generative art
In plain wordsArt in which the artist invents a process — dice rolls, software, written instructions — and lets that process make the work; the phrase now also loosely covers pictures from AI image generators.
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Art practice
Art whose maker's main creation is a procedure — chance operations, a purpose-built machine, computer code or written instructions — that, once started, settles much of the finished work on its own; Philip Galanter's widely cited 2003 definition centers on this autonomy of the system. The creative choices lie in the system and its constraints, and one system often yields many distinct outputs. The tradition predates computers (dice-composed minuets, chance methods in Dada and in John Cage's music, Sol LeWitt's instruction-based wall drawings) and became a computer practice in the 1960s with plotter drawings by Georg Nees, Frieder Nake, A. Michael Noll and Vera Molnár. Later strands include Harold Cohen's rule-based drawing and painting program AARON, evolutionary and fractal art, the creative-coding scene around the Processing language, and blockchain-based 'long-form' series in which each collector's piece is generated from a unique random seed.
Her generative art centers on a single program that has drawn a new landscape every night since 2012.
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Generative AIinformalcontested
Images, video, music or other works produced with generative AIgenerative AI, n.: AI that produces something new on request, such as an essay, a picture, a song or a piece of code, having absorbed from enormous numbers of existing examples what such things typically look like. models such as text-to-image modelstext-to-image model, n.: An AI system that creates a picture from a written description, such as 'a fox reading a newspaper, in watercolor', usually within seconds., typically by prompting a system trained on large collections of existing works. Many practitioners of the older tradition object that this usage blurs a distinction: in classic generative art the artist authors the system, whereas a prompter steers a system authored by others. The more specific term is AI artAI art, n.: Images, music or other artworks made with the help of AI — from early computer drawing programs to today's prompt-based image generators — and the debate over whether and how such work counts as art..
Origin
Rooted in 1960s Stuttgart: Max Bense's essay 'Projekte generativer Ästhetik' (projects of generative aesthetics) appeared in 1965 alongside Georg Nees's computer graphics, first exhibited that February, and Nees's 1969 doctoral thesis was titled 'Generative Computergraphik'. The English term gained currency in later decades, helped by the annual Generative Art conference in Milan from 1998; Philip Galanter's 2003 definition, centered on a system acting with some autonomy, is widely cited.
Usage note
AARON, developed by Harold Cohen from about 1973 until his death in 2016, is often cited as one of the longest-running AI art projects. Questions of authorship, originality and copyright arise in both senses but are sharper for AI-generated works trained on other artists' work.
Related
- AI artAI art, n.: Images, music or other artworks made with the help of AI — from early computer drawing programs to today's prompt-based image generators — and the debate over whether and how such work counts as art.
- generative AIgenerative AI, n.: AI that produces something new on request, such as an essay, a picture, a song or a piece of code, having absorbed from enormous numbers of existing examples what such things typically look like.
- text-to-image modeltext-to-image model, n.: An AI system that creates a picture from a written description, such as 'a fox reading a newspaper, in watercolor', usually within seconds.
- generative adversarial networkgenerative adversarial network, n.: Two neural networks trained as rivals: one forges fake images, the other tries to spot the fakes. As both improve, the forger's output becomes realistic enough to fool people.
- DeepDreamDeepDream, prop. n.: A 2015 Google program that exaggerates whatever patterns an image-recognition network detects in a picture, producing hallucinatory images full of eyes, dog faces and swirls.
- style transferstyle transfer, n.: Repainting a photo in the style of an artwork — your street as Van Gogh might have painted it — by keeping the photo's content and borrowing the painting's colors, strokes and textures.
- genetic algorithmgenetic algorithm, n.: A problem-solving method that copies natural evolution: many candidate solutions compete, the best are 'bred' by mixing and randomly tweaking them, and over many generations the solutions improve.
- AI artAI art, n.: Images, music or other artworks made with the help of AI — from early computer drawing programs to today's prompt-based image generators — and the debate over whether and how such work counts as art.
Sources
- Galanter, P. (2003). What is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory. Proc. 6th Generative Art Conference (GA2003), Milan.
- Nees, G. (1969). Generative Computergraphik. Berlin and Munich: Siemens AG.
- Bense, M. (1965). Projekte generativer Ästhetik. In rot 19: computer-grafik. Stuttgart: edition rot.
Mentioned in
Harold CohenHarold Cohen, prop. n.: A British-born painter who wrote AARON, a program that made its own drawings and paintings from the early 1970s, making him a pioneer of art produced by AI.