Parametric objects, dimensions variable (typically 14x14x14 cm). ABS plastic, 3D printed on a Makerbot Replicator.

[Julia Kaganskiy of The Creators Project asked me to comment on Bruce Sterling's "Essay On The New Aesthetic" along with 5 other art & tech writers (Kyle Chayka, Jonathan Minard, Greg Borenstein, James George and Kyle McDonald). You can find the collected texts on Creators Project, below is my subjective spin...]

My take on the New Aesthetic? On immediate reflection I’d say “good job” and “go easy on the drones”. But inevitably there is the jaded voice in the back of my head wanting to snarkily ask, “What took you so long?” Not “you” as in the particular group of people who curate and promote the New Aesthetic meme, but “you” as in (Western) society at large, the technology-addicted masses who want their Facebook (MTV, not so much) and smartphone bliss, yet manage to be continually surprised by the not-always-pleasant byproducts of their addiction.

There really is no excuse for being technoculture illiterate if you’re under 40 and living in the Western world. You can plead ignorance of the technological specifics, but not of the cultural effects produced by the gadgets and interfaces that have invaded your life. Technology is not something that happens to other people, nor can you escape it by hiding out in “the humanities.” To be human is to be technological.

Lacking a ubiquitous and intuitive understanding of the complex interactions between technology and human culture, sources like the New Aesthetic (NA) become golden. NA is an attempt at diagnosis of the most recent mutations of the human condition, a difficult task best attacked obliquely and from the flank, with subtle observations rather than head on with manifestos (which are not very New Aesthetic, by the way).

NA is part meme, part techno-ethnography and part Tumblr serendipity. Its art is juxtaposition: If we put this next to that and this other thing, surely a new understanding will emerge. And you know what? It works surprisingly well. Whether that success is the product of brilliant curation or the result of feverishly sign-deciphering minds scanning image after image for clues that might not be there is academic. If it works, it works.

The “New” part is deceptive, however. Most of what NA offers up for examination is not all that new. Technologies like machine vision and geo-location are old by most standards. What is new is their integration into our lives to the point where we are bringing them to bed. Smartphone habituees will think nothing of installing a sleep-tracking app and putting their phone on the mattress, where accelerometers will presumably make sage observations about your quality of sleep. This is the new Aesthetic—human behavior augmented by technology as often as it is disrupted. The New Aesthetic is a sign saying “Translation Server Error” rather than “Post Office”. The New Aesthetic is faces glowing ominously as people walk down the street at night staring at their phones—or worse, their iPads.

We need NA like we need weather vanes warning us of oncoming storms, because tech-driven cultural innovation has a nasty habit of becoming an inevitability with little regard for personal preference or even legal precedence. Once conceived of, or even just scribbled on a napkin during a drunken startup crawl, it is as though they might as well always have existed.

Yes, GPS will come storming out of the wilderness survival gear catalogue and give your mother an incredibly increased action radius. Yes, computer GUI elements will sprout legs and appear lounging around your neighborhood as though they had always been there. Yes, digital glitch is as much of a cultural artifact as the graininess of film or the bad colors of Polaroids. And that guy on the corner with the World of Warcraft battleaxe replica 1 instantly looks at home from the moment that he appears. Yes, you think, now that I see it, it makes perfect sense.

Marius Watz for Creators Project, April 6, 2012

1 That would be the artist Aram Bartholl, performing his “1H” intervention.

Closed systems: Generative art and Software Abstraction
Text for Lab[au] “Metadesign” monograph, May 2010

Downlod PDF: 201005-Marius-Watz-Closed-Systems.pdf

• System: “1. A group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole.”
• Closed system: “An isolated system having no interaction with an environment [...] a SYSTEM whose BEHAVIOR is entirely explainable from within, a system without INPUT.”

void setup();

The notion of generative systems, where formal constructs are described in terms of parametric processes executed autonomously of their author , has recently gained popularity in art and design. Conceptually these systems provide a computational model of creativity, combining principles of unpredictability with the purity of logic. As Constructivism and Futurism attempted to invoke the possibility of a world view based on industrial processes, so generative art presents us with a Weltanschauung of computation.

Forms produced by generative systems often take on a complex nature, exploiting principles of emergence to produce structures that could not be made by human hands. Inspiration taken from processes found in nature is common, with the tension between organic and mechanical forms ever-present. A common challenge in computational aesthetics is the simulation of organic behavior and spontaneous irregularities, phenomena that appear in nature without prompting but which can only be replicated by computers with the explicit encoding of such behavior.

