Since I’ve been writing about different kinds of software that generate text and images without using modern artificial intelligence (AI), I wanted to thread them together on their own page under the Research heading in the site menu above and available here.
Currently, the page collects together my posts about image generating software KPT Bryce and Evolvotron, and text-generating software Electric Poet, Kant Generator Pro, Mac Prose, and McPoet 5.1. I will update that page with additional links as I publish posts about other pre-AI generative software.
Y and I drove to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls for our honeymoon in 2009. One of the places that we stopped at among the many kitschy and wonderful tourist traps there was Brick City, a huge world constructed out of LEGO sets and populated by minifigures. There were trains, planes, and automobiles. There were science fictional time-and-space juxtapositions of the American West, Ancient Egypt, and 18th century piracy. There were space shuttles landing while another stood waiting on the launch pad. There is an AC/DC concert stage and the Golden Gate Bridge. Among the beautiful discord of scenes, sets, and characters was a custom model of Niagara Falls complete with a tightrope walker and the Maid of the Mist. For a LEGO maniac like myself who was eager to explore what’s there, it was a worthwhile place to visit. Unfortunately, it seems to have have closed down since then.
Y and I have walked pasted the hill where this monument is more times than we can count since moving next door to Green-Wood Cemetery two years ago, but we never looked at Sophie Calle’s 2017 art installation closely until a few days ago. It’s an obelisk inscribed with the words, “Here Lie the Secrets of the Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery.” Beneath the obelisk is a stone box with a slot big enough to slide an envelope through. The idea is for visitors to write secrets on a piece of paper and then slide them into the slot. We could see through the slot that the box was full of papers, full of secrets. Information about the installation is here, and where it is located in the cemetery can be found on Google Maps here.
Another such image generator program is Evolvotron. It can generate fractal-based images with different patterns, colors, and shapes.
It has an interactive interface driven by user choices in response to a field of different images–each generated from a different set of parameters. Based on this initial field of images, the user can choose File > Reset (or press R on the keyboard) to generate a new field of images.
When one of these images is one that the user likes or would like to explore more, they can right click and choose to Respawn (just the one square), Spawn (generate images with adjacent parameters), Spawn recoloured (same originating parameters but different colors), and other functions such as Spawn warped (below), Enlarge (below), and Save.
Below are a few images at 1024 x 1024 that I generated with Evolvotron.
I installed Evolvotron from the Debian 12 repositories. It can also be downloaded for various Linux distributions here, and it is available for MacOS X via Fink.
