Ars Ingenero
[The above images are produced by the same code which I ran three times for exactly the same amount of time (3 seconds) in the Processing environment. They are all different and although I wrote the code, I had no idea what the final outcomes will look like. ]
Creative coding or creative data - the latest obsessions of the creative industries in the digital economy. Cannes launched a new Innovative Lion award this year dubbed “Creative Data”. Also intriguing sounding job descriptions and titles are popping up in top tech places or agencies e.g. ‘Creative Technologist’ or ‘Creative Coder’. The order or hierarchy of the art and science implied in these descriptions is still unclear. They could mean an artist who uses code as another ‘drawing tool’ or they could mean programmers who uses code creatively. The output is also unclear as these could be data vis or actual applications or an ‘art piece’ or a performance or all of those??
‘Generative Art’ provides a useful practice-research framework of operationalising and working through all of these questions in a more sustained way. It refers to both a category of art and a process. It involves, I think, approaching creativity with computational thinking. It can apply to visual or sound arts and a key feature is its emergent property. In the design world, it has been deployed productively with Casey Reas and Ben Fry’s Processing environment. The images above are produced in Processing: I wrote the code as a set of instructions about drawing randomised rectangles, circles and colour and Processing did the rest!
David Cope, a scientist-musical composer, uses its principles for his “experiments in musical intelligence”. He has a nice explanation for Generative Art which provides some food for thought:
In Latin, 'ars ingenero' means 'generative art.' ... The complex systems used to produce it develop self-organizing behavior in the digital realm in many ways like the life we experience in the biological realm; beginning simple and developing over quadrillions of generations producing a kind of evolution. Thus, these pictures do not represent CGI (computer-generated images) as the term is usually meant. CGI uses algorithms to achieve particular end results that could not be produced by non-computational methods. Generative art involves the emergence of unpredictable outcomes. In other words, outcomes over which the user has little or no control except in choosing the starting conditions for their creation and picking the output I prefer to exhibit. In essence, this art originates from a computer rather than a computer acting as a tool to produce to a particular result. Like any art, visual or otherwise, the images here are meant to evoke responses from viewers. Like any art, there exists no one-to-one correlation between intended and actual responses. Some viewers, of course, will react predictably by predetermining them as senseless simply by knowing their process of creation. They will decide that what they see results from random behavior, even when the opposite is true. Every color, line, and shape is completely determined.