… or Interference Three. Taking the code from No. 68 and turning it up to 11. The audio is by Autechre, from the album Untilted (2005)

STROBE WARNING.

This demographic is changing fast though. As popular computing technology accelerates, more creative people are getting theirs hands on the tools and discovering this novel art form.

While the term Generative Art has only really been in general use since the 1960s, the concept has been with us a lot longer. Generative forms of music, for example, have been around since Mozart. His Musikalisches Würfelspiel (Musical Dice Game) was an early example of a generative artistic system. The idea was to create a Minuet by cutting and pasting together pre-written sections, making selections according to the roll of a dice. Even with a single six sided dice, the number of possible combinations rises very quickly, e.g. by five rolls there are 7,776 possible combinations, with six rolls 46,656. These types of artistic parlour games became very popular in the 18th Century.

In the last century composers such as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Brian Eno expanded upon the idea of generative music. John Cage’s 4’ 33”, his controversial note-less piece defined only by it’s length, takes environmental ambient sounds as it’s only content, meaning no two performances of the work are ever the same. Later, Stockhausen and Eno (and others) experimented with procedural methods of composition, where music is defined by a set of rules or conditions. Eno’s Discreet Music LP (1975) is a fine example of this, the first side of which is a 30-minute piece created by a tape loop feedback system. A synthesised melody was recorded onto a tape machine, the output of which was fed into a second tape machine. The output of the second machine was then fed back into the first machine and the overlapping signals recorded. We know of this process because Eno included a diagram of his setup on the back cover of the LP.

Visual forms of Generative Art started emerging in the 1960s, firstly with computers outputting to plotters, then VDUs, and later more sophisticated forms of print and video. An early pioneer in this area was the artist Manfred Mohr, who published a collection of computer-generated artworks Artificiata I in 1969.

But while the development of GenArt has been closely tied to the evolution of the computer, computers are just a useful convenience. The real tools of GenArt, the underlying constants to the various tools we can use, are the algorithms. Algorithms are a part of the natural world; they have a universality that transcends medium. So while the systems capable of creating GenArt change over time, evolving as technology evolves, the algorithms remain the same. Generative Art may not quite as old as Art itself, but it might be said to be at least as old as mathematics.

To the uninitiated it might seem that learning a programming language creates a huge barrier to entry, but this is not the case. Compared with the other Arts, where there is a minimum skill level necessary for one’s work be taken seriously, with generative art most of the skill doesn’t have to be learned, it is already encapsulated within our tools.

It takes many years to learn to paint, to draw, or to sculpt, but the programming aptitude required to get professional results in generative art can be mastered in a matter of days. I’m writing a book at the moment, due out later in the year, on this very subject. I would hope the first hundred pages will be enough raise anyone, even if they have never programmed before, to a level of proficiency sufficient to call themselves a generative artist.

If you are already blessed with programming skills you are already most of the way there. In fact the main problem for experienced programmers may be unlearning the strict disciplines you are used to.

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Revisiting 9: Interference Patterns. With a nod to Tomato.

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This is almost too subtle to observe. Go make a cup of tea and see what it looks like when you get back.

For more cellular automata fun, try this.

With more traditional art forms; sculpture, painting or film for example; an Artist uses tools to fashion materials into a finished work. This is clearly doing it the hard way. With generative art it is the autonomous system that does all the heavy lifting, the “artist” only provides the instructions to the system and the initial conditions.

The artist’s role in the production process may be closer to that of a curator than a creator. They will create their system, model it, nurture it, refine it, but ultimately their ownership of the work produced may be no more than a parent’s pride in the work of their offspring.

This is hideously unfair of course. We should not underestimate the human role in the collaboration. As well as the programming, the human brings one other important skill – aesthetic judgment. While it is perfectly feasible for computers to develop a sense of aesthetics (there has been plenty of work towards this aim within the field of evolutionary systems), it will never be the best division of labor in a human-machine creative partnership. If we need to calculate Pi to a million digits it would be a misappropriation of resources to set a human brain to this task. Similarly, it is probably best not to leave it to the machines to decide what’s pretty and what isn’t.

There are many varieties of production methods, but to be able to call a methodology “generative” our first hard and fast rule needs to be that there has to be autonomy involved. The artist creates ground rules and formulae, usually including random or semi-random elements, then kicks off an autonomous process to create the artwork. The system cannot be entirely under the control of the artist or the only generative element will be the artist herself. Our second hard and fast rule therefore is there has to be a degree of unpredictability. It must be possible for the artist to be as surprised by the outcome as anyone else.

