By Gareth Wilson

September 7, 2018

Randomosity!

Art+Code at XOXO #

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But first, we're excited to tell you about this evening's Art+Code event at XOXO fest. MC'd by our own Director of Community Engineering, Jenn Schiffer, it's an evening of creators working at the intersection of art and technology. Included in the incredible line-up are some of our favorite creators from the Glitch community, including Monica Dinculescu, Omayeli Arenyeka and Mozilla Open Web Fellow, Becca Ricks.

AI-powered Interactive Music #

OK, let's get into the apps! First up we have "incredible-spinners", an AI-powered interactive music experience created by software developer and music hacker Tero Parviainen.

Tero has combined Google Magenta MusicVAE, Magenta.js, TensorFlow.js, Tone.js, and three.js to create a musical experiment in which you can listen and move around a grid of musical measures generated by a neural network, creating your own musical patterns.

Do yourself a favor though and try it out on your desktop computer. This thing is making TensorFlow work hard in the browser and your mobile phone will struggle to keep up.

Remember This One? #

is a random episode generator which links off to Netflix for easy viewing. Cory Evan Wright captures the randomness of TV re-runs with this little app that's perfect for cord-cutters and Friends fans alike.

Become the Curator #

With "curator-and-the-machine", Stefan Bohacek explores ideas of creativity and authorship. You can curate the output of a random generative art script and share it via the @curator_machine Twitter bot. Currently, every visitor sees a unique artwork, but what if everyone saw the same thing? Should curating the artwork reset it? and should the curator have more influence over the art? Try it out and see what you think.

Make Your Own Art #

Inspired by a lightning talk about generative art, Matt DuLeone created "tranquil-island" - a generative art maker. Change the background color, line thickness, cell width and shape to customize and create your own generated art masterpiece.

An Array of Live Coded Visuals #

We've featured Olivia Jack's Hydra before. It's a set of tools for livecoding networked visuals. But it has been great to see the amazing things being created by music hackers and tinkerers using it on Glitch.

Of course, the above aren't the only great apps you can find on Glitch this week -- we regularly feature projects on glitch.com itself. And starting this week, we're doing something new and fun. We'll be featuring different artists illustrating the featured apps, to help you discover the coolest new projects and show off the community's creativity.

So this week, our inaugural set of featured apps have been illustrated by Roman Muradov. Muradov is an award-winning artist who is Adjunct Professor at California College of the Arts. He's worked with major publications like The New Yorker and the New York Times, as well as tech brands like Dropbox and Notion. See more of his work on Instagram and his website.

Talking Tech with Baratunde Thurston 🗣️🎙️ #

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We haven't just spent the week playing around with awesome apps though (we pinky promise!) We squeezed in some time to chat with comedian and best-selling author Baratunde Thurston. We got into topics like the current climate around data privacy, social media, and why he uses humor to tackle tough topics. Check it out.