With AI-generated art stealing the spotlight, it’s easy to overlook the charm of simpler, rule-based generative art. This article introduces Context Free Art, a tool that enables you to create intricate, beautiful designs using basic rules and recursion.

Context Free Art is perfect for generating fractals, trees, and other patterns with minimal coding.

It’s a recursive, rule-based generation program that provides an intuitive way to observe how complex patterns can emerge from simple, structured rules. By defining a basic “grammar” of shapes and transformations, we can watch intricate, patterns unfold layer by layer. This approach not only offers a visually appealing method for exploring recursion but also illustrates how simple, repeatable rules can model the complexity found in natural systems and abstract data structures.

🔍 Let’s explore how simple algorithms can lead to complex structures. If this sounds interesting, download the software to follow along 🙂

Intro

Context Free (and the command-line tool cfdg) is a digital art program that takes a description of an image and generates it as a bitmap, vector image, or even a movie.