from a long time ago i've played with the idea of writing a content generator

during the last decade i learned about art by collecting cultural objects from the internet into my hard drive. collecting texts, images, gifs, videos, even entire webpages. reading, watching, and modifying stuff in my hard drives: cutting out images, texts, gifs and contents i’d find online i started to go deeper into the use of digital tools for image modification and eventually i searched for alternative manipulation strategies like datamosh and databending. half-jokingly but true: tumblr taught me to use photoshop out of the need to make png transparencies or edit gifs.

it was kind of through that process that i began to make gifs, first publishing them on tumblr and twitter, later on newhive (newhive let us use the webpage like a canvas for different objects like pngs, gifs, text and even code, which was perfect to show 3000x3000px gifs lol). this took me down the road of building my own site. websites like paint7c https://canekzapata.net/paint7/c/ or homenaje a carlos merida https://canekzapata.net/carlosmerida/ — many of those visual strategies and collage experiments are visible in memepaint.fun

i feel like i’ve always learned art from the art of others to do my own art. i usually write while reading, and my poems are always textured by other poems. i feel this especially with (ﾉ>ω<)ﾉ :｡･::･ﾟ’★,｡･::･ﾟ’ https://canekzapata.net/object-generator/object.html a random gif object on tezos, a generator of objects based on my past decade's collection, already integrating a bot to generate titles and additional text for the outputs.

i’ve long been playing with the idea of writing a content generator. collage.py is that content generator. i started writing it at the end of last september under the idea that with the amount of AI-generated images in my hard drive, there’s already more than enough to create collages. but i am not the kind of person who manually cuts things out—and that’s something i’ve learned over this past decade—i like seeing what the machine decides, i like creating the right environment for it to generate cultural objects that humans can appreciate.

and as i still hold many of my teachings around glitch and my machine doesn't have much more power than the usual basics, i started thinking about code that could crop images, inject noise, shift the hue, rotate, transform, cut in weird ways and repeat the image while printing it on a canvas. later i asked it to draw lines and geometric shapes, and eventually, by mid-october, i connected my code to write with markov chains (something i’ve been exploring since 2017) — and there, the path diverged.

there are artists who are clear in their heads about what they want to do and what will happen. and then there are those who fly out to search for things. i’m one of the second kind. i decided to remove the images from collage.py and leave only the drawing of lines, geometric and abstract shapes, and the text generator with markov. the result, Writing poetry with a computer is post-human, is one of my favorite collections on objkt: a poem generator that questions our way of reading. and this kairos, this happy place led me to think of a version in time, not just in space, to confront the reading of animated text, like Writing poetry with a computer II. About time,.

and that was until just a few days ago, when i decided to remix the deviants, and among the ideas i had was to use collage.py — only without the drawings, lines, or text — just the collage generator. and seeing the results (and here i open a parenthesis to say: the tezos art community is quite collaborative and that's something to appreciate), Sabato and xer0x have been trying for a while to introduce me to their dark animated magics and i’ve just been slow. but thinking a bit about those old animators and the work of many artists making animated gifs, i took on the task of cataloging movements, collage strategies, and animation techniques and return to collage.py (almost jokingly now called the hasdrubal generator) and make it animate in different ways the clippings it selects: a random gif generator.

in this collection i’ll gather some of the outputs generated by collage.py.

gif 512x732px 67 frames 8.22mb miércoles 28 de marzo 2025 17:34:35 cdmx