Geometry, abstraction, and chance
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Group IV, No. 3. The Ten Largest, Youth - Hilma af Klint, 1907
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Suprematist Composition - Kasimir Malevich, 1916
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Circles in a Circle - Wassily Kandinsky, 1923
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Highway and Byways - Paul Klee, 1928
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Rotorelief 1 (Optical Disks) - Marcel Duchamp, 1935
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Concentric Squares - Josef Albers, 1941
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Study for Meschers - Ellsworth Kelley, 1951
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Red Meander - Annie Albers, 1954
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Burn - Bridget Riley, 1964
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Wall Drawing 11 - Sol Lewitt, 1969
What is Generative Art?
Generative art is art programmed using a computer that intentionally introduces randomness as part of its creation process.
Myth One:
The artist has complete control and the code is always executed exactly as written. Therefore, generative art lacks the elements of chance, accident, discovery, and spontaneity that often makes art great, if not at least human and approachable.
Myth Two:
The artist has zero control and the autonomous machine is randomly generating the designs. The computer is making the art and the human deserves no credit, as it is not really art.
Early Examples of Generative Art
Schotter (Gravel) - George Nees ,1968
Schotter starts with a standard row of 12 squares and gradually increases the magnitude of randomness in the rotation and location of the squares as you move down the rows.
Hommage à Paul Klee - Frieder Nake, 1965
As with many innovations, there were several pioneers exploring the potential for generative art in its first few years. Frieder Nake and Michael Noll, along with Georg Nees, were all exploring the use of computers to generate art. Back then, computers typically had no monitors, and the work was shared by printing the art on plotters, large printers designed for vector graphics.
Walk Through Raster, Frieder Nake 1966
Victoria and Albert Museum online collection
P62, Manfred Mohr 1970
Victoria and Albert Museum online collection
P197, Manfred Mohr 1977-79
Victoria and Albert Museum online collection
Pioneering Women of Generative Art
"Without the aid of a computer, it would not be possible to materialize quite so faithfully an image that previously existed only in the artist's mind. This may sound paradoxical, but the machine, which is thought to be cold and inhuman, can help to realize what is most subjective, unattainable, and profound in a human being."
Vera Molnàr
Interruptions - Vera Molnár, 1968/69
(Dés)Ordres - Vera Molnár, 1974
Untitled - Vera Molnár, 1985
Pixillation, photographic film stills - Lillian Schwartz, 1970
MIT summer sessions poster - Muriel Cooper, 1958
"The shift from a mechanical to an information society demands new communication processes, new visual and verbal languages, and new relationships of education, practice, and production."
Muriel Cooper
John Maeda and
the MIT Media Lab
John Maeda - The Laws of Simplicity
The Birth of Processing
Number of times the Processing software is opened on unique computers each month from 2005 to early 2018. This graph was originally published in Fry and Reas' excellent article on the history of Processing, "A Modern Prometheus."
Substrate - Jared Tarbell, 2003
Intersection Aggregate - Jared Tarbell, 2004
"When you write a program, it’s going to be executed the same way every single time. So if you define a system like this where things can happen at random, as the creator, you can be surprised by your own program, which is really great."
Jared Tarbell
Joshua Davis, Flash, and Praystation
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ps3-praystation-v1 - Joshua Davis, 2001
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Shapeshifter|Sonic Architecture - Joshua Davis, 2001
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ps3-praystation-v1 - Joshua Davis, 2001