical limitations.
Also, prof. Moon helped me a lot in realizing the impressionism portrait which is crucial in my whole project.
Future development: During the interaction and presentation days, my peers and instructors provided me with a lot of valuable suggestions. For future development, I think it is possible to add more artists and more interactions to the project to make it more user-friendly and dynamic. Also, I may need to redesign the layout or the order of pages to better lead users to the main function of the project – the art generator.
For me, one great, surprising effect of this project is that it really inspired me to observe things around me in a different way. Sometimes I just place my computer besides the window and let it generate artwork on the website. The work can be really stunning.
thank you