Generative art - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Generative art refers to art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

that has been generated, composed, or constructed in an algorithmic manner through the use of systems defined by computer

Computer

A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

software algorithms, or similar mathematical or mechanical or randomised autonomous processes.

Description

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

Autonomy

Autonomy is a concept found in moral, political and bioethical philosophy. Within these contexts, it is the capacity of a rational individual to make an informed, un-coerced decision...

. The workings of systems in generative art might resemble, or rely on, various scientific theories such as Complexity science and Information theory

Information theory

Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics and electrical engineering involving the quantification of information. Information theory was developed by Claude E. Shannon to find fundamental limits on signal processing operations such as compressing data and on reliably storing and...

. 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

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...

's "Musikalisches Würfelspiel

Musikalisches Würfelspiel

A Musikalisches Würfelspiel was a system for using dice to randomly 'generate' music. These games were quite popular throughout Western Europe in the 18th century...

" (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

Hans Haacke

Hans Haacke is a German-American artist who lives and works in New York.- Early life :Haacke was born in Cologne, Germany. He studied at the Staatliche Werkakademie in Kassel, Germany, from 1956 to 1960. He was a student of Stanley William Hayter, a well-known and influential English printmaker,...

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

Pure Data

Pure Data is a visual programming language developed by Miller Puckette in the 1990s for creating interactive computer music and multimedia works. While Puckette is the main author of the program, Pd is an open source project with a large developer base working on new extensions to it. It is...

or vvvv

Vvvv

vvvv is a general purpose toolkit with a special focus on real time video synthesis and programming large media environments with physical interfaces, real-time motion graphics, audio and video...

) as well as classic yet user-friendly programming environments such as Processing

Processing (programming language)

Processing is an open source programming language and integrated development environment built for the electronic arts and visual design communities with the purpose of teaching the basics of computer programming in a visual context, and to serve as the foundation for electronic sketchbooks...

or openFrameworks

OpenFrameworks

openFrameworks is an open source toolkit designed for "creative coding". OpenFrameworks is written in C++ and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux...

are used in real-time for generative audiovisual artistic expressions for instance in the Demoscene

Demoscene

The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer...

and in VJ

VJ (video performance artist)

VJing is a broad designation for realtime visual performance. Characteristics of VJing are the creation or manipulation of imagery in realtime through technological mediation and for an audience, in synchronization to music. VJing often takes place at events such as concerts, nightclubs, music...

-culture.

Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

and automated behavior

Behavior

Behavior or behaviour refers to the actions and mannerisms made by organisms, systems, or artificial entities in conjunction with its environment, which includes the other systems or organisms around as well as the physical environment...

have introduced new ways of seeing generative art. The term behavior

Behavior

is particularly useful when describing generative qualities in art because of the associations to biology

Biology

Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

and evolution

Evolution

Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

, for example with the virus models used by the digital artist Joseph Nechvatal

Joseph Nechvatal

Joseph Nechvatal is a post-conceptual art digital artist and art theoretician who creates computer-assisted paintings and computer animations, often using custom-created computer viruses.-Life and work:Joseph Nechvatal was born in Chicago...

. Autopoiesis by Ken Rinaldo

Ken Rinaldo

Ken Rinaldo is an American artist and educator. He creates interactive art installations that explore the intersection between nature and technology...

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.

Another theme in generative art is the use of pre-existing databases as input. Mark Napier

Mark Napier (artist)

Mark Napier is an early pioneer of net.art in the United States, known for creating interactive online artwork that challenged traditional definitions of art...

was one of the pioneers in this area, creating works based on the streams of zeros and ones in ethernet traffic, as part of the "Carnivore" project. Martin Wattenberg

Martin M. Wattenberg

Martin M. Wattenberg is an American scientist and artist known for his work with data visualization. Along with Fernanda Viégas, he worked at the Cambridge location of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center as part of the Visual Communication Lab, and created Many Eyes...

pushed this theme further, transforming "data sets" as diverse as musical scores (in "Shape of Song", 2001) and Wikipedia edits (History Flow, 2003, with Fernanda Viegas

Fernanda Viégas

Fernanda Bertini Viégas is a Brazilian scientist and designer whose work focuses on the social, collaborative, and artistic aspects of information visualization. Viégas received a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab in 2005. The same year she began work at the Cambridge location...

) into dramatic visual compositions.

The term generative art does not describe any art-movement or ideology

Ideology

An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...

. It's a method of making art. The term refers to how the art is made, and does not take into account why it was made or what the content of the artwork is.

Artworks, in generative art, can be identified in the creative processes and not only in the results. Also because the results of each generative process are endless variations belonging to the same idea. Generative Art create an artificial DNA

DNA

Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms . The DNA segments that carry this genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in...

able to generate individuals of the same species. In 1987 Celestino Soddu

Celestino Soddu

Celestino Soddu is an architect and professor of Generative Design at Politecnico di Milano university in Italy. He is one of the pioneers of Generative Art and Design...

created the artificial DNA of Italian Medieval towns able to generate endless 3D

3D computer graphics

3D computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data that is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images...

models of cities identifiable as belonging to the idea.

Examples

Composers such as John Cage

John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...

and Brian Eno

Brian Eno

Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...

have used generative principles and systems in their works. Cut-up technique

Cut-up technique

The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. Most commonly, cut-ups are used to offer a non-linear alternative to traditional reading and writing....

by Tristan Tzara

Tristan Tzara

Tristan Tzara was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement...

and William Burroughs, AARON

AARON

AARON is a software program written by artist Harold Cohen that creates original artistic images.Proceeding from Cohen's initial question "What are the minimum conditions under which a set of marks functions as an image?", AARON has been in continual development since 1973...

, John Horton Conway

John Horton Conway

John Horton Conway is a prolific mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory...

's Conway's Game of Life

Conway's Game of Life

The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970....

, visual software by Scott Draves

Scott Draves

Scott Draves is the inventor of Fractal Flames and the leader of the distributed computing project Electric Sheep. He also invented patch-based texture synthesis and published the first implementation of this class of algorithms...

and Karl Sims

Karl Sims

Karl Sims is a computer graphics artist and researcher, who is best known for using particle systems and artificial life in computer animation....

, interactive installations by Maurizio Bolognini

Maurizio Bolognini

Maurizio Bolognini is an Italian post-conceptual artist. His installations explore the potential and implications of new media technologies starting from the minimal and abstract activation of processes that are beyond artist's control, at the crossroads between generative art, public art and...

, sculptures by Anne Wilson

Anne Wilson (artist)

Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist. Wilson creates sculpture, drawings, Internet projects, photography, performance, and DVD stop motion animations employing table linens, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread and wire. Her work extends the traditional processes of Fiber art to other media...

, artwork by Sol LeWitt

Sol LeWitt

Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism....

, software art by Adrian Ward and architectures by Celestino Soddu are examples of generative art in different disciplines.

External links

Generative Art wiki
Generator.x. A conference and exhibition on software and generative strategies in art and design.
Generative Art International Conference. A yearly event in Milan, Italy.
generative.net. A collaborative collection of artworks, research and experiments, with mailing list discussion.
Playing with Time. A conversation between Will Wright and Brian Eno on generative creation.

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Description

Examples

See also

External links