Context Free Art

To prepare for a new course Evolutionary Graphics in AVA, I am testing the use of various graphical tools. One of them is the Context Free Art. It is a ruled based language to generate complex imagery. It cannot be described as a programming language as it lacks a lot of procedural elements. Its recursive capability makes it a good choice for generative type of graphics.

The Community of Variation book contains the sample of drawings in the gallery.

The drawing is done by typing a sequence of rules on the left hand panel. Press the ‘Render’ button to generate the graphics.

Every ‘program’ starts with a startshape keyword. For example, to draw a circle, we can type in the following:

startshape MyShape

rule MyShape {
     CIRCLE {}
}

To draw a square, type:

startshape MyShape

rule MyShape {
     SQUARE {}
}

To draw a triangle, type:

startshape MyShape

rule MyShape {
     TRIANGLE {}
}