Context Free Art

I’m entranced by this thing – it’s a context free grammar language and rendering environment for fractal-style art. It was inspired by the fake CS paper generator that used a small CFG (SCIgen) which was well-blogged. It’s downright ingenious; I’ve been around context free grammars and text generation since my baby linguist days, but never seen them applied to making visuals.

The language itself is a little bit like LOGO, which may or may not work for you (I want to read it like Prolog, alas). The app has a surprisingly elegant UI for grad student freeware, which makes it easy to play with the rules for generating the art and see immediate results from tinkering. It includes lots of examples along with a commented Lesson file.

Get it here: Context Free.