Automondrian

I wrote a program that generates images in the style of Piet Mondrian:

generated Piet Mondrian imitation

Generate more images in this style, including tuning parameters.

A few years ago, I saw a Mondrianizer in the functional language F#.

As early as 1966, people were writing programs that produced Mondrianesque art.

There’s lots of other programs on the web that produce mondrianesque images today:

These links current as of 2022-09-11, never forget.

I was offended by some Windows code monkey writing a non-portable “F#” functional program to do this. So I wrote a portable program, that can run just about anywhere, to make mondrianesque images. My innovation is trying to identify the properties of a mondrianesque painting, and making them tunable.

I think the question that these programs provoke is not, “are these really art?”, because they obviously are art (except maybe craft is missing). The real question is “who owns the ‘intellectual property’?” I mean, the images are fixed in a tangible form, as much as anything is these days.

In 1917, people could argue over whether Mondrian, or Kazimir Malevich or R. Mutt had made “art”. In 2022, we accept that some arrangement of bits is “art”, but argue about “intellectual property”.

Github repo for the source code for my program.