I mentioned the other day I was working on an app for generative art, a year or so late to the bandwagon. While playing with it, I stumbled on a great way to generative abstract art, in the vein of bauhaus, and it reminded me of a want I’ve had for years: a screensaver that generates bauhaus-style artwork. I thought I would some day build such a thing out of SpriteKit, but true inspiration never struck. Until I saw the results I was getting out of the Deliberate checkpoint for Stable Diffusion.

This stuff is so awesome to me. Not only does it look, to my eyes, like good abstract art, but a huge advantage to stuff like this is that it bypasses a lot of the issues with current image generation: artifacts and glitches. It can take a lot of time to get a good, coherent piece of art where you expect everyone to have the right number of fingers and arms, and all of their other components in the right position. But with abstract art, none of that matters. Literally every generation is great, because artifacts and glitches only makes something more abstract.

Anyway, if you think the above examples of artwork look good to you, you can grab Ealain over on its GitHub profile, the screensaver displays this style of artwork, freshly generated for you every couple of hours so you’ll likely never see the same piece of art more than once or twice: https://github.com/amiantos/ealain

P.S. Ealain means “art” (in the sense of a profession?) in Gaelic. It’s pronounced something like All-ee-(n)… Like Muhammad “Ali” with the lightest touch of an “n” sound at the end. Weird! But cool. Though… just say “Elaine”, you know you want to.