GENERATIVE ARS
by Domenico Quaranta

After almost fifty years since the term has first appeared, generative art is still, for the public of art, a mystery. Not that it is difficult to understand it, it is more true the opposite: the problem seems rather to be able to place it within the contemporary art scene. Figures such as Casey Reas, Ben Fry, Joshua Davis, Yugo Nakamura, Marius Watz, John Maeda, Philip Galanter or Golan Levin, who move freely from art to pure programming and to visual design, keep astonishing the public, and the fact that the term "generative art" is used also in relation to music, poetry, architecture and industrial design, doesn't certainly help to solve the problem.
Personally, I believe that the problem resides exactly in the term, or, more precisely, in the way it is normally understood. The succession, over the XIXth century, of artistic expressions like Pop Art, Minimal Art, Conceptual Art, Digital Art and so on and so forth, induces us to think that Generative Art should be read in the same way: as a style's expression, as a trend, as a variously compact movement of artists. In order to understand generative art, it is necessary to step back, to take into consideration terms like "ars combinatoria" or, more in general, to consider the Latin meaning of the word "ars", rather than the present meaning of it. Like the Greek "techné", the Latin word "ars" indicates a technique, a structured whole of rules and acts that allow to produce something. Generative art is, in fact, a technique, a method, a practice, a way of proceeding. This element is present in all the definitions of generative art, but it would probably deserve to be finally given more relevance. We must consider, for instance, the definition, which has become by now canonic, proposed by Philip Galanter in 2003: "Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist uses a system, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art." This definition, which is appreciable under many aspects, is still emphasizing too much the term "art" to be really considered comprehensive, but it represents a good start.

A technique, then: which can be, at the same time, used by an artist, a musician, an architect, a scientist, a designer. Sometimes, we can find all these roles gathered in the same person, but we must be careful: as Marius Watz says, "I work and think very differently when creating art and design". A technique which is based on the application of a system's internal rules - being it, as Galanter notices, ordered, unordered or complex - in order to produce something. A technique which pre-exists to the computer era, but which has received from their birth, a crucial stimulus. A technique which has many times re-appeared in the world of art, and for the definition of which the artists have given a remarkable contribution, but also a technique which is not only artistic; and which, in his present declination, arises from the gathering of different fields, from algorithmic composition, to digital animation, from underground rave scene and vj culture to architecture. A technique - and this need to be said for those who attribute to this word a denigrative connotation - which is above all a philosophy and an instrument of knowledge.

At this point, we can size the horizon, and say that, from now on, we will talk of the artistic use of generative methods, and, in particular, of the generative art where the instructions consist of an information code performed by a computer. This brings us to a first question: is the work of art the process or the result? The generative program or the generated work? This is a difficult question. My answer is: the first, the second, or both, according to what the author wishes. As Philip Galanter notices, "what generative artists have in common is how they make their work, but not why they make their work or even why they choose to use generative systems in their art practice". Galanter, like others, insists on the process, linking generative art to the long tradition of procedural art; some others point out at the result, even if it may be considered more interesting the position which, like Marius Watz' one, includes both the two possibilities: "The artist describes a rule-based system external to him/herself that either produces works of art or is itself a work of art".
For this reason, the use of generative methods is essentially neutral, it doesn't have any particular ideological implications. Nevertheless, this method is able to challenge in a very interesting way contemporary art, pushing it towards a deep innovation.

First of all, the use of generative methods tends to redefine, in a completely new way, the figure of the author. We said that generative art is based on a process which, "set into motion with some degree of autonomy", produces a completed work of art. In other words, there are two acts of creation, one following the other, and two distinct "authors": the person who choose the system that must be used and writes the program - the instruction set, the algorithm - to be performed; and the person - or the thing - that materially performs the program. The person that we keep, even if with some doubts, considering as the author, only writes the instructions, that are performed - with a margin of interpretation which can be considered relevant - by somebody or something else. The author, therefore, sets into motion a process which develops itself autonomously, and, often, in an unpredictable way, under an amazed gaze. We seem thus to deal not as much with an artist, considered in the way we usually do, but rather with a minor God, who activates a system and then watch it coming to life.
In effect, we are not very far from truth. Generative art proposes again, after many centuries, the idea of art, seen as an "imitation of life", but it tends to imitate not as much life's external appearance, but rather its dynamics. We must go back to the starting problem, the question of an author who seems to share, and sometimes to give away, his role with or to a machine. Which one of the two is the artist? And, above all: can a machine produce an artwork?

There is an interesting work by Casey Reas, which helps us to answer the question. MicroImage, presented at Ars Electronica in 2003, is an installation where the same code runs on three machines, positioned side by side. The code is the same one, but the output is completely different, because it changes every time that is performed. The artist has written the code, but the machine has a wide margin of operative freedom. Nevertheless, the artwork is neither the code written by the artist, nor one of the endless outputs proposed by the machine: it is the complex of the idea, the code and the output, organized in the form of an installation. At least in this case: because Casey Reas can choose - as he did - to isolate an image, to decide that this has an autonomous aesthetic value, to print it and sell it as a work of art; or to record one of the endless productions of the code and propose it as a video animation. Or, more, as Sol LeWitt used to do with his Wall Drawings, to say that the idea - fix in a form trough a determined set of instructions- and not one of its endless realizations, is the work of art. The author is dead, long life to the author!

