Generator multimedia project
1. GENERATIVE ART:
1.1. Overview:
Generative art is a term given to work which stems from concentrating on the processes involved in producing an artwork, usually (although not strictly) automated by the use of a machine or computer, or by using mathematic or pragmatic instructions to define the rules by which such artworks are executed. [1]
Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist creates a process, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is then set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art. [2]
The term generative art is most likely derived from “generative grammar,” a linguistic theory Noam Chomsky first proposed in his book Syntactic Structures (1965) to refer to deep-seated rules that describe any language. Steven Holtzman, author of Digital Mosaics (1997), traces the art form to the dawn of the information age in the 1960s, when musicians like Gottfried Michael Koenig and Iannis Xenakis pioneered computer composition. In fact generative art spokesman Brian Eno didn’t get turned on to the process until many years later. But if we go further back in time, it’s easy to find that Generative Art roots in art movements like Dadaism and Futurism.
Often the work of traditional artists is generative in the process, because from a vision to a final piece, as Paul Rand says, “Ideas may also grow out of the problem itself, which in turn becomes part of the solution” [3]. In art works made with a computer, the generative process is encouraged by the nature of the medium.
“Generative music enjoys some of the benefits of both its ancestors (live music and recorded music),” Eno wrote in A Year with Swollen Appendices (1996). “Like live music it is always different. Like recorded music it is free of time-and-place limitations - you can hear it when and where you want. I really think it is possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say: ‘you mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?’”
The visual application of generative art is newer, however. In the mid-1970s British abstract painter Harold Cohen plugged in his palette and designed AARON, a computer artist that produces original work. Since then, generative techniques have been used to grow artificial life based on genetic algorithms and massively complex virtual worlds that take infinitely longer than seven days to create by hand. But whatever the output, there is always a human behind the high tech curtain.
When a programmer develops a generative system, they are engaged in a creative act.
By programming computers to undertake creative instructions, more accurate and expansive traces of creativity are being developed that suitably merge artistic subjectivity with technical form.
Programming is no less a potential artform than painting is simply a result of technical procedures (paintings are ‘readymades’ according to Duchamp, as they use ‘found’ manufactured materials as a result of commodity production). Under the conditions of the dematerialized artwork, it is no longer necessary or even desirable to be able to render art as a final material object or dead-end commodity; it is as if process and code is now rendered as the material artwork.
Generative art as leads us to re-think our notions of interactive media, our notions of a digital aesthetic. The digital realms offer us the opportunity to not set our ideas in stone, but to allow them to grow and manifest new forms.
1.2. Conclusion:
The output from generative systems should not be valued simply as an endless, infinite series of resources but as a system - and not just any system, but a social system. It is possible to resolve many creative processes into instructions, but crucially according to Csikszentmihalyi: ‘… creativity does not happen inside people’s heads, but in the interaction between a person’s thoughts and a socio-cultural context’ [1]
Numerous so-called creative works play with ideas of randomness, but it is intention and purpose that are crucial.
Creativity lies not in the modification of rules, but in setting the criteria for the rules, rather like conceptual art.
Practices that insist on separating form and function operate impoverished theories of representation. Creativity lies somewhere in the link between the act of representation and conceptual clarity. An automated programme might use its representational strategies but it has no concept in itself.
More Info:
[1] “How I Drew One of My Pictures: or, The Authorship of Generative Art” by Adrian Ward, 1999
[2] “Generative Art” by Philip Galanter
[3] “Paul Rand: A Designer’s Art” by Paul Rand 1985
