DOMENICO QUARANTA: What is, for you, generative art?

MARIUS WATZ: Generative art is an art practice where the artist uses a set of rules or systems to produce the artwork, usually with some degree of randomness or autonomy. The system is not just a tool, but an artwork in its own right. Instead of a single static object, the process becomes the work. In my own work it means that instead of drawing a picture I create a piece of software that can draw a million pictures, based on rules that I define and experiment with to produce organic results. Some of my works I call "drawing machines", in reference to the fact that they use dynamic models of kinetic behavior, which can be compared to the act of drawing.

ALESSANDRO CAPOZZO: I think we can distinguish two profiles, depending on the perspective, methodological or poetic, that we want to use. I believe we can talk of a generative method, when the focus shifts from the project and the realization of an artwork, to the definition of systems able to autonomously produce the artwork, systems which are characterized by processes and rules able to adapt to given conditions and to reproduce themselves. This approach is not only typical of computer systems: if we consider it with a certain degree of openness, we can see it as a carsic river, which tends to re-emerge from time to time, especially in music. We must, for example, think of the integral postwebernian serialism, or, for some aspects, to the renaissance isorithmic techniques.
For sure, the fact of delegating to a machine the repetitive tasks connected with calculation, made emerge new creative potentialities, among which there are the generative poetics and aesthetics, which have, for me, a peculiarity: generative art doesn't want to achieve realism or mimesis, but, by composing and making sensible complex systems, it stimulate us to reflects on their analogies with our lives.

LIMITEAZERO: even if we never performed an "orthodox" kind of generative art, we've always found interesting to initiate processes, where the machine would hold a relevant role, would not be a simple instrument with predictable results, but it would rather be involved in the production of the aesthetic element, by making its own choices, even if, of course, limited in a predetermined set of possibilities.
The ideas of recurrence and minimal variation in a repetitive process are fascinating, and are the concepts on which is based our work at C.STEM.

FABIO FRANCHINO: Generative art is not, as the term would suggest, an aesthetic or a stylistic movement.
I like to think of it as a way, as an attitude, used in order to achieve an expressive goal. In this sense, generative methodologies acquire a higher value, because it is possible to apply them to different creative, expressive and also commercial fields.
About ten years ago, I was trying to create music with the computer, and I did some experiments with the sequencer, where some samples, with different durations, were crossing each other, originating an ever changing pattern. At that time, I didn't know anything about codes and programs, but, afterwards, I understood that, without realizing it, I was already trying to explore a non-linear creative practice.

DOMENICO QUARANTA: The '900, from Duchamp on, has been the century of "de-skilling", of art refusing technical ability and craft. On the opposite, New Media Art seems to have started a process of "re-skilling", which is to influencing also other artistic practices. What is your opinion about it? Which role do you give, in your work, to computer programming?

ALESSANDRO CAPOZZO: I don't see the '900 as a monolith, it is true that it has been the century of Duchamp but also, quoting Boulez, the time of the "artisanat furieux".
New Media derive directly from this "furious craftwork" of the XX Century, an artistic syncretism that has been alimented by cinema, photography, design and electronic music.
In such a variety, computer programs offer a common language able to go beyond the borders which separates different artistic practices, an idiomatic approach to digital media, whose output is the code: at the same time matter, formal organization and trace of the creative process.

LIMITEAZERO: We control and manage the whole building process of our objects, from the concept phase to the project, up to the assembling moment. Programs play a fundamental part in the project, are its heart, its nevralgic centre. The fact that we write the code, without filtering this phase through the work of experts, means that we are looking for the connection with the hardware, that we control the different knots that we've projected and we build the connection nets, both in a strictly mechanic and in a philological sense. The code is a structure in itself, a plastic and composing element, which requires rigor and order, attention and sensibility. Building an ordered code is like projecting a piece of architecture: it has an entrance, an incipit, variants that need to be named and built in a clever way, algorithms forming small satellitar micro systems and becoming an organism through the strings that bind them in a meaningful "mechanic" whole. It is a deterministic and aesthetic process and, for sure, an exercise of methodological discipline.

MARIUS WATZ: I think we are seeing a return of craft in many forms of art and design, but the idea that the artist must possess all skills necessary to produce the work has been discarded. But for most generative artists, programming skills are a requirement, because their artistic material takes the form of software processes. Paradoxically, the computer code takes the role of both canvas and brush.
For myself, code is the most natural expression of my creative process. I have never used another artistic tool, so it feels like a spontaneous and organic mode of creation for me.

FABIO FRANCHINO: there is no doubt that programming art requires technical knowledge. Nowadays, it is impossible to think to employ mathematics in art, without knowing well its potentialities and its limits.
At the same time, we can say that is becoming more and more easier to approach this technique, thanks to the creation of tools that have made programming easier and thanks to the community of artists, like the one about Processing, who share sources and knowledge.
I don't consider myself as a programmer, my code isn't clean and rigorous at all, but I've managed to find a balance between my ability and what I want to obtain. I find the "re-skilling" process a necessary step; probably in the next future we'll see a new phase of new media art's de-skilling, where the artwork's concept will take over technical ability, and maybe it will denigrate it.

