The unity of a long-form generative art collection
Much is said about the cohesiveness of long-form collections. According to many people, a cohesive set is critical even if no one can define cohesiveness. “You will know it when you see it” is the common answer. In this article, I plan to explore how artists tend to deal with cohesiveness and possible ways to think of it that would allow for larger mint numbers.
Most collections have a very strong theme and this is what unites them. A strong visual aspect explored to its limits. While there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a strong theme, it limits the output space of the collection, by forcing the final output to conform to a very restrictive aesthetic. I think a wider definition of cohesiveness, one that expands beyond a visual theme is one of the keys to expanding collections sizes without losing cohesiveness. Five months ago I suggested a “ring species” type of cohesiveness, and that’s one of the paths.
But besides a broader understanding of cohesiveness, it seems to me that a lot of artists tend to approach randomness as an enemy that needs to be tamed and controlled. What I mean is that they create discrete static aspects (the traits) and then let randomness choose which will be used. Palettes are the most common aspect of any collection that is done that way: The artist creates a group of colors and the random number generator chooses one. The effects that randomness can have on color composition are limited to simply choosing from a pre-determined set.
Naturally, this is not something bad, in her work “Trossets” Anna Carreras chose palettes based on her life experiences and previous photographic work, and allowing randomness to create strong variations would be against her artistic vision.
Palette is the kind of trait where this sort of strong control is the most prevalent, but not the only one. One side effect is that this limits randomness’s capacity to act as a co-creator with the artist. Of course, randomness is by definition a co-creator in long-form form generative art but in those instances instead of it being embraced as a partner, it is subjugated and turned into an obedient servant. This whole approach of dominating and controlling variance, in my opinion, is what Fidenza did so well. The control Hobbs exercised over the randomness to curate high-quality and yet distinct outputs is well heralded as an achievement but its restrictive nature is what I believe lead him to make “Incomplete Control” as his next work, where he deliberately choose to give up this overwhelming command and embrace randomness as his equal partner.
But very few projects have embraced randomness like that, especially with larger mint sizes. Turning entropy into an equal partner in the process of creation means taking a backseat on your own project and adopting a role more of a researcher and less of a creator. This is naturally incredibly challenging to do, but that to me is the next frontier of long-form generative art and the key to being able to do larger mint sizes. To create a wide enough system, united by something loser than a “theme”, where entropy can thrive and roam free.
The distinctions that I’m making here are nuanced and technically all works of long-form generative art allow randomness to roam free within a specified space. But the most interesting to me are the ones where entropy does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to generating the final output. They don’t simply choose between parameters, they allow the rules to interact in unique ways, changing and expanding completely the output space. As a physicist one of the things that attracted me to long-form generative art is the parallel with the universe itself. A set of rules upon which entropy plays freely to create an incredible variety of outcomes, and I love generative art that mimics that, and collections that are designed with underlying rules to be explored and pushed by randomness, and not trying to control and compartmentalize randomness.
From the current existing collections, the best to have done is actually Chromie Squiggles by Snowfro. In his own words, Snow is not an artist and Squiggles are a proof of concept more than an artwork. But while the RNG decides on some major characteristics of the Squiggles, there’s a new layer of randomness on top of the parameters, which shape the Squiggles, give them personality and uniqueness. Why has Snowfro, who is not an artist, managed to make a successful collection with ten thousand outputs while experienced artists have a tough time reaching the thousand outputs threshold required for curated status? For me, this has to be a question about approach. Squiggles were a proof of concept, and while great long form generative art has been created ever since, none truly followed the concept created by Snowfro in his iconic drop.
