“Each machine creates endless flows of random images and thus, in some way, generates out-of-control infinities. In this sense the first point to emphasize is that this work tends towards transcending me; it becomes self-sufficient. Initially I am the author of the device, as I set down the rules, but then straightaway I become the spectator of its autonomous existence.”  

— Maurizio Bolognini, Postdigitale, 2008.

“What is of interest is not so much the single variations as “variability” as a formal principle, the fact that one can make variations to infinity. What must be enjoyed—suggests the postmodern aesthetics—is the fact that a series of possible variations is potentially infinite. … The serial [is] no longer the poor relative of the arts, but the form of art that can satisfy the new aesthetic sensibility.”  

— Umberto Eco, Innovation & Repetition: Between Modern & Postmodern Aesthetics, 2005.

When I first encountered serial algorithmic art I was, frankly, confused. It was 2021 and a friend had instructed me to look at something called ‘Art Blocks’, which he touted as the site where a new form of art was emerging. This was already well into the precipitous climb of NFT fever and I expected to see more of the same kind of thing I had seen elsewhere: winky, ironic memes, cartoonish illustrations representing the equivalent of membership to stratospherically expensive private clubs, or hyperreal 3D objects draped in rendered light reflections. This, however, struck me as different.

As a body, the work these artists were producing seemed to draw on various points in new media art and the history of computation: it was alternately flat and geometric, riotously colorful in a way reminiscent of early computer graphics programs or slickly, glichily three dimensional, echoing a kind of nineties DOOM aesthetic. There were works that drew on natural phenomena or that seemed to nod self-consciously to the artist’s hand (or lack thereof), but filtered the result through layers of computerized fuzz and scribble. And there was a lot of it—there were hundreds, sometimes thousands of individual pieces associated with a work, each clearly related but different. It was disorienting, cacophonous and unabashedly maximalist. It was new … and I didn’t quite ‘get it’, though I found it strangely alluring. I wasn’t alone.

Over the last few years serial algorithmic art has emerged as a major movement in new media art. Though still a niche phenomenon it has spawned a wide range of work and attracted much attention, though there has been little to situate it. Why this, why now? From where does it speak, and what does it say about our strange, fractured, mediated, technologically saturated lives?

Postmodernism implies an inherent skepticism toward grand, unified narratives. It, like the body of work represented in this early class of serial algorithmic art, is as much if not more about the perspective of the individual versus any kind of sweeping proclamation about our time, but what links this work to previous patterns in art history is the use of material constraints to produce a novel approach to recurring themes in art and aesthetics. Because we are talking about a contemporary approach, of course the material is not paint, clay, or stone, but a digital technology—a digital ‘fabric’, or the layers of digital fabric that go into the makeup of the internet and now the blockchain.

There are three major components to this new form that set it apart from the more general term generative art, which is art created by means of any artist-driven autonomous system. This form is serial (it manifests as a series of related, potentially infinite pieces, each unique), algorithmic (the final pieces arise via a digital algorithm—a computer code-based system—programmed directly by the artist), and performative (it only comes into being via public participation at the time of collection, signified by a purchase transaction initiated on the blockchain).

Seriality, algorithmization, and direct participation in media are hallmarks of contemporary life—they are also key clues as to why this form of artmaking arose exactly when it did. If we take these three aspects as constraints chosen (consciously or unconsciously) by the artists, we can start to place things in an art historical progression.

Constraints are in fact necessary for novel solutions to problems—an easy way to get ‘unstuck’ from a bad case of creative block is, counterintuitively, to employ constraints. Numerous psychological studies have revealed that the more choices we have access to in the process of solving a problem (whether aesthetic or otherwise), the more conventional our solutions become (1). Patricia Stokes, psychology professor at Columbia University, has developed a constraint-based theory of novelty in creative practice. For her, “any problem requiring a novel response has three characteristics: (1) it is ill-structured or incompletely specified, (2) its solution requires the strategic selection of paired constraints, and (3) these constraints structure the problem space to preclude search [for solutions] among reliable, expected responses and to promote search among risky, surprising ones.”(2)

In other words, in order to come up with novel, creative solutions, the problem can’t have a clear cut ‘right answer’, the artist has to both exclude certain possibilities and emphasize others they want to employ instead, and these excluded or emphasized aspects of the constraint have to encourage artistic effort to produce a solution that is outside the current norm.

To give an example: in the 1960s the sculptor Richard Serra wrestled with how to break away from Minimalism and Conceptualism. These movements, both part of Postmodernism, emphasized meticulously planned, restrained, idea-focused art. For Serra, it all seemed too sedate and hemmed in, too bound by heady intellectual distance. In response, he decided to bring action and visible process back to the foreground. He developed a list of verbs to use directly on raw materials. “It struck me that instead of thinking what a sculpture is going to be and how you're going to do it compositionally, what if you just enacted those verbs in relation to a material, and didn't worry about the results?”(3)

This constraint—to exclude meticulous preplanning and concept and to situate the resulting sculpture as the result of a discrete action taken on a chosen material, formed the basis for the rest of his artistic career. The first successful resulting sculpture, To Lift, resulted from lifting a single sheet of vulcanized rubber in the center so that it was able to free stand. “I thought, 'Isn't this curious? All I've done is followed the action of the verb, lifted the thing up, and I have what I consider to be a sculptural form.’”(4)

This kind of engagement with constraints touches every artist, every artistic movement. Some, like Serra, deal with them consciously, while others hold the tension without ever knowing exactly to what they are responding. An interesting (if simplistic) conclusion might be that art history is simply the visible record of constraint pairs employed by artists to solve the ill-defined problem of aesthetic meaning—actions and reactions that, quasi-algorithmically, loop on each other through centuries.

