The Dr. Mutatis screen
I've worked on genetic textures, pretty much the same as Karl Sims' '91 SIGGRAPH paper. The main difference is, I'm doing it on a laptop, not a Connection Machine! Eventually, something like this will be used to "breed planets" to populate the synthetic universe we're building at FractalWorlds.com.
"Dr. Mutatis" (my program, current screen shown here) made its public debut at MacWorld in San Francisco in January of 1998.
The best thing about this project, of course, is that I get to design sexual reproduction... (I kid you not!)
Some day I hope to get work as nice as the masters such as Karl and Steve Rooke (who has been an invaluable advisor in this endeavor).
What I am after, if anything--and it may not be a good idea to approach genetic art with too precise an agenda--is a sense of painterly, natural flow in the images. The character of genetic images is partly determined by the basis functions in the system, as these basis functions provide the expressive vocabulary available to the system. My particular quiver of procedural random fractal functions, which have mostly been derived in my pursuit of visual models of natural phenomena, will I hope provide a particularly "natural" expressive vocabulary for my genetic image generation system. So far, the iamges are starting to bear that out. But there is much programming yet to be done...
Here a few of the images that Dr. Mutatis has cranked out so far.
My earlier work with Karl Sims' genetic software.
