I've never identified as a creative coder — I'm much more motivated by the process of learning how something is made, compared to using code as a creative tool. I had a chance to take a class framed as "Recreating the Past", which aimed to recreate key programmatic art. It was a great way to understand technology like shaders, and concepts like image processing algorithms,
My final project was a Chinese calligraphy (shufa) simulator. I had studied and practiced in high school, but hated cleanup. Why not try to do it on the computer?
For the first part of the course, we focused on replicating and remixing work. For example, compare Arabesque by John Whitney with my recreation.
Often, the most enjoyable part wasn't the exact replica of the piece, but the bugs we ran into along the way. Here are some glitches that I ended up liking more than the end result while recreating Raven Kwok's work, using my surname in Chinese.