Creating a generative artwork will always be a collaboration, even if the artist works alone. Part-authorship of any generative work must belong in part to the tools the artist uses; the system that has generated it. Fortunately anonymous autonomous systems are not usually too bothered if their unscrupulous artistic partners decide to steal all the credit.

There are many types of autonomous systems we might choose to collaborate with. My focus has only ever been generating visual artwork using a programming language, but GenArt may also be the product of mechanical systems, games of chance, natural phenomenon or subconscious human behaviour too.

“‘Generative’ is where you lose control of a machine which does exactly what you tell it.”
- eu-gene

On first appraisal, the question “What is Generative Art?” may seem a simple one. But, as is the nature of generative art, there is an emergent complexity even to its very definition. The elucidation most often cited in recent years is attributed to Philip Galanter, Artist and Professor at Texas A&M University, from his 2003 paper “What Is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory”

Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist uses a system, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art.

While this is accurate and descriptive, and a very long sentence with all the right words, a single phrase like this is not enough. I don’t think it quite captures the essence of generative art, which is much more nebulous. In my mind generative art is just another bi-product of our eternal titanic battle between the forces of chaos and order, trying to work out their natural harmony, as expressed in a ballet of light and pixels. But flowery crap like that isn’t going to get us anywhere either.

We have to be very careful treading around this topic, as we want at all costs to avoid trying to define “What is Art?” which is an argument best left alone. The concept of Art can be so fragile and fuzzy that if you were to prod it too much it would simply evaporate. So instead of trying to carve up a subject that doesn’t want to be dissected in search of a pithy description, in my four posts to follow I’m going to take a more delicate and obtuse approach. If I examine what generative art isn’t, I can attempt to a carve away the ground to reveal the figure.

Generative Art Is Not … An Artistic Style
Generative Art Is Not … Your Father’s Art Form
Generative Art Is Not … Difficult (TO COME)
Generative Art Is Not … New (TO COME)

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And furthermore, if we declare our programming as art, aren’t we implying an intent to explore emotion and aesthetic. Can one reasonably expect to create works with emotional resonance using only procedures, logic and mathematics? Relying on a computer to create an artwork and expecting it to connect with a viewer on a human level is surely akin to waiting for an infinite number of monkeys, with an infinite number of synthesizers, to write the perfect pop song.

Herein lies the challenge.

Order and chaos, simplicity and complexity, the mechanical and the organic, are not necessarily at opposite ends of a spectrum. They are symbiotic, intertwined. Any line we might walk between the two is a knife-edge. Our very existence is poised between entropy and order, between the turbulence of a hostile, chaotic environment, the natural world that we would find so difficult to survive unaided, and the simplicity of purest nothingness, the void which is also fatal to our animal needs. We may think we have both mastered the unruliness of chaos and fought off the boredom and madness of purest order. But any living being can testify that there is a constant fluctuation between the two, how no matter how much order you impose upon your life, chaos is never more than a car crash away.

The mechanical and the organic, like order and chaos, are co-dependent; one couldn’t exist without the other. The complex appeals to us as much as the simple, the organic as much as the mechanical. Fashion or mood may sway us more towards one or another in any given situation, but we would never go completely over to one side or the other. For to do so is to stop living, to eradicate chaos is to become a robot, to eradicate order is to become a savage.

Fortunately no one is asking us to take sides. The aim of generative art, if it has any aim at all, is to make something beautiful. We can attempt to use the mechanical to create the organic, starting from order and heading towards chaos, careful not to stray too far in one direction or the other. And if we become adept at this we might be able to consider ourselves both “programmer” and “artist”.

The image shows Newton, painted by William Blake in 1795. To the left of the picture is brightly colored flora and fauna, the complexity of the natural world. To the right is order, the precision of geometry and the compasses. In the middle, between these two incongruous elements, sits Man. Except, in this case, it isn’t just any man, it is Isaac Newton, writer of Principia Mathematica, the founding work of classical mechanics. Blake’s painting is a criticism of Newton’s world-view; he is turning his back upon the beauty of the natural world, his sole interest is in his scroll and compasses.

