I’ve been exploring generative art lately, experiencing it both through looking and making. I’ve always been fascinated by it, because there is something deeply intriguing about using code to breathe life into a piece of art. While I’ve been using code to build and design apps for a while, there is something entirely different about using it to create art. And what fascinates me the most is the logic that exists behind it, the fact that I can write an algorithm that creates an infinite number of outputs, all random, all beyond my control. That is something truly exciting.
The more I create, the more I find myself drawn to what other artists are doing in this space. I’ve been spending time with their work, sitting with it, letting it speak before I try to understand it. These three pieces are ones made with code in which I recognized feelings and entities I wasn’t expecting to see.
This is the first of what I hope will be many encounters with generative art inside The Hidden I. The deeper I go, the more I want to bring back.
I felt this piece the moment I first saw it. The combination of colors and shapes, the way they spiral and curl into one another, brought me immediately to a place I hold dear, the world of Japanese art, where beauty exists without explanation.
This is one of those works that doesn’t ask you to feel something specific. It makes you feel many things at once. There’s warmth in the reds and corals, calm in the pale blues, and something I cannot describe in the way the spirals repeat. It makes the piece feel as if it has always existed, and you’re only now seeing it.
Some art explains itself. This piece simply is. And perhaps that’s what makes it stay.
At first glance, this piece reminded me of the interior of Cerebro from X-Men (I have no idea how that happened), and the texture of a woven tapestry. But the image that stayed with me was more personal than any of those.
The edges of this work are full of color, scattered like small certainties, like the things we hold onto when we’re young, and the world feels vivid and knowable. But as your eye moves inward, toward the center, the color fades. The fragments of light become smaller. The space between them widens. And eventually, there is only darkness.
I couldn’t help but see my own life in that. We begin surrounded by color that feels infinite. And as we move deeper into the experience of being alive, we realize we’re walking toward something we can’t illuminate. The color recedes, and what we’re left with is the space between things.
That’s how I am seeing it.
There are moments when I need nothing but silence. Silence to sit with myself, to understand what the world has been trying to tell me, where everything around me falls away, and what remains is just me.
Everything that is happening in the world right now makes me realize that the ground I assumed was solid might not hold the way I thought it would.
And in the middle of that weight, I encountered this piece, which asked me to stop, to look inward, and to remember what I actually care about beneath all the noise and fear.
I believe it arrived at exactly the right moment. Because in times like these, when winter has come in every sense, we need to return to the questions that matter.
How do we feel? What do we think? What do we believe in? Where does our connection actually live?🌹