If you don’t read my work blog (and if you aren’t of the geek persuasion there’s no reason why you should – it would doubtless bore you senseless) you won’t know about my stupidly over-ambitious Open Source Generative Art project that is nibbling away at my precious free time. I have set myself the task of producing 100 generative artworks, to be published one a week for as long as I can keep it up, mainly to see if I can do it, but also to see where it takes me. You are very welcome to drop in and sneer at my awkward efforts, or subscribe and get a new one every Friday.

When putting the site together I felt it needed the obligatory “What Is Generative Art?” FAQ page, to make it more accessible to the bewildered surfer, and so whipped up a bit of copy that I felt did the job. But, obviously unsatisfied with what I wrote, my brain has been bugging me on this question ever since. I’m not sure I can satisfy it.

I don’t require an answer to “What Is Art?“, it’s been a while since I’ve been that drunk, I just want to narrow down what we can call “Generative Art“, and attempt a concise, pithy description. But this is not as simple as it might first appear.

My boy, as with all three year olds, is learning to express himself in a number of ways, including artistically, with varying degrees of success. Naturally, as parents we take stupid amounts of pride in every random daub or scribble he manages to get on a piece of paper, especially if he comes up with something vaguely recognisable. But, my evil brain is wondering, when I compare his works to the algorithmically generated abstracts on abandonedart.org, might my son’s formless doodles also come under the heading ‘generative art’?

The generative element here is a biological process rather than a mechanical one, and the four years taken to complete the algorithm (from conception to splats of paint on paper) is much longer than the process you can observe with each of the abandonedart works. But isn’t the principle essentially the same? Does the “artist” claiming credit for the work (me) have any greater claim on the output of an algorithm he has fashioned than the artistic expressions of a child he has sired?

This is a cruel example obviously, because if anyone can claim to be the artist in this example, it is my son. To attempt to steal the credit for his achievements is an extreme abstraction of influence over individualism, it is only computations we can treat so inhumanely (this century anyway).

It might also be stepping dangerously close to what the crazies call “Intelligent Design“, the idea that a creator might take credit for an evolutionary process if they are the one who defined the initial conditions and started the ball rolling. I’m sure this isn’t the only instance where the concepts of “Artist” and “God” might be so easily interchangeable.

Thirdly, I should also be slapped for once again evoking the spectre of Universal Automatism, seeing the whole universe as one big algorithm; which is what I am doing in proposing a causal chain from a certain ‘creative act’ in the bedroom to an abstract piece bought home from nursery four years later. UA, where every deterministic action or inaction is just part of the great computation, absolves us from responsibility for just about anything we do, our artworks included.

But still I’m no nearer to answering my question. Lets shortcut the discussion with a few bullet points on what I am settling toward, and I challenge you to dispute any of these. For an artwork to be “generative” …

• there has to be some kind of autonomous system involved
• there has to be a degree of unpredictability, and
• the results have to hover somewhere in the sweet spot between chaos and order for it to be appealing.

Beyond these imperfect axioms I can’t come up with anything more definitive.

There is a page on generative.net which collects definitions. Philip Galanter’s is the most often cited,

“Any art practice where the artist creates a process, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other mechanism, which is then set to motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a complete work of art.”

Unfortunately, it’s one of those sentences that leaves your brain looking around the room for someone else to talk to, and it doesn’t even hint at what makes generative art so interesting (bullets 2 and 3 above). I much prefer this glorious nugget, which was teased out of a recent debate on the eu-gene mailing list:

“generative” is where you lose control of a machine which does exactly what you tell it.

If anyone can come up with anything sweeter than that, I’d like to hear it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 15th, 2008 at 6:16 pm and is filed under art, culture, evolution, fatherhood, generative art, open source, philosophy, tech, universal automatism, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.