MysticSymbolic Development

Mystic Symbolic  is a Visionary Art Generator.

After a night spent looking at “visionary art,” I awoke wanting to make some. As I sketched, I realized that with a vocabulary of a symbols, a computer program could do the same thing.

I reached out for a coding collaborator and found the brilliant Atul Varma almost immediately. Thus our collaboration began.

Atul and all of MysticSymbolic’s contributors have day jobs, so it falls to me, the artist and visual designer, to raise some money so we can PAY him (or an equally competent collaborator) to dedicate some serious time to whipping it into shape.

MysticSymbolic currently lets you randomly generate “creatures ” - really compositions - using a vocabulary of over 100 visual symbols I’ve been designing and testing over the last several weeks.

The same symbols appear in randomly-generated mandalas , with some limited animation functions. Atul also made these controllable animated waves , based on the way I animate waves in my films . Thanks to the contributions of Maneesh Yadav, we have the beginnings of procedurally-generated colors; thanks to contributor Dave Weaver, we have experiments running on a separate web site .

But these represent the mere embryo of what MysticSymbolic will be, if we can get some quality dedicated coder time. Then it will be able to generate complete compositions with animated backgrounds and harmonious colors. In addition to waves and clouds, we’ll create a landscape generator and a building generator that can dot it with castles and villages. Our “creature” generator will have rudimentary animation built in. New symbols will be possible if we get our “mating halves ” feature coded. Many more effects will be possible once we support svg masking and shape recognition . Ultimately we will be able to generate a variety of animated tarot cards ; once MysticSymbolic can do that, it can do anything.

What do you get for contributing? MysticSymbolic is a Free Culture, Open Source Software project. We’re giving it to everyone as we create it, and you can use the assets or fork the software already. But there will be more and better assets to use and code to fork, if we can afford more work-time.

We think it would be great if MysticSymbolic could exist as I envision it, for anyone and everyone to use, share, and develop further. If you want it to exist too, please contribute. Thank you!