Creating a Living Generative Art NFT Project (Part 2)
I’ve published Creating a Living Generative Art NFT Project With JavaScript, Google Cloud, Instagram, and OpenSea a few weeks ago, and wanted to write about some updates on the project. The updates are aesthetic, technical, and community-oriented.
Aesthetic updates
I’ve made some changes (we’re up to the 3rd generation of visuals now), and am retroactively calling the original “filled-in circles” as the 1st generation:
After some iterations, I decided to make the pieces a bit more visually stimulating. I went with using concentric circles decreasing in size, with random colors as well. This created the 2nd generation:
In the meantime I had been dabbling more with complementary colors, as well as seeing how I can involve randomness but keeping the pieces a bit more intentional.
You can create complementary colors in the HSB color model easily. You simply generate the first color as a random hue, then you add 180 and modulo 360 to receive the complement (always 180 degrees away). This created a more pleasing result from a color perspective. I had also looked at keeping the circles generally-speaking (for continuity) but being able to work within the circles. I went from filled-in circles to transparent circles and arcs with a stroke. An arc is an incomplete circle, but along the circumference of what would have been a complete circle.
I randomized whether each concentric circle would be an arc, a full circle, or nothing. The initial circle hue was also randomized and the background was a complement of that hue.
This led to the 3rd generation:
I’m pretty pleased with the 3rd generation, and released it to the wild beginning the morning of 10/7/21.
The “continuous canvas” concept that I kept mentioning in the original Medium story is now more readily apparent when looking at the Instagram profile:
Technical
I had made a number of under-the-hood changes with formatting and refactoring to make the code better and to be able to log the events more cleanly. These aren’t super interesting. Some updates that are more apparent from the end user perspective are that I updated the run times to be twice a day (NFTs move fast!) at noon and midnight UTC (8am and 8pm ET, in my time zone).
I had also finally gotten approved as a Twitter Developer, so I’ve been able to use their API to automatically upload and post the media. It was actually quite an easy API to work with, so I was happy with that.
We’re still blocked on OpenSea not having an asset creation API, so the choosing process that occurs every Sunday is still manual, albeit with the same logic as I would have had in code (use the piece with the most impressions in the preceding week, exclusive of the choosing date).
Community
The Twitter and Instagram accounts, though still at a small following, have been growing steadily. We’ve also created a Discord community, focused on tech and generative art.
The NFT and generative art space absolutely moves fast. I’m continuing to upskill in p5.js, look at inspiration, and evolve this and other projects. More to come!
Any questions — feel free to reach out! And visit the links below:
