nici /genpaper

Nichole Smith

DANM 201

Fall 2005

Beth Stephens

 

Generative Art

 

            Many branches of art are defined by their medium, some by the resulting works and some by the tools and materials that are used to construct the work. Generative Art is defined by the process in which the artist sets in motion the procedure and the degree to which they allow events to unfold once they have given them impulse. For the artists whose work is categorized in this field, and this is not commonly a self-categorization, the completed works become a synthesis of the artist’s intent and the natural complexity with which the process unfolds. In some cases the procedures become so independent from the artists will that they begin to border on claiming the title for artist themselves.

Recent technological advances, and by recent I mean in the last century or so, have allowed for the creation of more varied and complex forms of generative art. Machines allow for the automation of repetitive tasks, computers allow for the development easily manipulated graphic formats, programs begin to take on complexity that allows us to aim towards artificial intelligence; all these things have allowed artists to create more freedom in the creation and implementation of the procedures that lie at the heart of generative art but generative art was not born of these things. Rather as it became apparent that more and more artist were following similar trends, a definition of the art was formulated that was then realized to encompass many previous works that had nothing to do with these advances in technology. Philip Galanter, Associate Director for Arts Technology at NYU's Information Technology Services and self-proclaimed generative artist, words his definition as thus:

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 mechanism, which is then set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art.[1]

As such generative art can be seen to apply to many practices; there are computer programs that alter or create graphics files, there are machines that paint, that are synthesizers that create complicated musical elements, you can also consider playwriting a form of generative art as well as musical compositions as long as the initial writer / composer is not involved in the production of the piece. Along these lines early Fluxus  performance pieces run parallel to the definition, an example being when Nam June Paik followed a set of instructions (called a score) written by LeMonte Young thus enacting a performance of Composition 1960 #10. [2]  It has even been suggested that tiling is a very early form of  generative art in that once the initial pattern has been set the repetitive procedure requires no artistic impulse in the subsequent steps. If you accept this categorization then repetitive art reaches back as far we are currently aware art reaches back.[3]

            The impulse however should not be to try to create a strict categorization of this field, as technology advances and new possibilities are opened undoubtedly it will become useful to develop new definitions and consider new groupings and sub-groupings. Since the emphasis in generative art is on allowing a process to unfold with some degree of autonomy, and these unfoldings bring us insight into the workings of the mechanism used to carry out the instructions, it is quite likely that our definitions and groupings will undergo radical changes as start to better understand the complex systems that are at work.

Many generative artists consider the set of instructions passed on to the machine or robot or receiver of any type to be similar in a way to our own our genetic code. The instructions are passed on to a receiver whose implementation of those instructions results in artistic work that is neither the product of solely the machine or its programmer but a result from their symbiotic relationship. Just as our lives would be impossible were it not for our parents, but we do not bequeath all responsibility to them; these works are the result of human action but develop beyond the initial efforts of the human artist.

The emphasis on some degree of autonomy for the mechanisms with which the processes are executed also creates a distance between the conceptualization and the actualization that allows for a more objective exploration of “natural forces” involved. Even should a traditional human artist wish to objectively perform an artistic process by hand it is doubtful that their subconscious could be kept from influencing any decisions they would have to make. This becomes important if the artistic works needs to be free of pre-committed representation; if you want the patterns that emerge to be results of a self-organizing system. These “natural forces” can be as natural as environmental influences or as constructed as rules within a computer simulated space but they function as natural within their respective settings. 

This exploration of the complexities within the behavior of a given system are indicative of generative art’s roots in process art, which, as Philip Glanster describes in one interview, “involved the use of flexible or chemical materials, sometimes poured plastics or fiberglass. The artist would indeed give up some control and accept what the material would dynamically reveal itself to be.”[4] The aspect of dynamic revelation, where the journey is more important than the destination, is one of the distinctive features of generative art as I understand it.

The focus on the autonomy of the acting mechanism in the iteration of the instructions also affects the role of the artist, the human instigator of the processes. While they are the source of the inspiration and direction, the meaning of the piece begins to evolve an independence from the personality of the artist. In his essay “The Death of the Author” Ronald Barthes describes the traditional connection between meaning and author:

The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us.[5] (Original italics)

While Barthes is discussing the role of the author in literary works, I believe the concept is pertinent to the role of the artist as well. Often the meaning of a piece is interpreted by deciphering the personality of an artist and the intent we assume they have. While that technique of interpretation is not obsolete in these works there begins to be meaning imparted by the mechanisms that cannot be ascribed to the voice of the artist. This secondary voice joining in is a voice we are not accustom to privileging with any semblance of the title artist.

            Our culture has no strict definition of what it means to be an artist, definitions include words such as aesthetics, activism, creativity, inspiration and the actual assigning of the title has more to do with what the people in question consider themselves than any strict definition. Herein lies one hurdle for machines: artificial intelligence has yet to reach the levels where true self-reflexivity is possible and the possibilities of alternative forms of consciousness are not yet widely accepted. As Simon Penny puts it "Artistic skills and methods are distributed bodily phenomena and inherently refute reductive approaches to questions of intelligence and consciousness."[6] Unfortunately for machines their current decision processes are based on a highly reductive heuristic approach and we consider them lacking in intelligence and consciousness necessary to create works of art.

