Dear Gen

http://book.dear-gen.art

Dear Gen is series of generative drawings created by two friends living in different countries, who mailed each other a new drawing every Monday, for 20 weeks. The name of our project is a tribute to beautiful and inspiring project called Dear Data, created by artists Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec. For the Dear data project, Stephanie and Giorgia, who were also living in separate countries, mailed each other hand-drawn post cards with data visualizations covering a broad spectrum of the daily life, from moments of indecision, to laughter and good-byes. Luckily for us, Dear data was later published as book. We loved Dear data, and we though we could do the same with creative coding and generative art.

We decided to run Dear Gen as a creative experiment, divided in weekly chapters. We believe that one week should be enough to keep the project alive and work as a deterrent to our perfectionism. We knew from the get going that this would be an open-source project, which we hoped would also help to demystify the creative process in generative art. We do not believe that our drawings are anyhow superior in technique or aesthetic value, but we hope that the discussion and explanations added to each subject would help readers to explore more creative paths and create drawings of their own.