William Blake was a Romantic, with a capital R. He was part of the Romanticism movement, the artistic, literary and intellectual reaction to The Enlightenment of the late 18th Century. The Enlightenment was the time that heralded the birth of modern science, where purest reason was the dominant philosophical trend. The Romantics feared the coming godless world and clung to the dying remnants of an idea of natural idyll; the aesthetic, the rural and the picturesque. They saw the future on their horizon, the world of the rational and scientific, the future we now live in, and it repulsed them.

The modern computer programmer may adopt the same pose as Newton. She spends her working day entranced before a screen, squinting at a glowing monitor in a dimmed office, making only the barest micro movements with her mouse-hand and keyboard fingers. She may spend the majority of her life focused upon an ordered reality, only dimly aware of what is beyond the screen, outside the window, outside the city. The chaos of the natural world is not welcome in her world of logic, unpredictability is not something one wants from a computers.

The Generative Artist would be the programmer sitting facing the other direction, straddling that rock like Christine Keeler. The Generative Artist comes from the world of logic to look toward the natural world for inspiration.

“From the standpoint of Taoist philosophy natural forms are not made but grown, and there is a radical difference between the organic and the mechanical.

Things which are made, such as houses, furniture, and machines, are an assemblage of parts put together, or shaped, like sculpture, from the outside inwards.

But things which grow shape themselves from within outwards – they are not assemblages of originally distinct parts; they partition themselves, elaborating their own structure from the whole to the parts, from the simple to the complex.”

Alan Watts 1958

Alan Watts, English philosopher and Zen monk, was a Buddhist in a very sixties sense. He was a master of Theology, a Priest, and the author of over twenty books on Zen philosophy. He also experimented with psychedelic drugs, both on a personal level and in laboratory trials. He had plenty to say on the subject of creativity and technology, but never, as far as I know, said anything specifically on the subject of Generative Art.

In the quote above he is talking about the incongruity between the natural world and the man-made, separating creation into the organic and the mechanical. This concept of organic growth, whereby forms are constructed “from within outwards”, describes Generative Art rather well, but in such a clear bilateralism how can we say that a work of computer programming belongs to the world of the organic rather than the mechanical?

Generative Art is neither programming, nor art, in their conventional sense. It is both and neither of these things. Programming is an interface between man and machine; it is a clean, logical discipline, with clearly defined aims. Art is an emotional subject, highly subjective and defying definition. Generative Art is the meeting place between the two, it is the discipline of taking strict, cold logical processes and subverting them into creating illogical, unpredictable and expressive results.

Generative Art is not something we build, with plans, materials and tools. It is grown, much like a flower or a tree is grown, but its seeds are logic and electronics rather than soil and water. It is an emergent property of the simplest of processes: logical decisions and mathematics. Generative Art is about creating the organic using the mechanical.

Watts’ opposing categories of worldly things, the mechanical and the organic, are usually quite easy to separate. A building has straight edges and sharp corners, it is functional and accurate, it is in the realm of the mechanical. A tree is irregular and temporally inconstant, its leaves shake in the wind and shed in the autumn, it is in the realm of the organic. Mechanical things are constructed; they are fashioned, as Watts says, from the outside in. They are built, drawn, assembled, sculpted, manufactured. Whereas organic things are grown, they are self-structuring, holistic. Their forms come about without intent, they do not conform to designs or blueprints.

Like the landscape gardener, the lot of the Generative Artist is to take naturally evolving phenomenon and to fashion them into something aesthetically pleasing. It is finding that point of balance between the beautiful unruliness of the natural world and the desired order of our ape brains. A garden that is unkempt and overgrows is unpleasing to us because it is too far into the realms of the chaotic, whereas concreting the area instead is the tidiest, most ordered of solutions, but it removes all beauty too.

The sweet spot is between the two, where the grass is neat and evenly cut but still no two blades are alike, or move in perfect synchronicity. Where the colours of the flowers are evenly balanced, but not in a way that is exact and precise. The sweet spot is where the “art” lives.

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Watercolour and ink. All excited about Pavement reforming.

I was writing a section for the book on noise and spirals, and this is where it took me.

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Custom noise with disco lights. Remove the commented out parts of the source code for the “easter egg” version.

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Resurrecting 34: Membrane and giving it a new spin. You’ll have to ask Elliot why it’s called “Receiver”. Naming these things is the hardest bit, so I threw it out to Twitter for this one.

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Best viewed projected onto the front of a Brighton church.

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Bring the Noise.