We consider the products of their labor as art in a manner more akin to the readymades of Marcel Duchamp: ordinary objects that gain their art status based on the context they are placed in.[7] They become labeled as art not through the intent with which they were physically created but through contextualization and inclusion of the creative processes in the definition of the piece. The work gains its explanation, its interpretation, through its association with the process set in motion by the initial human instigator.

Of course at this point it is primarily an academic exercise to consider the possibility of a work of art created completely independently by a machine. We have not yet developed a decision making process for machines that allow them such self-determination, but people are working on the concept. MIT’s AI lab is working towards a conscious robot with the hope that it will grow to be capable of learning, of making decisions, and of self-improvement.[8]  It is not a stretch to assume that if such a robot were to pick up pen and paper and do anything with them, that we could then call this robotic art and consider it to be completely autonomous to human art.

This step toward a robot artist has yet been taken but many human artists are currently sharing some of their claim to title. Leonel Moura creates art using ArtSBots, small mobile robots that apply paint to canvas according to a decision making process he claims is similar to the way ants lay down pheromone trails. The process involves up to twelve breadbox-sized robots navigating their way around an enclosure, analyzing the bit of canvas they are above, and determining whether to apply one of two colors or to do nothing.

Moura, calling the work done by the ArtSBots unmanned art, refers to himself as “the Symbiotic Artist, the one who brings about the conditions for ‘situations’ to be constructed.”[9]  He relinquishes part of the title of artist to the robots and considers their interactions to be a form of behavior called stimergy. This behavior is the means in which social insects, such as ants, function as a group to create a general map of which the individual members know only small pieces.[10]  In ant colonies each individual worker ant acts on a local scale being informed by scent trails left by other ants and chooses to follow or reinforce the trails they encounter. The ArtSBots are only aware of their immediate surrounds and have relatively simple instructions but their behavior as a group produces complex works of art.

Moura’s work fits within the definition of generative art: he created the process that the ArtSBots enact and they are allowed to do so with his interference. The human decision-making is limited to deciding where to start the robots and when to consider the painting done. Between these two events the canvas is the domain of the robots and humans play no role. The resulting paintings display common attributes of non-linear dynamic theory; there include strange attractors and can be seen as the result of a series of bifurcations. They demonstrate how a very simple set of rules can lead to complex behavior when the system involved is constantly referring back to itself in order to determine what to do next. Even the paintings created by one ArtSBot display these chaotic tendencies and when you increase the number of actors the results become completely unpredictable and yet order does emerge.  

            Another example of generative art that also explores a symbiotic relationship between human and machine is Sabrina Raaf’s installation piece Translator II: Grower. However, the relationship of interest in this work is between the machine and the audience. In this piece the carbon dioxide a mobile machine (a grower) maps out levels of the installation space. A ceiling unit monitors the carbon dioxide levels and the grower draws a corresponding green line as it navigates its way around the perimeter of a room. These green lines are to be conceptualized as grass, their actuality to be replaced by the significance we assign them. 

The patrons become a part of the artistic process as they exhale carbon dioxide increasing the room’s levels and causing more grass to be grown. While their role does not grant them authorship or direct agency the piece uses the effects of their presence on the physical space as the information around which to base its visual aspect. Their limited role does not prevent the piece from addressing the relationship of the viewer to the installation and to the gallery or museum in which it is being shown. Indeed this is one of Raaf’s stated goals:

The relationship between Translator II: Grower, the space, and the public becomes a cross-metabolic one. This piece makes visible how art institutions depend on their visitors to make them 'healthy' spaces for new art to evolve and flourish within.[11]

The grower’s job is to translate data so that the relationship between viewer and space becomes apparent. The direct environmental relation between human and carbon dioxide is used to express a more social relation between artistic process and sponsorship. Through the simple iterative process of charting information the installation explores a complex system of interaction.

            This piece falls under the category of generative art in that Raaf provides the machine with a set on instructions and then steps back to let it do its job. The piece is not about what the grower draws but the whole installation of the process including the visiting patrons. Her simple set of iterative processes is given to the machine and the art becomes its performance of those instructions.

            One of the striking differences between Moura’s work and Raaf’s is the method in which they present it. Raaf has created an installation that focuses of the actions of the machine, conversely Moura display the final product of his robots work and not the process. Despite this difference the process is still a very important aspect in both of their works. Another difference is the terminology that they use in referring to their projects, Raaf calls the grower a machine and Moura refers to the ArtSBots as robots. Perhaps this ties in to the more authorial role Moura assigns his robots in the creation of the art; the general definition of a robot is a machine designed to do a human’s job[12] and authorship has historically been something left up to people. Raaf, on the other hand, has assigned the role of translator to her machine and it is translating something that humans cannot see. It is therefore doubtful that her machine would be designated a robot and perhaps this accentuation of difference helps create the limits to the artistic capabilities we can begrudge the grower.

