draw-something

By Rhea Myers

An artistic image generator inspired by Harold Cohen's AARON.

What is the minimal behaviour a program needs to display to be considered an analogue to human creativity?

Can we better understand our own artmaking by encoding it?

Can we recognise inhuman aesthetics?

Installation

You will need a Common Lisp environment.

The scripts included use sbcl via Roswell:

https://roswell.github.io/

The basic draw-something system has been written to have no dependencies.

Simply link this directory to your Common Lisp system's local-projects/ directory. This will be ~/.roswell/local-projects for Roswell.

Dependencies for the GUI, for testing, and for the smaller programs in sketches/ can be installed using quicklisp, which Roswell should include:

https://www.quicklisp.org/beta/

Some dependencies may need newer versions than are included in Quicklisp. These should be cloned from their git repositories.

They may also need modifying to support some architectures:

At the time of writing, on macOS under m2 Apple Silicon, the required libraries are for the sketches/ directory are:

cl-sdl2
cl-sdl2-image
cl-sdl-ttf
sdlkit
sketch

Usage

Creating Drawings

./draw-something

Sketches

The folder sketches/ contains workbenches/sketches for exploring and visualizing behaviuours for the larger draw-something system.

You'll need sketch installed:

ros install vydd/sketch
ros groundhog.lisp

Clicking on the sketch window usually restarts the process.