Part 5: Using other people's art

Prompting with descriptions of art

Prompts:

• Chaotic attractors

• Mandala

One afternoon, I found myself admiring Jared Tarbell's website and wanting to learn how to create generators with similar qualities myself. I thought I'd try making some pieces based on his descriptions, as a first step towards developing my own voice. I did a couple of studies this way, and I found that it was pretty easy to achieve great results just by providing some context to Claude off of the site.

To prompt Claude to make my "chaotic attractors" study, I used Jared's description for his Peter de Jong attractor series, named after the algorithm that was used to create it - which was in turn based on code by Paul Bourke.

The description on Jared's site goes like this:

A particularly interesting attractor written by Peter De Jong.

xn+1 = sin(a yn) - cos(b xn)

yn+1 = sin(c xn) - cos(d yn)

These images plot the phase space of the Peter d Jong system using arbitrary starting values within the image region.

My prompt went like this:

Please create some incredible generative art. Give me controls for the key parameters. Make sure I have a control for the overall speed or timestep. The controls should disappear when the mouse hasn't moved in a few seconds. Use a subtle and restrained colour palette.  Start with a particularly interesting attractor written by Peter De Jong. xn+1 = sin(a yn) - cos(b xn) yn+1 = sin(c xn) - cos(d yn) These images plot the phase space of the Peter d Jong system using arbitrary starting values within the image region.

This inspired Claude to create an art generator that produces striking shapes that are clearly derived from the original work.

I had to tinker with Claude's version to get it to look really good, because it originally made it so that every time I tweaked the parameters, a new shape would appear on top of the old one, like an overlay, which turned the art into an amorphous blob. I made the lines black and bold, just like in Jared's piece, because I thought that made it look more striking. You can check out the polished version of that generator here. For comparison's sake, here's where I started.

I also asked Claude to apply some "complex fractal transformations," which made it possible to change the parameters in even more interesting ways than before. Here's an example.

As a final step, I asked Claude to contain the shape inside of a sphere – a small artistic move on my part. It drew a circle instead, which I think was an even more elegant choice.

Rob Haisfield made a version of this piece that slowly cycles through all the controls into an animation of all possible settings. He told me that he wishes he could embed it within an actual sphere and run it constantly on his desk. Egg said that he was thinking about doing the same thing, by setting up a version that randomly drifts through interesting ranges. I'd love to see this idea come to life someday as a physical piece!

In a similar manner, I created my "mandala" study by prompting Claude with Jared’s description of the algorithm he used to create his Henon phase deep series, which I find to be beautifully reminiscent of tree rings. My version is very simple in comparison to Jared's. I had to iterate a few times to add definition to the animation, because at first, the image was so vague that you could barely see it.

Since doing this experiment, I've created even more complex mandalas with my own budding techniques, but this study taught me that Claude could even do this kind of thing the first place, which felt super exciting to find out at the time. It feels amazing to be able to instantly create something cool from a few scraps of text, even if I don't fully understand the methods that went into it. It's a bit like getting spectacular results from a recipe, even if some of the ingredients and how they work together are shrouded in mystery. That's ok! You can learn more as you go.