WesRecs X gm.press #001
A collection of recommended reading & viewing focusing on generative art for collectors, appreciators, practitioners, & the curious.
An occasional series wherein I gather various articles, videos, essays, etc. (both old & new) that consider generative art in some way while providing some notes and thoughts on why I believe they’re most definitely worth your time. Brought to you via the gm.press branch of gmDAO, a community of NFT collectors, artists & investors.
📜 Table of Contents (quick links directly to the recs discussed in full further below):
🗞 Beyond the Janus-Faced Typologies of Art and Technology — A fantastic long read from Charlotte Kent in the Brooklyn Rail looking at the exceedingly long relationship between art, tech, & power.
🗞 There should be no Computer Art — 50 years ago a pioneer of generative hard had concerns about the use and purpose of the field. They are as resonant as ever today.
🎬 Generative Art Speedrun — A video introduction to the basics of generative art that is the best single primer that I’ve yet seen.
🖼 Beyond the Janus-Faced Typologies of Art and Technology
Charlotte Kent
The Brooklyn Rail [July -Aug 2022]
Not just what and how, but why and for whom, to what end and when, are all important questions to contextualize an artist’s work. Amid the myriad crises of our times and the existential angst of the exponentially growing click-rate compulsion of our lives, we need art to help us see where we are.
When Charlotte Kent is writing about art, especially art on the blockchain, I pay attention. The thoughtful, perceptive, and multi-faceted approach that she brings to her writing for a general audience in publications such as ArtNet, Wired, & The Brooklyn Rail consistently manages to provide depth and nuance to whatever subject happens to be at hand and doesn’t shy away from asking necessary questions about power, money, value, and ethics.
Here Kent takes stock of the current moment that digital art, and specifically generative art, is having due to the recent surge of interest (and capital) that these areas experienced due to the NFT mania seen in the last 18 months. However she first acknowledges how these developments have led her to reconsider the history of art “because it suddenly seems so strange that the last five hundred years of creative practice could be presented as if these artists were not responding to, discussing, and adopting technologies”. Yes, the conversation in our space is so thick with questions about the value and validity of algorithms, AI, smart contracts and the like that it can often feel like “technology” is somehow this new thing that artists suddenly have to grapple with over just the past few decades when in reality it’s been a fundamental topic of artistic consideration for the several centuries.
Oil paint, the printing press, electricity, photography, etc etc were all new and disruptive technologies in the same way that AI and blockchains are and it is important to remember this history lest we lose track of the ongoing conversation about ourselves and society that they trigger in favor of having our attention swallowed by the latest shiny thing.
Generative art requires that the artist adopt an autonomous system, a procedure or machine, that defines in significant ways the production of the art, and which often generates serial works. Many see this denial of authorship as leading to the impersonal, but that reiterates a problem earlier addressed in photography. Only thirty years ago, some still claimed that photographers had no style as they simply captured what was there.
Beyond affirming generative art’s place in a long art historical continuum Kent makes the case for it as a valuable, even necessary, mode of investigation and commentary for our lives which are so heavily enmeshed in technology…even as so much of that technology is invisible or incomprehensible to most of us. According to weekly usage stats that Apple helpfully (sadistically?) insists on delivering to me each week I spend something like 11 hours a day looking staring at my phone screen. Yet I could not begin to tell you how that device actually functions on a technical level let alone detail the complex mining processes needed to extract the rare earth metals that are inside of it or the inner workings of the “cloud” where my decade and a half of memories and messages reside. This state of being simultaneously utterly reliant on technology and woefully abstracted from its actual processes (to say nothing of the less-than-rosy realities of labor and environmental impact that make that state possible) is common to much of the audience that has come to NFTs in the recent boom and recent generative art, itself a product of this existence, is uniquely positioned to remind of us this.
Dare I suggest that use of the machine more explicitly makes evident the social and technological ties that bind an artist to the larger economic, political and public cultures of which they are a part?
Yes, the majority of generative art is not created specifically to surface these questions. Many of the most popular projects and collections simply look gorgeous, and there is nothing wrong with appreciating them on that level. It’s where most people are going to focus their attention. But the surface area it (and all of our current digital art) offers is so much more vast and Kent’s work does an incredibly job of outlining the questions that are possible, and essential.
As Alex Estorick of Right Click Save observes of generative art: “It seems to operate through two channels — both image and code — simultaneously, which given the current collision of art and technology makes sense. One only needs to consider a project by Zancan to witness the supremacy of the code over its own visual display. Generative art is an art form made for this moment of human-machine interdependence. But it is also an art of visual seduction, one bizarrely suggestive of modernist revenge.
🖼 There should be no Computer Art
Frieder Nake
Bulletin of the Computer Arts Society [October 1971]
Well, as someone who has only come to an appreciation of generative art in the last year and a half (and who has been grateful and delighted to have done so) this is kind of devastating.
