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Defining and implementing abstractions is more practice than elaboration. Interfaces built through formal languages are shaped by a shared praxis whose consensual lessons are established as standards. The use of such normalised means to create art pieces is hence an intuitive deviation: tools fashioned as means to an end are often used for purposes that appear to be the exact opposite of their raison d’être. Recent technosocial developments have enabled the tentative burgeoning of an economy nurturing these deviant applications. A new wave of the so-called “generative art” milieu is attempting to mobilise both factors of production, capital and labour, to augment the manufacturing of such algorithms. While the nature of each factor is apparently unremarkable, their intersection in this space does yield an idiomatic result. Humans and tools which are engaged in this practice, because they are incentivized to systematically share the outputs of their research, participate in the transformation of both factors and, as such, in their own. The generative art milieu is building an attempt to seize the means of generation.

Images in digital art and photography are frequently purposefully perturbed with grainy textures, often intending to evoke a tactile feeling and to add an ounce of ruggedness to an artwork. In this manner, grain is a valuable tool on your generative artist tool belt to elevate your artwork. This article discusses several techniques to achieve grain with p5, texture overlays, SVG filters, and shaders. We’ll discuss each one in great detail and the ups and downsides.