James Ashford
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jelashford.bsky.social
James Ashford
@jelashford.bsky.social
610 followers 3K following 58 posts
Researcher in Machine Learning and Genetics. Here to explore projects in ALife and machine learning - particularly interested in self organising systems and interpretability! (he/him)
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jelashford.bsky.social
Excellent decor at the Graduate Hotel Cambridge!
A wood floored, white and blue walled, room with a large wooden punt placed vertically in the centre of the image, pointing with it's bow to the ceiling. On the side of the punt, the sequence "LV 426" is written in white lettering. A large hotel atrium, viewed from above with a glass wall and a reception desk directly below. I'm the centre of the shot is a model of a DNA helix made of stick and ball shapes with different colours for the different atoms.
October 26, 2025 at 11:54 AM
jelashford.bsky.social
woe. knee pain be upon me.
A screenshot of a Garmin connect run log. The map at the top shows the route of the Oxford Half Marathon 2025, snaking through the city centre and branching up to Summertown and Marston. The text fields below list the distance (21.39km) and the time taken (2:08:15) which averages out to a 6:00 per km pace -which I'm very happy with! The calorie information I consider pretty suspect. My heart rate averaged 183 BPM and WOW I felt that!! Photograph of a very sweaty me, with messed up dark brown hair and a wide grin on my face. My glasses are slightly steamed up. I'm wearing a bright yellow shoulderless running top, and holding up my participant medal, which is a the shape of an archway in light blue, with the words Oxford Half written over a silhouette of the Radcliffe camera skyline. I'm holding a water bottle in the same hand as the medal, which is full (but was emptied very quickly after the photo!). There's a large crowd of runners behind me, all looking quite tired. The street behind is lined with dark green leaved trees behind me, as well as a metal railing, on the left, and a cream stone angular modern building on the right.
October 12, 2025 at 12:52 PM
jelashford.bsky.social
I've been exploring around and there's some doozies! Even managed to find a few with gliders like in GOL! :)
A black and white pixellated image, where the background appears black populated by large diagonal rectangles white rectangles. These are arranged randomly, and interspersed with small white dots. A white canvas with a small constellation black points and crosses in the centre. Along the falling diagonal is a highway of black pixels that look like tyre tracks, that have looped from the bottom right around to the top left (via the bottom left).
April 26, 2025 at 10:20 PM
jelashford.bsky.social
Okay - so the update rule doesn't use the `self` state, only the neighbours? Here's what I get applying those rules for 400 steps from random, it's similar to yours! I've put the code up here: github.com/JELAshford/l...
April 26, 2025 at 9:05 AM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary31 #genuary Pixel Sorting. A gentle finish to the month (only a bit late!) remixing my day 2 art. Love how concise this is with numpy. Code here: github.com/JELAshford/g...
An image, with clear columns, has been agressive sorted by luminance to form a sharp, agressive set of colour pillars. The image is predominantly black and white, with streaks of neon green and purple.
February 4, 2025 at 7:51 PM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary30 #genuary Abstract map! Another experiment with Perlin noise and thresholds. Code here: github.com/JELAshford/g...
A black and white series of swirls, the white areas look like bodies of water and the black areas are land with white contour lines.
February 4, 2025 at 6:48 PM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary29 #genuary Grid-based graphics! Lots of rectangles, with random rotations applied to squares arranged in a grid. Sort of forest-y! Code here: github.com/JELAshford/g...
A field of green and blue shaded rectangles layered on top of each other, with random rotations applied to squares layed out on a regular grid. These rotations give each rectangele arms and tendrils, that reach out over their neighbours.
February 3, 2025 at 11:09 PM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary28 #genuary Infinite scroll! I'm back from the house move, I can finally finsh these off. Here's some infinitely looping random walks - that always come back to the same spot! Code here: github.com/JELAshford/g...
February 3, 2025 at 12:15 PM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary27 #genuary Interesting with no randomness or trig. Like others, this prompt screamed elementary cellular automata to me! I used a window of 5 instead of 3 (4.3 billion rule combinations instead of 256!) and searched for a cool pattern. Code here: github.com/JELAshford/g...
A black and white grid, with large diagonal lines reaching from the right to left. On the lower left the lines collide with other short ones from the left of the screen, resulting in cascades of dark triangles that fall downwards.
January 27, 2025 at 11:11 PM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary26 #genuary Symmetry! Behold the bestiary! Each formed from 6 random reflections of a starting central circle - shockingly simple once I learned about point projection. Highly recommend running the code with different seeds: github.com/JELAshford/g...
An 8x8 grid of black squares, each contianing a white "creature" made of circles that have been reflected 6 times. Despite their simple origins, the resulting creatures have a broad diversity of shapes, scales and densities. Some are bunched up and circular, others stretch into long thin filaments.
January 26, 2025 at 7:28 PM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary25 #genuary A line that may or may not intersect. Applied the Chaos Game to the sequence of a random gene from the human genome - this one is "P51532". Code here: github.com/JELAshford/g...
A bright white square with crossing black lines, that describe a continuous path. The dark lines are strongest along the main diagonals, with many lines forming nearly square patterns.
January 26, 2025 at 5:02 PM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary24 #genuary One-shape Geometric Art. I don't really know what this is, but I had fun making it! Code here: github.com/JELAshford/g...
