From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics (Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture) by Meredith Hoy

Author:Meredith Hoy [Hoy, Meredith]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Dartmouth
Published: 2017-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 3.4 ■ Victor Vasarely, Planetary Folklore, Number 3, 1964. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Watz creatively and professionally identifies with a group of young artist-programmers who utilize the productive constraints of software to produce algorithmically evolving code-based abstractions called “Generative Art.” Put simply, a work of Generative Art comes into being when an artist defines a set of rules that set into motion a process or series of processes resulting in a “complete” work of art. Algorithmic, generative strategies have existed in art production for centuries and do not inherently require the aid of electronic computers; in 1787, Mozart designed his Musikalisches Würfelspiel, a generative musical composition whose operative mechanism was a set of dice and a 177 measure score. Chance, instrumentalized through a toss of the dice, determined the order in which the measures would be played and thus superseded authorial control as the primary organizing principle of the aleatoric musical piece. That Mozart supplies an early example of algorithmically unfolding art is not accidental—the history of generativity in the visual arts has been inextricably linked musical composition, particularly to experimental avant-garde composition, on one side, and to the hedonistic rave scene of the 1990s one the other. Interestingly, the distance between these two musical genres has collapsed, to a certain degree, as the popularity of raves has dissipated and video jockey (VJ) culture has begun to align itself with the experimental art scene.

Generative Art is a term that applies to a compositional strategy rather than to a particular style or genre and does not necessarily rely on electronic computation for its success. Most often, however, it describes a computer-based trend in software art in which randomness is built into a chain of executable, coded commands to introduce unpredictable results into the “final” work of art. Influenced by the conceptual, algorithmic practices of artists such as Sol LeWitt, Victor Vasarely, the Algorists, Jean Tinguely, Jean-Pierre Hébert, the early digital artist Manfred Mohr, and Roman Verostko, Generative Artists are deeply invested in the questions of (1) how code and algorithmic proceduralism can shape the final outcome of artworks and (2) whether code bears a specific materiality that imprints itself on the face of the artwork. In short, Watz, Casey Reas (whose work is examined in chapter 4), and many of the self-identified group of Generative Artists take principle of structure and form as their central conceptual and aesthetic material.

Some reservations about the historicization of Generative Art have led Watz to comment that “uncritical use of the term [generative] risks conflating artists from different periods and assuming that their artistic interests are the same, when in fact the contexts in which they produce their works are very different.”72 Nevertheless, Watz in ElectroPlastique creates a necessary and explicit link to Vasarely’s earlier investigations by performing a series of formal permutations of Vasarely’s basic elements of structure. Watz suggests ultimately that his optical surfaces contain a latent multidimensionality that reveals itself when the structure is subjected to stretching and compression both spatially and durationally.

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