An uninspired take on the future of generative art
The bare minimum...
I fear these are so obvious you’ll resent me for wasting your time.
The state of the world today.
The norm today is an Art Blocks style mint with a DA or fixed price, where the collector provides a random seed that generates a single piece in a 100-1000 piece collection with explicit traits.
Most differentiation and innovation comes around the edges. Things like esoteric auction mechanics, params-style mints, pairing with a physical, burn mechanics, etc. These things are nice, but not fundamentally different.
Hundreds of artists, thousands of pieces, and millions of dollars are all pouring into this one niche application of generative art. As one eccentric postoor once said, “That’s just Squiggles with extra steps.”
What comes next?
At the very least: increasing amounts of data, animation, interactivity, ambition, and display.
More data instead of meaningless seeds.
The seed approach adds very little and I’m surprised this isn’t talked about more. We’ve defaulted to “put a quarter in and get a random toy.” This is the least participatory version of art outside of making something in a vacuum and selling it to a stranger. We’ve moved just 1 step up the ladder.
We will see more work using real and respondent data, both external and user-driven. External data like Cory Haber’s sunsets that map to weather data. User data like Highlight’s studio that allows traits to be driven by things like batch size, price paid, or gas levels.
Animated > static.
Historically, most art was static for no other reason than that it couldn’t be anything else. There’s very little reason that digital art should orient around the canvas / print as its core structure and I expect things to be default animated, not default static going forward.
Dynamic and interactive.
Imagine if we painted only in black and white. Programming is a dynamic and interactive medium. And yet 99% of what’s created isn’t just flat, it’s dead and unresponsive. Imagine the things we aren’t saying, the thoughts we aren’t having, by not fully leveraging our tools.
This extensive article does a nice job of laying out a few different frameworks and lots of examples (although some seem to be mis-categorized).
Shockingly ambitious work.
This space is so over-capitalized that artists, more than ever, are prioritizing only what sells. Go read quotes from Rothko and Mondrian. These men were explicitly trying to reach God or ultimate truth or transcendence in some manner. We see very little of this ambition amongst popular projects and that will change in time.
“You might as well get one thing straight. I'm not an abstractionist... I'm not interested in the relationships of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures show that I communicate those basic human emotions... The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.”
― Mark Rothko
Thoughtful and intentional ways to consume, display, and revisit digital art.
Most generative art is still a ‘mint it and forget it’ experience. Or at the very most, a print. This is even more surprising given how much money collectors are spending compared to other mediums.
I am not sure what comes next here, but I know that it will change drastically. I am not excited about the current state of digital frames. Every time an IRL event uses a bunch of wired up screens, a tiny digital butterfly dies somewhere. Ditto for highly skeuomorphic, metaverse galleries.
I am much more excited about emergent, generative-native approaches like Art-Tab and gallery.so. Approaches that meet collectors where they already are and art where it was made - the computer.
In closing
None of these points are particularly interesting. Which makes it all the more surprising that they aren’t common. In writing this I tried to find projects that fulfill all of these characteristics. The best example is - no surprise - Terraforms. Another that comes close is Toccata. There are at least 5-10 others that I won’t list in order to not explicitly leave anyone out.
Of all the points above, ambition is the outlier. More of an input than a characteristic. It’s easy to think that ambition and vision don’t matter. And there’s no doubt that play and joy and starting small and love are often the best first step. But eventually, you need more and I don’t think ‘trying to make something exceptional’ is too much to ask.
I love generative art. And I can’t wait to see what the next 5-10 years bring. What do you think I’m missing? Where am I wrong?
Notes:
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A few additional themes that I have not fully thought through or were too small to call out:
Confident in:
Games as art and art as games
Stories
Multi-sensory, particularly sound and touch
Quantified self
Not confident in:
Self-referential / meta art (e.g., commentary on NFTs and financialization)
Minimalism
Retro computer art aesthetics
Haven’t decided:
VR / AR
Cyberpunk-esque brain / bloodstream
Increasing separation of generative art from NFTs
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People are alive -- they behave and respond. Creations within the computer can also live, behave, and respond... if they are allowed to. The message of this talk is that computer-based art tools should embrace both forms of life -- artists behaving through real-time performance, and art behaving through real-time simulation. Everything we draw should be alive by default.
— Bret Victor,
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Thank you to Remnynt for a clarification on the definition of runtime art, Quantized for being so screenshot-able, Nat for showing me the data capabilities at Highlight, and Haven for not purging me (yet).
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