ISTA 301 Blog: Generative Art

      What happened to Art? Once a interval part of every man, woman or child's life is now put aside for video games, TV and iPhone's. Its an after thought in modern times. Today we build a square building, then fill it with furniture and lastly put a little Art on the walls. Where it should be the other way around. Finding Art that connects to you, build a purpose built structure with meaning and thought to house the Art and furnish it to make it cozy. Its not the only thing we have completely backwards in today's world but I'm not going political. The mentality of taking a process and reversing it is not new and in fact in art there's a ingenious concept that's broken the order of things. Traditional art is conceptualized, perfected in the mind and performed on canvas or sculpture. The result an exact representation of the original idea in the artist mind. So how do we reverse this? A little thing called Generative Art.

     

            Generative Art refers to art that in whole or in part has been created with the use of an 

            autonomous system. - Trusty Wikipedia

      Yup generative art is art not created by the artist by rather by another being or machine. Instead of an artist creating a concept of the finalized work he/she creates a process to perform an artwork. Often a set of ambiguous steps to be followed by others each time creating a new and clearly different work. One the earliest examples would be Wolfgang Mozart's "Musikalisches Wurfelspiel" work. This is a large set of short melodies that are randomly played together based on a die roll thus creating a new piece of music every time.

      Generative art reverses the roll of artist and observer. Instead of the artist performing the work he/she is now the observer of the performers who then realize the work. Its the old switcharoo. Hundreds of works have been realized in this fashion and each and everyone is unique. A great example is Sol LeWitt's wall drawings below: 

      Very cool stuff. How about this piece?

      Wish it showed the completed work but still very cool. Hope you look for cool works like this in the future -Laters