About

grimoire is a reference for making code-based art. Every page explains one thing and embeds code you can run, steer and break.

Who it is for

Someone who already wants to make something and needs a specific thing to do it — the algorithm stated in the order you would implement it, what each parameter does to the picture, and what it looks like when you get it wrong.

It is deliberately not a general encyclopedia of the field. That decision is enforced rather than aspirational: an entity only exists here if knowing it changes what a practitioner does. "Poisson-disk sampling" qualifies. "Generative art" does not — which is why the term has no page, and why this one is the only place it gets defined.

So — generative art

Art where the artist builds a system and the system produces the work. You write rules; the rules draw. What you control is the space of possible outcomes rather than any single one, and the craft is in shaping that space until the things it produces are worth looking at.

That idea long predates computers — Sol LeWitt's wall drawings are instructions executed by someone else, and François Morellet let a phone directory decide where 40,000 squares went. A computer makes the loop fast enough to explore rather than merely execute.

How pages get here

Drafted by machine from a curated corpus of 272 verified sources, then checked against the evidence they cite. Specifically:

• No claim survives without a quote that is verifiably present in the fetched source. That is a script, not a promise.
• Every page is checked by asking one question — which sentences are not supported by this evidence? A correctly-cited claim the source never actually made is the characteristic failure, and it is invisible to everything else.
• Every embedded sketch is loaded in a real browser and required to draw, respond to its controls, and reproduce each of its documented failure modes.
• A page is earned: two independent sources, or an algorithm complete enough to yield a real runnable. Everything else is still covered — as a section on the page it belongs to, rather than as a thin page of its own.

What it still gets wrong

Attribution and dates are the errors most worth telling us about, and the ones automated checks are worst at. Pages carry a revision number; see corrections.

Code that came from someone else is recorded as such, with a link to the original — see attribution and the reuse policy. If you would rather your work were not reproduced here, one email removes it.