Frieder Nake long ago secured his place in the pantheon of Computer Art pioneers. In the 1960s & 70s, alongside the the likes of Herbert W. Franke, Vera Molnár, & Georg Nees he helped to make the first explorations into the artistic applications that the then-novel technology could be used for beyond missile telemetry, spreadsheets, and mathematical computation and the like.
Yet for someone with such a trailblazing role in the field of digital generative art Nake has had anything but a cheerleading mentality regarding its purpose and the effects it has had on art and society. Quite the contrary: Nake has cultivated a deep skepticism about his field for decades now. And in 1971 he published this highly critical takedown of the nascent digital art world and digital art market. I would be lying if I said much of his argument doesn’t ring true in the context of our current hype.
Since then, a serious discussion has been going on in the art world about the consequences and implications of the use of computers. Art magazines are full of articles, exhibitions are held everywhere, seminars are offered by art schools, books are published, portfolios are sold. Computer conferences have their computer art sections, computer journals publish technical papers. Computer scientists are flattered by the little public success they make and amused by the interest artists develop. Artists surrender to the pressures of the new technique or laugh at the results, and get humiliated by the attitudes that scientists assume when they try to communicate with each other.
Nake’s main gripe here is that collectors and dealers and the media get so caught up in the fact that this new/new-ish tech is capable of being used to generate purely aesthetic (vs functional or utilitarian) results at all that they don’t stop to consider whether those results are useful, necessary, or if they actually attempt to ask or answer an artistic question. Which is a concern that in our present moment seems…relevant.
The dominating and most important person in the art world today is the art dealer. He determines what is to be sold and what is not. It is the art dealer who actually created a new style, not the artist. Progress in the world of pictures today is the same as that in the world of fashionable clothes and cars: each fall, the public is presented with a new fashion, artificially (sic!) created almost a year before in the centers (Paris, London for clothes, Detroit for cars, New York for pictures).
Long form generative art, of the type recently made collectible by blockchain technology (I say collectible, not possible, because the algorithms for Autoglyphs or Fidenza in no way require a blockchain to generate randomness or to produce their visually distinct outputs — only to tokenize and add scarcity to those outputs) has given us a countless number of beautiful images, but if I’m being honest with myself a huge part of the appeal of these images is knowing that they were generated entirely by code. If I knew that collections like Rings Genesis or Mind the Gap had been hand painted by an artist I would no doubt be wildly impressed by the time and effort required to produce so many utterly distinct outputs, but would I be amazed in the same way that I am when I know that that beauty was birthed from what my non-coder mind sees as the damn-near-hieroglyphics of javascript? I have some doubts.
And all of this is to say nothing of whether or not a given project is making an actual artistic inquiry. I mean, is Autoglyphs saying anything beyond the fact that “hey, wow, we made a provably scarce number of these cool patterns only with code and managed to store them immutably on a blockchain”. Think before you answer. It is no doubt an amazing technical feat, and a historic one, and I think it will be talked about and remembered for centuries, but in 500 years will we file it alongside achievements like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or alongside achievements like the invention of the internal combustion engine? Or both? Time will tell, but it’s essential to consider.
We should not be interested in producing some more nice and beautiful objects by computers. We shouId be interested in producing a film on, say, the distribution of wealth. Such a film is interesting because of its content; the interest in the content is enhanced by an aesthetically satisfying presentation. That is, the role of the computer in the production and presentation of semantic information which is accompanied by enough aesthetic information is meaningful; the role of the computer in the production of aesthetic information per se and for the making of profit is dangerous and senseless.
🖼 Generative Art Speedrun
Tim Holman
CSSconf [2018]
If anyone asks me “what is generative art?” I might say something like “Well it’s art made in conjunction with an independent system which assumes some of the decision making that would otherwise belong to the artist themselves. It’s been around since long before computers but it really took off alongside their evolution and has seen a particularly sharp rise in popularity over the past few years given the ways in which blockchain tech can guarantee its randomness, scarcity, while providing a small role for its primary collectors in the creation of each piece” and if their eyes continue to, somehow, show a spark of interest after that (I mean… I really need to work on my pitch here…obviously) I will usually send them this video because it is maybe the single best intro that I have come across.
The presentation, delivered by developer Tim Holman at Australia’s CSSconf in 2018 pretty much speaks for itself. Holman playfully and enthusiastically demonstrates just what it can mean to take some simple lines of code, a shape here, a bit of randomness there, and turn it into something beautiful that’s imbued with endless possibility. It is breezy & entertaining and provides just enough of a technical framework to demonstrate the talent of creative coders who use programming to create this works while demonstrating enough aesthetic possibility to draw in people who would never watch a talk about coding otherwise. Bookmark this and save it for when you’re eventually asked to explain gen art to your friends. I assure you it’s better than my attempt.
