Art as Algorithms All the Way Down

If generative art is defined as collaboration with an autonomous system that helps shape the final work, then surely the world’s hubbub is an autonomous system that shapes the artwork of every artist. The artists, then, as algorithm. There’s even a name for this algorithm: style. So what happens when the algorithm of an artist meets the algorithm of a computer meets the world of Web3? We get a radically new experience of art.

Artist as Algorithm

While we may tend to think of generative art as computational, from a certain angle, all art is generative. After all, an artists is not a self-contained system. Like us all, the artist is always and necessarily a term within a greater system, a productive node within an elaborate ecology that includes their physiology; their upbringing; what they’ve read, seen, experienced; stimuli of every sort from bird calls to city streets; their geography (think of the sense of place that inhabits Hockney, Wyeth, Turner, Monet…).

If generative art is defined as collaboration with an autonomous system that helps shape the final work, then surely the world’s hubbub is an autonomous system that shapes the final artwork of every artist. The artist, then, as algorithm.

There’s a word for this kind of algorithm: style. Just like a social platform’s algorithm, an artist’s style is a set of rules and functions that organizes how data is served up to an audience. And just as most computational generative art forges a series of one-of-ones, an artist does, as well. This series may be contained by time—such as Picasso’s Blue Period—or to an entire body of work, an oeuvre.

Picasso’s Blue Period is a series produced by a style-cum-algorithm.

The Rise of Analog “Generative Art”

While what we call “generative art”—the use of autonomous systems to determine the work—has been around since the earliest known drawings (source), it wasn’t until the 20th century that there was a conspicuous rise in generative art.

The position, the image, of the artist was changing. Artists began to embrace their position as algorithm interacting with the varied forces of the universe. No longer forging life as kind of god or “genius,” artists began actively inviting all sorts of external forces to shape the work. The French philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, argue that this is what defines modern art: “The assemblage [that is, the artwork] opens onto the forces of the Cosmos” (342, Thousand Plateaus). This modern artist is not a master creating life from nothing, Yahweh with clay. She’s an intelligent node, a sense making mechanism. An algorithm.

Think of Jackson Pollock laying his canvas on the floor and, hunched over, his hand with its brush leading the way— not his eyes with their reason and control— introducing a play of chance, his paint hitting the canvas not in a stroke, which would imply the artist’s agency, but in a drip, inviting gravity and viscosity as active forces. Pollock is not a master conjuring life from nothing. He’s a paint distribution algorithm.

The examples of analog generative art abound throughout the 20th century, artists embracing the participation of other forces in their work while they function as algorithm. Francis Bacon would dip a broom in paint, smear the canvas, then work with whatever came. Andy Goldsworthy would incorporate rivers and, yes, tides into the very work itself. To write, William Burroughs would cut up other writings and assemble them by chance; to paint, he’d put cans of paint in front of a canvas then shoot the cans with a shotgun. John Cage composed music using the I Ching. Before coming to use computers, Brian Eno — not to mention Steve Reich and a bevy of other musicians — created what he calls Generative Music using, among other things, an algorithm that was instructions to an orchestra.

William Burroughs, “Sloth,” 1991 (source). // Francis Bacon, “Seated figure,” 1983 (source). // Andy Goldsworthy, “Snow drift, carved into, waiting for the wind, Grise fiord, Ellesmere Island, 12 April 1989,” 1989 (source).

Generative Art On the Blockchain: Algorithms Using Algorithms

And then along came home computers and the possibility of writing code that could generate art on its own. With the rise of blockchain, generative artists can create series of any size in which each piece is provably — not to mention, immutably — authentic and ownable. Just as IRL printmakers create series that they number and sign in order to maintain value and authenticity, generative NFTs have smart contracts to do the same work (only better as it’s harder to forge a smart contract than a signature).

Which makes for an admittedly surreal dynamic: if an artist is an algorithm, then an artist using a computational algorithm is, in a sense, creating art using an artist as brush.

With algorithms using algorithms, the production of on-chain generative art has been exponential. A brief tour of ArtBlocks‚ the premier platform for on-chain generative art, reveals the ensuing explosive production, styles ranging as wildly as you’d expect, and hope, as new kinds of artist have entered the fray, radically expanding the field of art.

diewiththemostlikes, “nameless dread #608”. // Anna Carreras, “Trossets #835.“ // Robert Hodgin, “Ancient Courses of Fictional Rivers #267.”

Now Add the Algorithm of the Collector

Just as generative art shifts the posture of the artist from master to collaborator, it shifts the viewer’s relationship to art. Look at the rise of the PFP—a provably unique profile picture. Throughout X/Twitter, we see Larva Labs’ CryptoPunks. Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club. CryptoDickButts, first created by comic book artist, K.C. Green. Milady, a neochibi aesthetic inspired by street style tribes. The list goes on. This is not art people view from afar; this art has become intimately woven into their very identity. If college students used to hang posters of Doisneau’s The Kiss on their dorm room walls, they now enjoy art as their very, albeit digital, self.

CryptoPunks. // Bored Ape Yacht Club

CryptoDickButts. Milday Maker.

This is a radically different experience of art than seeing the so-called “master’s” work in a museum. Our wallet’s have become the new museums as we peruse each other’s collections, some rising to celebrity—Seedphrase, Cozomo, punk6529. Indeed, NFTs have elevated the role of everyday collectors’ taste, transforming the overall experience from institutionally sanctioned into peer-to-peer networks of communities of taste that include artist and collector.

The style of collectors—that is to say, their algorithm of taste, how they choose this work and not another—is now part of the mix, forging a new, more intimate relationship to art where the artist’s algorithm meets the code’s algorithm meets the collector’s algorithm. It’s algorithms all the way down.

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