DOMENICO QUARANTA: We could say something similar about the idea of beauty, which is starting again to be considered as an important element, especially in generative art ,- which, in fact, has some links with design. What do you think about it?

MARIUS WATZ: I don't think generative art is necessarily looking to design, even though the results are often more graphic than the work seen in most contemporary art. I myself have a background working as a designer, but I find that I work and think very differently when creating art and design. However, I would agree that there is a current coinciding interest in ornament and formalist aesthetics both in generative art and current design. It must be the zeitgeist, reacting to the Modernist (and Hypermodernist) reduction of the last few decades. My own work certainly follows in that vein, with the creation of beauty being a definitive goal. But note that beauty is as ever in the eye of the beholder. I see generative art as related to much of the work done in the 60s with system-based art, natural references would be Minimalism, Conceptual Art and perhaps most importantly Op art.

ALESSANDRO CAPOZZO: The aesthetic search is important for new and young expressive forms, like digital art.
I believe that if we want to go beyond the pioneering and "pre-linguistic" new media's phases, when we've inevitably tended to apply paradigms drawn from other disciplines, we can't avoid the step to find new and autonomous aesthetic canons and to pursue their practical experimentation.

FABIO FRANCHINO: Generative practices offer, compared to linear techniques, a further creative possibility, the capacity to obtain results which we wouldn't have reached using a logical and mental "traditional" process.
In generative art, like in every new art, the main goal is the idea of beauty, because it's the primordial tension pushing us to take decisions. To go back to the previous problem: we are really talking of a new media art, where there are few boundaries and an open range of possibilities.

LIMITEAZERO: if '900 vanguards, and I'm talking mainly of electronic, have privileged a rigorous methodological sense often not balanced by an equivalent aesthetic result, my impression is that contemporary generations are not being flattered by aesthetic, and are, anyway, able to express a surprising capacity to go in depth.
I don't know if generative art is really connected with design. Maybe it has found in design a temporary place of decantation, a transitional ambient where it can position itself, while waiting to define its own autonomous identity.
When we talk of design, we must refer to a field that is not based anymore on the criterion of "taking out" beauty from an industrial process, but rather to a big "beauty factory", where the projecting process doesn't represent a value in itself.
Generative processes, and they're not the only ones, repropose the question of process, the complex of operations that produce a final result. Independently from their degree of complexity or refinement, elaborate algorithms constitute simultaneously a methodological and structural skeleton, in relation to the final result, especially if we think of the fact that the product wouldn't exist, without the performance of the process.

DOMENICO QUARANTA: Music plays an important role in your art, like in most of generative art: an element that you like in most of generative art: an element that you electronic arts, the beginning of video art. Why?

LIMITEAZERO: In our work music doesn't play a main role, but the concept of sound was present in many things we did. Electronic music is surely one of the fields we draw on, one of the systems we refer to with great interest.
Electronic music, in the last decades, has manifested a more and more evident tendency towards the creation of a visual scenery. Concepts like "synestesy" are coming back from vanguard's work and are now part of the more recent experimentation. Probably, this has happened both because of the hybrid background of its protagonists and because of the use of a medium. Kim Cascone, quoting a famous mcluhanian concept, affirms that tool and message are close to coincide, and this means that the availability and the diffusion of sound elaborator tools, and the subsequent assimilation on large scale of their projectual logics and use's modalities, offer the nucleus from where the aesthetic model starts.
In other words, in electronic music, the employment of tools and of a medium, leads to the development of a method, and of a final result, strongly influenced from the use of the tools themselves. The same dynamic is present in electronic art, in design and in architecture, slowly constituting an homogeneous whole of elaboration rules, which inevitably tend to influence each other and to converge towards a shared aesthetic result.

ALESSANDRO CAPOZZO: I mostly have a musical background, I would feel its influence even if my activity would be different from what it is today. I believe that the influence you're talking about is so strong for two reasons: musicians have been the first to use electronic as an artistic instrument and, secondly, music offers models of formal organization of time which are much more refined than the ones that can be produced, nowadays, by other time based media.

MARIUS WATZ: Electronic music has been an inspiration for me since very early on, in many ways it would be correct to say that I started working visually in an attempt to express what I experienced in early house and techno music. My hedonist tendencies certainly have their roots in that period. But more importantly, electronic music is a reference because it often tries to express a synaesthetic experience where multiple senses combine, becoming a single coherent sensory space. In my work with algorithmic structures this sense of synaesthesia is strongly present, at least for me. I attempt to express non-verbal experiences through form, color and movement the same way a musician might use complex layering of sounds.

FABIO FRANCHINO: I've always listened to music, and I keep on listening it in large amounts. I believe that it has an influence on many of the things I do in my life.
In the past, I played music, and the very first years of my creative awareness were devoted to musical composition. Obviously, this had an influence on my attitude, which even then was adopting rather unconventional methods. I usually listen to music during every step of my work, and maybe it has an unconscious influence on the final result. I hope to have the time, in the future, to work on some musical experiments through programming, a kind of research that I just tempted till now.