Welcome to gart; a C# application for creating generative art.

It is still very early in development so expect a lot of changes over the coming week.

I am building out a few generative art algorithms for fun and, since I promised to blog about them, I decided it was high time I find a way to procrastinate and do something else. gart is the culmination of that effort. But, more helpfully, it's the UI to run the various art generators.

The UI is built with 💖 using Terminal.Gui.

The only reason I'm even creating generative art is because of the amazing work that James South, of Six Labors fame, has done to make working with graphics in .NET easy and painless.

If you've never heard the term, then Wikipedia has a in-depth entry on it. For my purposes, I am providing the computer with an overall structure but relying on it to introduce some randomness into the process. The tension and trade-off of "human-provided guidance" and "computer-generated randomness" will vary by implementation. It would be very easy to argue with some of the recipes that I have planned that the computer has no input into the process at all. So, in some cases, it might be better just to think of the work as 'computer-assisted art creation'. But, for my purposes, I'm going to keep everything under the same umbrella.

gart is a C# .NET 6.0 console application. From the root of the repository (where gart.sln lives; along with this readme), you can run dotnet build -c Release to build the application. By default, the resulting executable will be buried under .\src\bin\Release\net6.0. That's likely not useful so the next step is to publish the project.

The following command will publish gart to .\dist. The path assumes, again, that you will run this from the repository root

dotnet publish .\src\gart.csproj -o ./dist --no-self-contained

Alternately, you can execute .\build.ps1 or .\build.sh to restore any missing Nuget packages, build the application and then publish the application to .\dist

It's a bit early for contributions for others. But, I would highly encourage you to fork gart and play around. Do your own thing. And, as always, you can message me on twitter @hyrmn.

• Simple Colored Boxes
• more to come

Programs need names. Since it's a .NET generative art maker, I was leaning towards nart (.net art, not art? you decide what the n stands for). But, @DawnAlison suggested gart was a much better alternative. So long answer... because my wife picked the name.

I think the real take-away is that you should not hire me to do branding or UI/UX work.