Hi, my name is Hans and this is my site to showcase some of my artwork. I thought it would be nice to say a few things about myself and my work. I retired in 2020 at the age of 57 since I was bored to death with the work I was doing. So, I resigned from my job and started to develop some ideas of what to do with my new freedom and the plenty of spare time I had now.
I did a bit of research on the subject of computer generated art. I picked Processing as the tool of choice and got quickly comfortable with it. I was excited by the endless possibilities of computer generated visualisations and how complexity quickly emerges even from simple things, so that sometimes visual results are generated, that are not only attractive but also trigger some resonance with the observer. If this happens, I believe, we call it art.
Yes, it is trivial but true, art is int the eye of the beholder. At the beginning I didn’t even dare to think that what I produce is art, as the results were rather mediocre. You will witness by yourself as I left them on the site, as a kind of history of my own journey. I had no idea where to go, what to achieve and how to do it, simply trying out things. But step by step I got a more critical view at my work and I challenged myself to get better and to continue to try out new approaches. By doing so I learned a lot, not only on the technical aspects of programming generative art but also about our human perception and viewing habits.
I want to finish with a few explanations about how I work. I don’t do any drawings with the mouse or use any other input data. Everything that’s needed to generate the image is contained within my program code itself, which is stopped and stored in a file after a few dozen, a few thousand or in some rare occasions a few hundred thousand of iterations. I don’t do any post processing of the picture via Photoshop or GIMP and I don’t use any pre-built filters. I don’t use any videos or pictures as input to change, corrupt or resample them, nor do I some other forms of glitch art. Over the course of last year (2023) I did a bit of work on using pictures as input, the results are collected in the Project section.
What you see on the site is usually a downsized version of 20-30% of the size of the original file, which obviously degrades quality. If you are interested in an original version printout you can visit my store at https://hansbeil.shopify.com.