A dark canvas with many multicolour squares randomly scattered, with a warped spiral of smaller squares revealed behind.
January 24, 2025 at 7:45 PM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary23 #genuary Inspired by Brutalism. I wasn't hugely inspired, truth be told, but in the process of building a concrete statue I ended up closer to Thomas Was Alone! It charmed me, like the game. Code here: github.com/JELAshford/g...
4 panels of grayscale constructions, each make of sacked vertical and horizontal rectangles. The stacks rise as if they're growing, with shard rises and plateaus. Some look almosts tree-like.
January 24, 2025 at 5:10 PM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary22 #genuary Gradients with dithering - there are so many different algorithms for this! I implemented "Filter Lite" and "Minimised Average Error" here - can you tell which is which? Code here: github.com/JELAshford/g...
A circular gradient from black to white, going from white in the bottom right corner to black on the top and left sides. The gradient is not smooth, and instead quantised into 10 sahdes and broken up by dithering. The quantisation + dithering introduce banding artefacts, which give the image a wave-like quality.
January 23, 2025 at 11:29 PM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary21 #genuary Custom collisions! Quite happy with the idea even if it costs an entire pixel buffer for each shape! I've demo'd here with circles, red shows collision with cyan, but with `skimage.draw` this can do polygons with no extra cost! Code: github.com/JELAshford/g...
A 3 by 3 grid of dark squares, with many circle outlines in white. A bright cyan cirlce is highlighted, and all circles that collide with it are coloured red.
January 22, 2025 at 10:20 PM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary20 #genuary Generative Architecture. Inspired heavily by the amazing art of Daybreak, in particular the "4th Gen Nuclear" art by Edward Tuckwell. Code here as usual: github.com/JELAshford/g...
A bright white background with a purple/blue tower that looks like it's made of stained glass. Each segment is approximately a long triangle.
January 22, 2025 at 7:37 PM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary19 #genuary Op Art! This one hurt my brain to work out how to make, then hurt my brain to look at - totally worth it though! A riff on Bridget Riley's "Movement in Squares" - you can mess around with the number and position of lines in the code here: github.com/JELAshford/g....
A checkerboard grid distorted by proximity to three vertical and two horizontal lines, creating the illusion of curvature near the intersection of those lines. It strains the eye to look at.
January 20, 2025 at 6:43 PM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary18 #genuary What does the wind look like? A simple but easily extensible/moddable perlin noise experiment - refreshingly familiar after trying to imagine a world where PI = 4! Code: github.com/JELAshford/g...
Many blue and yellow dots smear smoothly over a white background, seamlessly joining around the edges. It looks a bit like the wind on a weather forecast...I hope!
January 19, 2025 at 12:59 AM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary17 #genuary What if PI=4? A deeply confusing prompt for me, and the output reflects this. Code here: github.com/JELAshford/g...
January 19, 2025 at 12:20 AM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary16 #genuary Generative palette. I generated a palette. Am I doing this right?? MeanShift was fun to learn about, and it was interesting messing with emedding the pixel positions as well as the colours. Code here: github.com/JELAshford/g...
A landscape picture of a green valley with a wider rier runnign within it, under heavy high cloud cover. The image has been reporduced with only a hadnful of colours, the palette for which is shown on a subfigure on the right hand side.
January 16, 2025 at 6:30 PM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary15 #genuary Design a rug! It's time for more bitfields!! :D Code: github.com/JELAshford/g...
A pixel-y rug with a dark background, with a strong square motif. The squares are mainly green, blue, and yellow. Many of the squares interlink, and there is a slight asymmetry that becomes visible in the lower right quadrant.
January 15, 2025 at 7:00 PM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary14 #genuary Black and White. I could spend hours messing around with different bitfield combinations - surprising things happen after really minor looking changes. Code here: github.com/JELAshford/g...
A black and white image, bright colums interspersed with black regions like tree bark. Each column has a black vertical line deliniating them, with some of the lines bleeding out horizontally in the top right.
January 14, 2025 at 10:30 PM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary13 #genuary Only Triangles! I leaned into the spikyness, and draw a sort of triangle chain-forest. It unsettles me. Code here: github.com/JELAshford/g...
A white square criss-crossed with tight lines of darkening triangles, creating a tight enclosed feeling despite the bright background.
January 14, 2025 at 9:48 PM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary12 #genuary Subdivisions AKA The Grid! Very satisfying to make this, love how the random level of grid detail draws me into different parts of the image.
Grayscale square image that has been radomly segmented into increasingly small rectangles. The grid appears to be overall chopped into thirds on both axes, but no clear seams are visible. Looks a bit like farmland from a plane, or a city plan, or a digital frontier...
January 13, 2025 at 9:25 PM
jelashford.bsky.social
#genuary2025 #genuary11 #genuary Impossible! I tried something that I knew would be a stretch, so it took me 2 days. Generating pictures with a CPPN using CLIP emebedding to optimise the target. This is "a sailboat" apparently - not sure I quite agree but it's pretty at least!
A smooth rainbow surface is stretched across the image, with storng purple and yellow tones.
January 12, 2025 at 6:34 PM