So what of the constraints that gave rise to serial algorithmic art? The rise of personal computers in the 1980s led to the proliferation of digital aesthetics and digital forms, but this was nothing in comparison to the boom in acceptance of the digital domain introduced by the rise of the internet in the late 1990s. The further development of social media in the mid-2000s ushered in a great ‘flattening’ of public discourse and a rupture in media—the broadcast was no longer the dominant form of information dissemination—instead, the feedback loop and the algorithm dominated. Direct individual participation in creating ‘public’ media and in determining popular culture became not only accepted but expected. Concurrently, the development of distributed transactional infrastructure (blockchains) and digitally native currencies (cryptocurrency) opened yet more avenues for the digital to coalesce in forms that were culturally accepted as concrete renderings of reality.

Constraint pairs for Postmodern contemporary art vs. Serial Algorithmic art:

Mostly physical materials → Mostly ephemeral (natively digital) materials

Concept is foregrounded → Creative use of material is foregrounded

Art is an object → Art is a system

Creation is spontaneous → Creation is meticulously engineered

The cult of the artist is paramount, only the artist can produce the art → Cultural participation is paramount, only the many can ensure the full breadth of the art comes to exist

Art is something that happens alone in the studio → Art is something that happens in public on the internet

Art is anti-transactional → Art depends on transaction to exist

An artwork is a unitary object → An artwork is a series of related objects

Authenticity is determined from an original object → Authenticity is determined from a distributed record of authenticated transactions

In the 2020s, serial algorithmic artists adopted a series of constraints in part inherited and in part in response to (and in reaction against) the dominant mores of the contemporary art domain. These constraints allowed for novel solutions that simply would not have been possible at any earlier time. It’s insufficient to say that the new materials (computer code, the internet, blockchain infrastructure, and digital currencies) predetermined this form, as such a statement would miss key components—desire on behalf of these artists that the public should participate directly in the creation of their work, and public acceptance that a natively digital object is real enough to be owned. It is a sincere, even vulnerable gesture on the part of the artist to bring the work to viewers in a nascent state and hope that they, in turn, will pull the final narrative arc of the work into the light—for if they do not, it may never exist at all.

To my mind, the problem set these artists grappled with and the nature of their solutions puts them squarely outside the skepticism and relativism espoused by postmodernism and into the realm of what is being called metamodernism (5), represented primarily by an oscillation between sincere seriousness and playful irony. These two modes were characterized by media theorist Lev Manovich in 1996 as ‘Turingland’ (sincere seriousness, the problem space of new media art) and ‘Duchampland’ (playful irony, the problem space of contemporary art).(6) It was his contention that these spaces would never converge: they were too philosophically opposed. I see a glimmer of possibility for a future where the heirs of both Duchamp and Turing may not be at odds, but instead will engage in the kind of positive feedback loop that comes from any constructive dialectic.

It’s inherently risky to write an analysis of anything in the middle of the story—there’s little to grasp, little to create perspective. Is this a mountain or an anthill, the road to some major new development or a deer track that peters into nothing? We don’t know—we can only glean clues from the past and what little can be glimpsed ahead. In medias res, we plunge ahead in the dark, many of us feeling as wary as Umberto Eco: “finally, we have the work that speaks of itself: not the work that speaks of a genre to which it belongs, but a work that speaks of its own structure, and of the way in which it was made. Aesthetics knows this problem and indeed gave it a name long ago: it is the Hegelian problem of the Death of Art.”(7) But the voice of the artists represented in Series 1–8 might counter, as does Jonathan Loesburg “although art may die again and again, it will always mean most in its dying”(8) or indeed in its rebirth, even as its form is once again new and strange to us.

References:

(1) Mumford, M. D., Reiter-Palmon, R., & Redmond, M. R. (1994). Problem construction and cognition: Applying problem representations in ill-defined domains. & Ward, T. B. The Role of Specificity and Abstraction in Creative Idea Generation TB Ward, MJ Patterson, and CM Sifonis. & Yokochi, S., & Okada, T. (2005). Creative cognitive process of art making: A field study of a traditional Chinese ink painter. Creativity Research Journal, 17(2–3), 241–255.

(2) Stokes, P. D. (2007). Using constraints to generate and sustain novelty. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 1(2), 107. & Stokes, P. D. (2009). Using constraints to create novelty: A case study. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 3(3), 174.

(5) Vermeulen, T., & Van Den Akker, R. (2010). Notes on metamodernism. Journal of aesthetics & culture, 2(1), 5677.

(6) Lev Manovich, The Death of Computer Art, 1996

(7) Eco, U. (1985). Innovation and repetition: Between modern and post-modern aesthetics. Daedalus, 161–184.

(8) Jonathan Loesberg, The Long Happy Death of Art, Stanford Humanities Center, Jan 2017