Code as a creative medium: shaders, demos and generative art

Dylan Beattie's NDC conference talk is a story-driven tour of code as a creative and expressive medium. It touches on quines, live-coded music in Sonic Pi, and his joke language Rockstar, and argues that programming can be art.

Freya Holmér builds up Bézier curves from scratch with animated, interactive visuals, starting from simple linear interpolation and working up to higher-order curves, derivatives and how they are used in graphics. It treats the topic as geometry you can see rather than a formula to memorize.

A tutorial by kishimisu that teaches shader art from scratch, building up a colourful animated fragment shader step by step. It covers the shader mindset, coordinates, distance functions, palettes and iteration, written as GLSL in the browser.

Inigo Quilez live-codes a portrait of a character in a shader, building the whole image from mathematical formulas and signed distance fields. He narrates the process, so viewers see how shapes, shading and color come from code.

Inigo Quilez builds an image from scratch with code, writing a simple shader step by step so the picture emerges from mathematical formulas. It is an introductory entry in his series on procedural graphics.

Inigo Quilez live-codes a whole ray-marched landscape in a pixel shader, using only math and signed distance fields. He builds up terrain, lighting, sky and atmosphere from formulas and explains each step as he goes.

Elevated is a 4-kilobyte intro by Rgba and TBC that won the PC 4k competition at Breakpoint 2009. A flying camera tours a procedurally generated mountain landscape with music, and all of the visuals and sound are generated in real time by the 4096-byte executable.

A recording of A Mind Is Born, a Commodore 64 demo by Linus Åkesson that fits its music and visuals into 256 bytes of code. It plays for more than two minutes.

A high-quality capture of fr-08 .the .product, a 64 kilobyte demoscene intro released by the group farbrausch in 2000. The roughly 11-minute real-time audiovisual piece shows how much animation, 3D scenes and music fit in a tiny executable.

Second Reality, the 1993 demoscene production by Finnish group Future Crew, captured at 60fps. It is a classic MS-DOS demo of real-time effects, music and visuals running on PC hardware of the early 90s.

Moleman 2 is a Hungarian documentary on the demoscene, covering its history, its culture and the creative process behind demos and intros. This is the English version, from 2012.

8088 MPH is a demo for the original 1981 IBM PC with its 4.77 MHz 8088 processor and CGA graphics, released in 2015 by Hornet, CRTC and DESiRE. It shows 1024 colors on CGA and plays sound through the PC speaker.

Martin Donald explains the Wave Function Collapse algorithm, using Sudoku and the idea of superposition to show how it generates tiled content. It is the technique behind procedural maps and images in games like Townscaper.

Sebastian Lague builds a boids flocking simulation in Unity, explaining the rules that produce flocking behavior and how to scale it up with parallelization on the GPU. It is one of his Coding Adventure videos, with a companion code repository.

Generative artist Tyler Hobbs speaks at Strange Loop 2017 about making paintings with code. He explains how an artist's aesthetic decisions can be turned into algorithms and how he works with randomness and control.

Andrew Sorensen's OSCON 2014 keynote, in which he live-codes music on stage using his Impromptu and Extempore environments. He writes and changes code while it plays, treating programming as a live performance.

A video on drawing pictures, including mushrooms, on an oscilloscope by feeding it sound. It shows how splitting the audio channels into x and y coordinates makes the beam trace shapes, and builds intuition for waveforms.

A video on the famous donut-shaped C program that prints a spinning 3D donut in ASCII characters. It shows the code and the rotation and projection math behind it.

Steven Wittens (acko.net) talks about making visual things with maths, showing how basic mathematical ideas turn into interactive 3D graphics in the browser. He draws on his MathBox work and demonstrates how experimenting with equations produces curves, surfaces and other visuals.

A video of SmoothLife, a continuous version of Conway's Game of Life created by Stephan Rafler, which uses real-valued cells instead of on and off. The result is smooth, organic-looking patterns that move and evolve.