Looking for visual generative art(ists) that are familiar with or interested in Christopher Alexander’s work. I’m toying with the idea of collaborating towards a series of artworks that manifest and demonstrate Alexander’s 15 geometric properties of wholeness in the digital space and which could later on perhaps serve as material for a practical studio course that teaches these properties in a way more accessible to computer people so that they don’t have to become architects first to learn them. I tweeted a little thread about this as a beacon for interested people to find me and to start a discussion (and perhaps even collaboration?). Would greatly appreciate if you helped spread the word to people you know who might be interested. 🙏 https://twitter.com/stefanlesser/status/1322929366251327488?s=21

I would be interested in following this adventure! I have just started exploring generative art and would love to experiment things along this line. I guess you are looking for artists with more experience, that may more or less already use the 15 geometric properties (even subconsciously), but I am really curious about this topic. And it will be a good way for me to enter the Alexander's world.

@ogadaki No, I don’t care about experience, I only care about interest in exploring Alexander’s work. And the 15 properties are just an example that looks promising to me; there might very well be other connections to explore. I’m not aware of anybody having done this before, and there is some thoughtful exploration needed to figure out if and how the 15 properties can map to digital art, but I don’t see any reasons why they shouldn’t.

My homebrew thingy would only allow for geometrical shapes for the immediate future but I can try a hand at this. But as I understand Alexander’s work is more flowy/bouba like than geometric/kiky like. Or I should rather say his is a discerning blend of shapes and I only have got one half of his aesthetic span ready to implement. I will post these works on Twitter and tag you.

@Prathyush That’s great! Please do (tag me). Not sure how much time you want to spend reading Alexander, but book 1 of Nature of Order is about harmonious configuration of centers, which is extremely geometric (Alexander is a trained mathematician). I am just about to finish book 1 and couldn’t help but think of your work several times. I’d really love to hear your take on it…

@Stefan I have been thinking over this on the past few days as my animation library is taking shape. At one point I thought I shouldn't do this because I want to do his work justice. The only book I have read from Christopher Alexander is Notes on the Synthesis of Form. And that is one book I keep revisiting even after years of reading it because it was such a dense book even when it is low on page count. That is one of those life changing books of mine that hinted me to the idea that synergies from different domains could be brought into practices like design/engineering. Re: geometry, I think Christopher Alexander's style is much more in line with that of Frank Lloyd Wright. Both of them have this sort of geometric sense which aligns greatly with nature. So to point out what I mean by the bouba style, I think Ernst Haeckel's work would be exemplary. There's this sort of morphogenetic unfolding nature to whole of Alexander's ouevre which I find culminates in him identifying those 15 patterns. If I understand it correctly, those 15 patterns are a distillation of what he find "animating"/life giving in nature. This is one of the reasons I think it would be injustice if I straight away jump into animating them without imbibing his (dense) context. What do you think?

@Prathyush I didn't expect you to just go ahead and create visualizations of the 15 properties. 😉 I'm still wrapping my head around Alexander's theory myself, and how I want to help form a (software) community around it. What I'd really like to do though, is to have a broader discussion with you specifically about the connections I see between Alexander's theory as described in Nature of Order and the mathematical work you do. I think that would be much easier in a synchronous fashion. Would you be interested in having a video chat about that in the near future?

@Stefan I will definitely be up for a call on this. Since I was feeling to give an interpretation of the kind of aesthetic and ideas I have I created this Figma document on the Strong Centers idea of Christopher Alexander: https://www.figma.com/file/BhsccIVN4ZOAo37s6zCKev/Geometry-of-Life?node-id=0%3A1

@Prathyush I’m not even sure if I’m at a point yet where I should comment on art direction for a Christopher Alexander interpretation, but that Figma looks pretty amazing to me! I don’t understand how you can have such a good understanding of the properties without having read at least book 1 of Nature of Order?! I tried to piece it together from Internet resources before finally reading the book and I can now tell that I failed to grasp it. You don’t seem to have that same issue at all. I will get in touch via DM about a call. Give me a few days… (I’m in a weird moving house situation that went a little sideways.)

@Stefan Hey, thanks a lot for the kind words. Hope you sort out the house shifting issues and looking forward to talking with you soon. Re: understanding strong centers, there’s this thread of philosophy from antiquity from time of Plato/Plotinus I could superimpose on Alexander’s philosophy. I also happen to read an article by him where he mentioned Spinoza, so I was trying to build something with that relation in mind.