Evolutionary art

Evolutionary art is a comparativly recent artform, and is virtually exclusively generated on computers. The basic idea behind evolutionary art is that the artist is able to control the development of a piece of work through some form of "selection", in a manner analogous to natural selection. In all evolutionary art one or more parent pictures or virtual sculptures are mutated and/or crossbred to produce a number of "children", which are then selected again. The more advanced systems allow the artist to assign a "goodness" factor to each child. The results of this "selection" are then used to produce the next "generation". Evolutionary systems allow the artist to generate complex computer artwork without them needing to delve into the actual programming used. Most, if not all, genetic art systems, and many organic art systems, are "Evolutionary".

Genetic art is entirely computer generated, based on the ideas of genetic algorithms. Briefly, and probably wrongly, genetic algorithms work by creating a number of entities which are then selected by some criteria, cross-bred and mutated to produce another generation of entities. Each entitiy has lists of operations which it performs to produce it's own output. The individual operations on the lists are treated as genes, and can be mutated. Cross breeding occurs where two entities are selected by their "goodness" and sections of operations are copied at random from each to produce the next generation. The common link between all sorts of genetic and organic art is the ability to modify some essential factors, in an original. These factors may be just the numbers, the formulae, or some other changable units that are used in the shape.

Organic art is the production of organic looking shapes. [...]

William Latham has converted his FormSynth artistic technique into a computer program called MUTATOR, this can produce complex shapes from simple rules. These shapes are often abstract but can often resemble the underlying shapes seen in living creatures. [...]

The most powerful feature of most Organic art systems is the ability to "mutate" an original, this means that usually you create a form once (or copy one) and then create a whole series of forms all clearly 'descendant' from the original. You can then select the one(s) that you personally prefer and reapply the whole process again, without needing to get too heavily into the actual programming of the shapes.