Procedural Art with Computer Graphics Technology

While traditional tools enable visual artists to work only on objects, the computer gives them access to the processes and sources of creative activity. Through dialogue with the model, the artist is no longer limited by the material constraints or the irreversibility of real actions. By emphasizing the process rather than the object, the computer enables formalizing of the creative act and the application of formal categories of discourse. Graduating from the hand to the brain and becoming ‘intelligent’, the tool gives new meaning to the concept of artistic creation and endows the visual artist with a new attitude which leads to ‘procedural art’. In order to define this concept, the author first relates the adventures which led him to change from a traditional painter to a designer of software for artists. He then describes his Anyflo system of three-dimensional animation and synthesis which uses the concept of procedural art in relation to teaching and the production of works generated by computer.