If the author delegates to the machine the material performance of the program, we may, as a consequence, think that the author himself wouldn't need to have any particular artistic abilities. In these terms, generative art, may look as the highest point of the "deskilling" process started by Duchamp and carried on by contemporary art. Nevertheless, if we think carefully, generative artist, must possess a skill, and in a very high degree. All the artists using generative methods are skilled programmers, and are proud to be so. The code that they write is not hidden, but is placed in a prominent position. Here we see emerging again the figure of the artist as an artisan and the attention paid to work's manual side in contemporary art. This manual aspect has its roots in a very deep knowledge, which imply a reflection on the complex systems', on computer theory, and so on and so forth. In other words, generative art is able to rejoin the fracture between theory and practice, between "the painter as a beast" and the philosopher artist, who has dominated the XIXth Century.

Finally, there is another system of values, hated by XXth century art, which the use of generative art has revalued: art as a search for beauty, as a reflection on form, as a process of knowledge. The aesthetic judgment is often present in generative art, in relation both to the code, and to the final result. Generative art seems to have learned from pop culture - one of the ground where it has its roots, through electronic music, animation and pop culture - what art, for a century, has tried to forget: that to work on form is not a sterile aestheticism, escape from reality, trendy superficiality, but an extraordinarily powerful way to investigate our time Beauty is also the beauty of nature: generative processes often imitate its mechanism, and help us to get to know them, if you think, as Galanter notices, that "the universe itself is a generative system."

All the thing that we've said until now, about generative art in general, can be verified in the artist practice of the artists gathered for the first edition of C.STEM. In all the cases, we deal with artists that operate in the space of intersection among different creative fields, and who, often, have a difficult relationship with the world of traditional art. This is caused, on one side, by the well-known weariness towards new media experimentalism, and, on the other side, by the already mentioned difficultly to place generative art in a precise position, and by the innovative elements that we've listed, which, paradoxically, makes this, under some respects hedonistic, art, more radical (and more difficult to understand) than the art which uses the new media in a more conceptual and ideological way. It is possible that, when it will be able to appreciate the deep link between generative art and the work of famous masters like John Cage, Sol LeWitt and Hans Haacke, and to understand its innovative force, the world of contemporary art will welcome these kind of quests.

In the meanwhile, the artist don't waste their time complaining. Marius Watz is a Norwegian artist who has started his career at the beginning of the Nineties, creating visual animations for rave concerts. From this practice, and from his activity as a designer, originates his exaggerated and baroque aesthetics, which is deeply different from the majority of generative art, which, from the aesthetic point of view, looks mainly at the minimalistic and western geometric abstractism' s tradition. To Philip Galanter, who proposes "a maximal art with minimal means", Watz opposes his caustic sentences, like "more is more" and "there is no culture like pop culture"; the boasts superficiality and hedonism, but under this surface there is an awareness that makes his work, not that much a mirror of his culture of reference, but rather a distillation, and a reflection on it; he says of his work: "My visual style tends towards extremes, taking color strategies and form systems that clearly have an origin in the pop culture, but are exaggerated to the point where conventional aesthetic expectations break down. I work with code as a way to create visual systems, exploring the material qualities of different algorithmic approaches, seeking to surprise myself as much as anyone else."
Surprise is an important component in the poetics of generative art, where the artist, as we've seen, is often an enchanted observer of a process, which develops in unpredictable directions. This is more true when, as in the case of the work of Fabio Franchino, who comes from Turin, the casual components of the process are underlined. The project Kinetoh consists of a series of studies on sign, form, color, able to produce images of a very high definition. Franchino activates them, and he leaves the process to develop, slowly, on his computer's screen, hour after hour. From time to time, he goes back to observe it, and, if he finds a particularly surprising, or just beautiful, configuration, he fixes it on a frame, transforming it, afterwards, in an autonomous artwork. The artist guards for himself a world, which was born in front of his eyes, limiting his role to the act of giving us the fragments which, for him, represent the more significant images. In the introduction to the project, Franchino quotes a sentence by Edward del Bono: "Chance doesn't have limits, imagination instead has some." Kinetoh is a collection of memories of a travel to the unknown land, situated on the boundaries between imagination and chance's potentialities. If Watz's work is loud and excessive, Milanese Alessandro Capozzo's work reveals a sober, rigorous and minimal aesthetics. The chromatic aspect is reduced to the minimum, with a preference for pale colors, which are often juxtaposed to brighter ones (but always following a two-color selection). Forms position themselves in nets, lines' aggregations, arborescent patterns, and often develop following organic dynamics, obtained through the use of artificial life's algorithms.
Capozzo's one is an aesthetics of the code, but if, on one side, it shows its own mathematical and algebraic nature, on the other side, it reveals a delicate musicality,a poetry of the ephemeral, which arises from life's detailed observation: like in Exuvia (2006), an installation created in collaboration with Katja Noppes, that plays on the uncertain limit between life and its pale "shroud", and whose title refers to larvae's exoskeleton.
The dimension of the installation seems to suit also the Milanese duo Limiteazero (Paolo Rigamonti e Silvio Mondino), whose self-definition is that of a studio of architecture, media art and media design. Interested in the mediation between virtual and real space, Limiteazero occasionally uses generative methods in order to give life, to quote the title of one of their work, to "active metaphors", able to make senses able to perceive, through sounds, forms and colors, the constitutive elements and the structures of immaterial spaces. Again, the reference point is life, even if here organic life is replaced by the life of the network and of the world beyond the mirror that is, for us, the space of bits.

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