Generative content creation #2 - Generative Art

The very idea of generative arts has been fascinating me for long time since i heard of the very first experiments made by the digital artists Autechre who develop some generative elements for their music and videos. Every since then i tried to reflect upon how algoritms can be at the origin of a piece of music or video and how independent can they be from their author in order to autonomously create a piece of art that can also be pleasant to be experienced.

The current field of generative art interestingly relates with different fields of science. For Galanter it relates with Complexity Science, Chaotic Systems and Random Systems, Algorithmic Complexity and Effective Complexity. In fact, generative art has deep roots in multidisciplinary fields that often have roots in engineering and software programming. Even though not necessarily the consequence of the use of a computer, generative art is often much more complex than "traditional" art because the work that needs to be done is often extremely vaste and complex. For example, to build a piece of software that creates a video that responds to audio stimulation can end up being an extremely complex task that needs skills in programming, design, sound engineering and video manipulation.

Another extremely interesting application of generative art comes from generative literature. What seems to me most interesting in the application of generative algoritms to art are the semiotical consequences that the introduction of an algoritm causes into a text.

References

Galanter, Philip. 2003. What is generative art? Complexity theory as a context for art theory. In In GA2003–6th Generative Art Conference

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