Artwork Guidelines

As I mentioned in the introduction post:

We're going to focus on web art; basically any kind of visual display that uses code you can run on a webpage, from simple CSS to gnarly WebGL and everything in between. Furthermore, it's got to run automatically and not require interaction. Ideally it fills the available screen space. Most importantly: there has to be some sort of code involved. I love regular images and videos as well, but there are plenty of showcases for them already.

I figure I'll add a little more detail here, and we can discuss.

I'm interested in all sorts of art, from abstract geometries to naturalistic/representational. I figure even text things are cool, as long as they don't require interaction.

Not requiring interaction is important, so the artwork can be played on passive screens and enjoyed like a painting or sculpture. Interactive art is great, but that's not what we're trying to do here. In addition to not requiring interaction, preferably there's no visible UI either. If your piece does support interaction and does have UI, I propose the convention of adding ?ui=0 to disable the UI.

Since we'll be embedding the artwork, it should also stand alone on its own page and preferably fill that page. Descriptive text about the artwork, for instance, belongs on a different page. Again think of a painting hanging on the wall.

My personal preference is for such artworks not to have sound, but I think that's really up to the artist. Even so, perhaps being able to disable the sound with ?sound=0 would be good.

The goal here is to celebrate art that comes alive somehow with code, so ideally we're looking for things that wouldn't be mistaken for still images or videos. This probably means some kind of nondeterministic animation, either with randomness or with enough complexity that it doesn't just feel like a looping GIF. If it's code that generates a different still image every time it runs, it should automatically rerun itself from time to time, so it stays fresh. Of course these aren't hard rules… Just things to aim for.

These guidelines are a work in progress… Please discuss them here if you have any critiques: https://github.com/pixfabrik/artywidget/issues/9

Code recipes for creating artworks along these lines can be found here: https://codepen.io/collection/XMJpqd/