Oh guess what, I’m thinking about generative art and pattern languages - here comes whatever threads are called here:

the timeless way / mythic mode / painting / conviviality

So while it has the common characteristics of the pattern, as a _center_ of wholeness/life it is entirely unique. His favorite example was leaves on a tree, but of course this applies to main entrances to buildings etc

His early work emphasized the underlying structure of the pattern. His later work emphasized the immediacy of the _center_. How do I help _this_ center to become more alive? The pattern is a helpful direction to that end

His fundamental question was how to arrive at a creative process of unfolding for making buildings that moved like nature — to encode a generative pattern that retains and strengthens wholeness and emergent adaptation to personality and context

His theory was there are infinite processes, but not all of them are capable of creating life. We can study natural processes of transformation to find approaches to try.

There’s a quote, I think from Cezanne but I can’t find the source, that all great art movements begin with a return to nature. For me as a painter who works in physical mediums with real paint on real surfaces, this means I draw and paint “from life.”

Meaning I look at the real world in front of me and try to record my perceptions as accurately as my mind, eye, and hand will allow and end up with a still image, but if I am painting well, one that has a sense of life and movement.

I’m not well versed in the huge amount of generative art projects that have been made, but from what I’ve seen I think the most moving and captivating collections are doing the same thing, using the theme and variation of pattern and adaptation.

I hope that the best projects are taking generative mathematic loops from their senses and measurements of nature — the proportions and physics of how the world moves and transforms across milliseconds or days.

Recording numeric observations of the structure of a leaf is not much different than a painter looking and recording the nuanced shifts in hue and value. Painting is intuitive and emotional, but it’s also highly strategic and logical.

Artists in all mediums find ways to practice both modes of the generative process to create life. All this is to say… share your favorite generative art series with me please! And who is doing interesting one of one pieces that have a generative spirit?

An important detail of Christopher Alexander’s work describing pattern languages is that _instances_ of a pattern are always unique, adapted to both the conceptual/structural context of the pattern and the immediate, tactile reality where it emerges