Nerd Arts

Generative art refers to art that has been generated, composed, or constructed in an algorithmic manner through the use of systems defined by computer software algorithms, or similar mathematical or mechanical or randomised autonomous processes.

Generative art is a system oriented art practice where the common denominator is the use of systems as a production method. To meet the definition of generative art, an artwork must be self-contained and operate with some degree of autonomy. The workings of systems in generative art might resemble, or rely on, various scientific theories such as Complexity science and Information theory. The systems of generative artworks have many similarities with systems found in various areas of science. Such systems may exhibit order and/or disorder, as well as a varying degree of complexity, making behavioral prediction difficult. However, such systems still contain a defined relationship between cause and effect. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Musikalisches Würfelspiel” (Musical Dice Game) 1757 is an early example of a generative system based on randomness. The structure was based on an element of order on one hand, and disorder on the other.

An artist or creator will usually set down certain ground-rules or formulae and/or templates materials, and will then set a random or semi-random process to work on those elements. The results will remain somewhat within set limits, but may also be subject to subtle or even startling mutations. The idea of putting the art making process in the place of a pre-generated artwork is a key feature in generative art, highlighting the process-orientation as an essential characteristic. Generative artists such as Hans Haacke have explored processes of physical and biological systems in artistic context.

Generative art can also evolve in real-time, by applying feedback and generative processes to its own created states. A generative work of art would in this case never be seen to play in the same way twice. Different types of graphical programming environments (e.g. Max/Msp, Pure Data) are used in real-time for generative audiovisual artistic expressions for instance in the Demoscene and in VJ-culture.

Artificial intelligence and automated behavior have introduced new ways of seeing generative art. The term behavior is particularly useful when describing generative qualities in art because of the associations to biology and evolution, for example with the virus models used by the digital artist Joseph Nechvatal. Autopoiesis by Ken Rinaldo includes fifteen musical and robotic sculptures that interact with the public and modify their behaviors based on both the presence of the participants and each other.

The term generative art is not describing any art-movement or ideology. It’s a method of making art. The term refers to how the art is made, and not taking into account why it was made or what the content of the artwork is.

FreeJ is a vision mixer: an instrument for realtime video manipulation used in the fields of dance teather, veejaying, medical visualisation and TV.

With FreeJ multiple layers can be filtered thru effect chains and then mixed together. The supported layer inputs are images, movies, live cameras, particle generators, text scrollers, flash animations and more.
All the resulting video mix can be shown on multiple and remote screens, encoded into a movie and streamed live to the internet.

FreeJ can be controlled locally or remotely, also from multiple places at the same time, using its slick console interface; can be automated via javascript and operated via MIDI and Joystick.

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Carnivore, by the Radical Software Group, is an artistic parody of the wire tapping application of the same name (Carnivore (FBI)), created by the FBI. The artistic version is an application with server-client architecture; several artists have created client applications for this project.

From their website:

“Carnivore is a surveillance tool for data networks. At the heart of the project is CarnivorePE, a software application that listens to all Internet traffic (email, web surfing, etc.) on a specific local network. Next, CarnivorePE serves this data stream to interfaces called “clients.” These clients are designed to animate, diagnose, or interpret the network traffic in various ways. Use CarnivorePE to run Carnivore clients from your own desktop, or use it to make your own clients.”

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Eddo Stern - Reviews: New York
ArtForum, Jan, 2003 by Tim Griffin

POSTMASTERS

Among the more provocative essays published after September II was Slavoj Zizek’s “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” which suggested that Americans would have to renegotiate their relationship with spectacular culture after Al Qaeda attacks forced the rupture of our seamless, unbearably light, endlessly entrancing mediascape. Whatever has happened along these lines in mass culture, it’s worth asking whether any such shift has taken place in New York art production, particularly in pieces most obviously inflected by today’s agitated political climate. For example, Thomas Hirschhorn’s stunning installation at Barbara Gladstone Gallery might suggest the answer is no. The Swiss artist’s massive cave made of wood and duct tape kept to seductive blueprints belonging to installations of the ’90s boom: a low-tech, narrative style, mapping, in part, contemporary politics onto an immersive environment with spectacular architectural roots. On the other end of the spectrum, Saint Petersburg-based Sergei Bugaev Afrika’s concurrent installation at I-20 seemed discomfitingly real, incorporating into a sculptural installation a video made by Al Qaeda-backed Chechen rebels of an attack on Russian soldiers.

Perhaps most poignant in this context was Eddo Stern’s Sheik Attack, 2000. A former Israeli soldier, Stern spliced together selections from the video games Settlers III, SumCity, Nuclear Strike, and Red Alert to compose a “fictional documentary” about the creation, scuttled idealism, and increasing militarism of his homeland. The projected sequence of short vignettes, linked by graphics that make each scene clear as a historical phase (or a different “level” in a game), provides visual metaphors for real events. In opening scenes, for instance, construction workers erect a single building in an empty landscape, representing the nation’s folk origins; later, a seemingly boundless cityscape signifies a burgeoning Tel Aviv. Yet nothing is now so intuitively correct about the piece as its episodes circling violence. One gorgeous scene depicts a single assault helicopter lifting off the desert floor before drifting behind a dune; Stern incorporates cinematic dissolves to underscore the poetry of the machine’s turn ing blades. In the final moments we’re presented with cold-blooded shootings in a domestic habitat. Nearly all these scenes are accompanied by nostalgic Israeli songs, whose slow, languorous phrasings create the kind of paradoxical, aestheticized violence familiar from John Woo films.

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Thomas Briggs is an artist who uses methodolgies of animation and scientific visualization to generate drawings of great complexity.

Check his website here

This web site is about making new creative works out of old ones, whether it be fine art or pop culture. If you’d like, read our original manifesto.

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