            Both of these examples have had a very physical presence, the ArtSBots and the grower both being undeniably material and thus asserting their identity. Another example of generative art whose mechanisms are less corporeal is Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway's Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium. This installation uses a live data feed of the stock market information of 4000 companies to project a capitalist galaxy on a domed ceiling. Living amongst the stars are artificial digital creatures that adapt and evolve in a competition for the energy created by the real trading of shares in those companies.[13]

            These creatures were designed by a team of Artificial Intelligence specialists with the goal of giving them every possibility to evolve, the initial inhabitants of the star field were designed by random combinations of functional parts and survived by efficiently navigating through the 2D space and consuming the energy created by stock activity. The initial system is populated with 10 different inhabitants, each of these representing a new species. These species are kept sexually isolated from each other, there is no cross breeding, but a memory queue of samplings from past species is used in the case the diversity population drop below a certain point. Species is determined solely by tracing ancestry to the introduced individuals but when the queue is used to reintroduce sample individuals from past species those different samples are considered to be their own new species.[14]

Different life functions, such as movement, require the consumption of energy but the main goal is to store up enough energy (4 times the amount they were born with) in order to reproduce. Once the energy level is achieved the organism can choose to become a mother, giving energy from its own body to create a new organism. This is not a case mitosis, a father is chosen randomly from the species population and half of his traits and makeup are used to create the offspring. Organisms can be both mother and father over their lifetime, and it is interesting to consider a species where there is no conscious choice of mate. These creatures will never develop the complicated mating rituals that are so common among primates and most of the animal kingdom.

However various species do develop independent of any guidance from their human programmers, sometimes without the humans having any understanding of what’s going on. As a caption on an image in the websites gallery reads, “we named this species “Jellyfish” because they seemed to have very little structure to their bodies, and we never did manage to understand how they survived or moved.”[15] These life forms are subject to a process of selection designed to be indicative of the how we understand the process of evolution to function in the “real” world. Within the boundaries of the closed system their world is as real as it get for these creatures and they evolve complicated way to deal with the obstacles it presents them with.

Their world is not completely disconnected from ours, their rules for survival may be simpler but in many ways the forces that shape their world are the same as ours. Activity on the stock market determines their resource availability on an individual scale, on ours it functions on a societal scale, but the same fluctuations affect both our worlds.  One of the hopes behind the project seems to be that creatures will develop that will be able to predict where energy will be in the future, which means they will effectively be forecasting changes to the stock market, something humans have always wanted to do.

In fact, the whole project stems from the spectacular crash of the company Long Term Capital Management, this company utilized the Black Scholes formula to predict the value of shares from one day to the next. While they were wildly successful for a long while, most analysts see the crash as brought on by the company’s failure to take their own success into account with the formula. It would be interesting to know if any species have arisen and fallen in similar manners within this closed system.

In many ways this installation is even more process oriented than the previous two discussed, Moura refers to the ArtSBots process, Raaf displays the process as the work of art but restarts the process at every showing of the installation and conceivably have a cut off point at which the process has gone on too long, but for the Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium the process that can never be complete. The ongoing evolution of these creatures, the success or failure of the species that arise, these things can’t be determined without continuation. If it weren’t for the failsafe measures it would be possible for the process to die out completely and thus be finished but as it, short of complete annihilation of the planetarium and all the database backups, this process doesn’t have an end.

Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium assigns artistry to Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway, they credit the Chief Programmer as Thomas Riley and Cefn Hoile developed the artificial life.[16] The artificial life itself gets no credit for artistry though in a sense this is endurance art raised to it’s highest level. Not all generative art projects bring to light the same issue, what they share in common has nothing to do with their material side. They are grouped and compared based on they processes they involve and the means in which they explore the more abstract mathematical and theoretical concepts that govern the systems they inhabit. Undoubtedly new forms will develop and it will become more relevant create different distinctions, but for now it is all about the process.

  
Bibliography:

Autogena, Lise ; Portway, Joshua. Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium, <http://www.blackshoals.net/>[November 22, 2005]

 

Barthes, Ronald. “The Death of the Author” Image Music Text. New York, Hill and Wang: 1977

 

The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed., Questia, 22 Nov. 2005 <http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=101267905>

 

Dennett, Daniel. Consciousness in Human and Robot Minds (June 6, 2002) <http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0474.html> [November 20, 2005]

 

“’Generative art is as old as art’. An interview with Philip Galanter” artificial.dk [September 6th, 2004] < http://www.artificial.dk/articles/galanter.htm> [November 22, 2005]

 

Hoile, Cefn. Black Shoals: Evolving Organisms in a World of Financial Data <http://www.blackshoals.net/ALife.html>[November 22, 2005]

 

Moura, Leonel Trails, Ants and Anarchy < http://www.lxxl.pt/pdf/Trails.pdf> [November 22, 2005]

 

Penny, Simon.  "The Virtualization of Art Practice," Art Journal 56.3 (1997), Questia, 21 Nov. 2005 <http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5000561010>.

 

Raaf, Sabrina. Sabrina Raaf – New Media Artist < http://www.raaf.org/> [November 20, 2005]

 

Rush, Michael. New Media in Art. London, Thames and Hudson, Ltd.: 2005

 

Wikipedia, < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page> [November 22, 2005]