What Is Generative Art? A Quintessentially Modern Art Form

What Is Generative Art? A Quintessentially Modern Art Form

Many think of Generative Art as a crypto-art practice, but its aesthetic roots span a century of avant-garde movements – from Dada and Surrealist automatic drawings to Conceptual rules-based processes.
Many think of Generative Art as a crypto-art practice, but its aesthetic roots span a century of avant-garde movements – from Dada and Surrealist automatic drawings to Conceptual rules-based processes.

O ne of the most-discussed New York art exhibitions in the last year has been, perhaps for the first time, a work of generative art. While it is typically described as being created by artificial intelligence, in Refik Anadol’s “Unsupervised,” at the Museum of Modern Art, the AI is employed as a tool to generate a work of art – the latest example in a long history of artists defining rules and protocols within a process of algorithmic production. It may have divided critics, but it certainly mesmerized crowds.

It is a high point of visibility for a genre that came into existence more than half a century ago: works made using algorithmic codes or mathematical formulas, in which the artist grants some or all the decision-making to an autonomous system. Its philosophical roots stretch back to the early 20th century, when Dada and Surrealist artists prized chance and unpredictability, and it began in earnest in the 1950s, when artists and computer experts pressed machines into service to help them generate works of visual art.

Generative Art Exploration Chapter III GRAILS : Property From An Iconic Digital Art Collection

Pioneer Herbert W. Franke used analog systems and cathode-ray oscillographs to create oscillograms in the mid-1950s, and soon, corporations like Siemens and Bell Laboratories were granting artists access to equipment and assistance from their specialists. In 1968, generative art hit the big time at ICA London, with the exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity,” in which other pioneers, including Frieder Nake and Vera Molnár, contributed works such as computer‐animated films, plotter graphics and painting machines. That same year, Harold Cohen began to draw with computers, and five years later, he created AARON, a computer program that itself could draw. John Whitney (perhaps best known for collaborating on the title sequence to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece Vertigo) was a visionary in the world of computer imaging and the first artist-in-residence at IBM.

Dmitri Cherniak, Ringers #879 (Estimate: $2–3 million)

Today, countless artists, professional and amateur, are creating art with technology like artificial intelligence and image generators like Midjourney. And artists such as Larva Labs, Tyler Hobbs and Eric Calderon, aka Snowfro, are creating generative projects on the blockchain, bringing together a decades-long art practice with the new technology behind the boom in NFT artworks. Several examples in the GRAILS collection – the second part of which heads to the block on 15 June, featuring practitioners like Dmitri Cherniak, Tyler Hobbs and Snowfro – are among the most acclaimed generative works of our day.

Cherniak’s “1,000 Ringers generates geometric forms according to a set of rules mimicking a piece of string wrapped around pegs of varying thickness. It took three years of work in JavaScript before he could release the project on the Art Blocks NFT trading platform. “On the surface it may seem like a simple concept,” he wrote, “but prepare to be surprised and delighted at the variety of combinations the algorithm can produce.” Collectors were indeed delighted: the works, referencing earlier artists such as László Moholy-Nagy, immediately sold out. Ringer #879, seemingly representing a bird and often referred to as “The Goose,” demonstrates the unexpected results that can come from chance.

Tyler Hobbs’s Fidenza #479 (left) will be offered in GRAILS Part II on 15 June. Fidenza #725 (right) sold for $1,016,000, five times its high estimate, in The Contemporary Day Auction on 19 May.

Hobbs’s “Fidenza” works derive from what the artist has described as his most versatile generative algorithm, with flexible core structures that allow for great variety. They are based on a “flow field” algorithm that generates organic, curved shapes. The series of 999 works sold out in minutes. They are marked by curving, organic shapes that never overlap, with varying degrees of what the artist calls “turbulence” and a variety of thickness of shapes, all in color palettes the artist selected to harmonize well. When Fidenza #725 passed the block during the recent Contemporary Day Auction, it found a buyer for over $1 million, five times its high estimate.

Larva Labs, Autoglyph #187 (2019). Sold for $571,500, over 3 times its high estimate.

The second project from the team that created the massive hit CryptoPunk NFTs, Larva Labs’s “Autoglyphs respond to the technical nature of the NFT phenomenon in an innovative way. Whereas NFTs typically include a link that points to an asset (such as a digital image) that is stored elsewhere, Larva Labs’s Matt Hall and John Watkinson created works that themselves reside in the very limited space available on the blockchain: simple, black-and-white geometric designs. Tying the modern art form to its roots, they pay homage to both the wall drawings of Conceptual artist Sol Le Witt – which are themselves a kind of generative art, since Le Witt defined the rules for artworks that were then physically created by other artists according to his orders; today, artists are expanding this principle while encoding similar systems on the blockchain. The “Autoglyphs” also formally resemble, and pay tribute to, the digital generative art of the 1960s and 70s.

No less a commentator than Blake Finucane, writing in the online journal Outland, has referred to the Chromie Squiggle, by Snowfro (Calderon), as “the genesis” of the generative art now being made with crypto technology, and one of “the absolute classics.” The first project on the vital trading platform Art Blocks, founded by Calderon himself, the Squiggle represents a multicolored digital serpent and forms a modern equivalent the “brushstroke” paintings of Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, concisely encoding the gesture of artmaking itself.

With a lineage drawn over the length of a full century, generative art is an important modern art form, and considering the rapid increases in the power and sophistication of the computing systems artists are using to create it, it’s sure to take untold forms over the years to come.

NFTs

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