I’m Varun Vachhar — Developer Experience Engineer & Generative Artist. Ask Me Anything!

#ama #podcast #discuss

Hi there!

I'm Varun Vachhar — Developer Experience Engineer at Chromatic, generative artist, and contributor to Storybook. I'm really looking forward to connecting with all of you here!

I was a guest on this week's episode of the CodeNewbie Podcast with @saron

Listen and enjoy!

S16:E2 - What is creative coding and generative art ( Varun Vachhar)

CodeNewbie Podcast

In this episode, Saron and I talked about creative coding and generative art (i.e. art that has been created with a non-human system — either entirely or in part). If you're a member of this community, you probably already know that coding can be incredibly artistic — but believe it or not, that's something many people don't realize!

I’d love to answer any questions you might have about my career, using coding for creative pursuits, component-driven development, or really anything else.

Feel free to ask me anything (AMA) in the comments below!

Top comments (7)

Michael Tharrington • May 19 '21

I'm thinking about music created by generative art and it kind of makes think of this video where James Murphy (of LCD Soundsystem) created music from tennis data:

However, I kind of think this might be different, because a human is involved in selecting the sequences and kind of mixing them together.

Would this still fall under the umbrella of generative art?

Varun Vachhar • May 19 '21

Hey Michael,

Yea generative music is totally a thing. One of my favourite examples is disasterpeace.com/blog/january

You can create audio on the web using the Web Audio API. However, there are more specialized tools for this. For example, Ableton, nodalmusic.com/ or supercollider.github.io/

That said, I don't have much experience with this. There is a getting started tutorial on Coding Train: youtube.com/watch?v=Bk8rLzzSink

Michael Currin • May 27 '21

I did a write up on Sonic Pi for writing music with code. And it can be used for live performances with a file on a loop that is changed in real time.

michaelcurrin.github.io/coding-blo...

Michael Tharrington • May 25 '21

Very cool, I love the example you shared.

Gracie Gregory (she/her) • May 17 '21

Hi Varun! Generative art is so fascinating to me. Is there an example (outside of your own awesome work in this space) that you find particularly inspiring?