“Tokyo” Takuya Yamauchi, 2020. SIGGRAPH Asia 2020 Art Gallery
“Tokyo” is a generative artwork created by visualizing continuous recorded Tokyo temperature data obtained from the Japan Meteorological Agency from 1990 to 2017, and then printing out the result in a creative manner. The colored dots in the artwork reflect the temperature of each day. Cold days were colored in blue while warm days were displayed in orange. There are two primary reasons for using natural phenomena, such as temperature data in generative art creation. First, the data allows us to embrace and comprehend the unpredictability of natural phenomena. Second, when used with a generative algorithm, it makes possible data visualization in ways that allow us to create abstract art. Since there are massive amounts of historical temperature data, such artwork would be impossible to create without computers. Simple patterns like noise are not always random and often contain repeating patterns that can be expressed harmoniously. The seeming randomness of dots showing temperature distributions of hot summer days can be painted as patterns that result in abstract artwork. When applied to Tokyo temperature data, the stain-like patterns that resulted are among the most attractive characteristics of generative art painting and would be difficult to express without the generative algorithm.
