John Pound made a fine career of weird cartoons. His great success came in 1984, when he collaborated with underground comics legend Art Spiegelman on the first run of Garbage Pail Kids trading cards. But something happened in the late '80s that set Pound's weird cartoons on a slightly different course: He bought his first computer. Ever since, Pound's been obsessed with making cartoons from code, a passion that's had him tinkering with comic-drawing algorithms for the better part of the last two and a half decades. This video shows those algorithms at work.
Pound, now retired and living in California, started by teaching himself PostScript, a programming language used for commercial printing. When he was just getting started, he let the computer go wild, but he quickly discovered that pure randomness typically doesn't look all that interesting. Pound saw better results when he contained the chaos, so he started adding intricate rules and parameters to his programs to guide the creative process. Pound might supply the general guidelines for a smiley face, for example, but he'd leave it to the program to decide its expression, its color, and its position in the composition. With time, Pound came to see his computer not as a tool so much as a collaborator.
In contrast to the mathematical look of much of today's code art, Pound's computer-made compositions have a sort of naive charm. You could think of them as outsider art for the computational era. They're often beguiling and occasionally amazing. They've been exhibited alongside his commercial work in some small galleries, and Pound's currently looking for a publisher to collect some of his favorites in a book.
In the case of the video, though, the process is as interesting as the product. It's an enjoyably bizarre visual joyride, but it's also an intriguing document of a computer program at work. As the cartoons materialize, one on top of the next, you start to get a feel for the logic of Pound's code. You can intuit the different grids it utilizes and sense the library of objects it draws from. Gradually, you see patterns. In aggregate, the pieces hint at the rules and parameters that govern them.
There's also something about the speed at which it all happens. The clip shows a computer program churning out dozens of tiny haphazard works in very rapid succession, much as you'd expect of a computer program. But it doesn't produce them instantaneously. The cartoons don't just appear, fully formed. Instead, they're constructed, piece by piece, as if they're being made by a person on super-fast-forward. Some cartoons are finished in a blink, but others take a full two or three seconds for the program to complete.
This could be attributed to Pound's code (he admits it's unruly), or perhaps to aging hardware, but it makes for compelling viewing. It has the effect of bringing the computational proceedings down to a clip discernible to human brains and eyeballs, letting you actually see this thing making decisions. It's a unique pleasure. You don't often get to see an algorithmic work in progress.