On a more pragmatic level, generativity is a useful strategy to harness the power of the computer, performing rote tasks and crunching numbers. By using parametric processes to produce an infinite series of possible outcomes, the author is allowed to take the privileged position of harvesting the most successful results. Most generative work is marked by a tendency towards formal complexity made possible by having software filling in the details. The difference between having 10 and 10 thousand particles interacting is a simple adjustment of parameters and allowing for additional computing time. Increases in processing power is certainly a factor, allowing ever more complex computations to be used even for realtime applications.

This is not to say that the use of parametric systems is trivial or simply a matter of powerful hardware. The process of abstracting aesthetic processes into executable computer code requires formal stringency and a talent for reverse-engineering a desired result in order to identify its causal elements. Every aspect of the system must be explicitly described, including details that might seem insignificant when considered individually. When considered as a whole, however, these series of decisions become the very body of the work. Furthermore, even the most experienced programmer will encounter unexpected results in the process of designing a process, whether as byproducts of errors in the code or tendencies given by the algorithms used. Programming errors can lead to serendipitous discoveries, and one does well to embrace one’s mistakes.

A piece of software can be written in a dozen different ways, each with subtly different biases. One strategy might yield stable and predictable behavior that falls just short of being aesthetically interesting. Another might lead to an unstable system that produces frequent crashes but also occasional displays of genius. Despite the essential immateriality of computer code algorithms nevertheless display material properties, often showing a specific bias towards certain outcomes. Generative art requires that the artist be able to express herself through the manipulation of these systems, choosing computational strategies and appropriate parameters in a combination of technical skill and aesthetic intuition.

void loop();

In popular discussion of generative art two aspects are often forgotten: Firstly, that it does not in fact constitute an art movement as such. Rather it describes a strategy for the invention of works that share a certain methodology, but which may present themselves in myriad ways. Secondly, the aesthetic application of rules comes with a wealth of historical precedents, dating back as far as humans have been known to employ scientific principles. The fascination with systems has been a constant of human culture, from early astrology to the mechanical automata of medieval times. These observations are important because they point to a weakness in the current discourse while simultaneously providing a possible solution. By looking at how generative art differs from classic media art, a clearer understanding might emerge.

The current popularity of generative art can be traced historically to several factors: The introduction of personal home computers in the late 1970’s with their easily accessible programming languages like BASIC and LOGO provided many artists with their first taste of computation. Later, the near-complete invasion of creative production by digital tools from the early 1990’s onwards meant that the transition from simple tool use to exploring code as material became a logical next step. Ironically, it was the introduction of relatively primitive code frameworks like HTML, JavaScript and Flash that jump-started the interest in code-based aesthetics.

These technological developments, coupled with the World Wide Web as a sandbox for personal expression, produced an explosion of web sites in the late 1990’s, quickly becoming an international subculture for digital media experimentation. Coinciding with (but conceptually separated from) the rise of net.art, a particular subsection of these sites concerned themselves with software abstractions. Ranging from simple interactive soundtoys to more complex generative compositions, these early experiments should be considered the direct predecessors of today’s generative art scene.

While much of the early work of the 1990’s was naive both conceptually and aesthetically, it did establish an important distinction from the interactive artworks that dominated the media art scene at the time. Interactive art exploits the feedback loop of interaction between a system and its user(s), with custom software systems generally considered a necessary evil rather than an end in itself. Generative art is primarily interested in closed system, self-contained constructs investigated for their formal and material qualities. This might seem like a trivial difference, but it places the concerns of generative art closer to traditions of drawing or painting than to the relational aesthetics so common in the media art field.

From the more traditional art world obvious connections can be made between generative art and movements like Conceptual Art, Minimalism and Op Art, both in terms of formal and conceptual similarities. Sol Lewitt’s use of terse text instructions as the means of describing his famous wall drawings has become something of a golden standard , an art historical reference providing generative art with mainstream legitimacy beyond comparisons to screensavers and audio visualizers. Similarly, the strictness of Minimalism with its elimination of subjective gesture is inevitably appealing to the computationally minded.

A direct link is found in the work of early computer art pioneers like Charles Csuri, Manfred Mohr, Vera Molnar or Frieder Nake. Created in the hey-day of Minimalism and Op Art, their explorations of parametric processes predates the current scene by more than 30 years. Along with a larger group of artists experimenting with computer code they laid out a conceptual groundwork that was sadly semi-forgotten and ignored by media art discourse, until its “rediscovery” in recent years. Generally created before the advent of interactive screens and mostly realized using plotter hardware, artworks from this era mirror the ideas popular in painting of the time.

These pre-existing art movements certainly provide part of the conceptual framework for code-based work being created now. But to get the full picture one must address the radically different cultural context of the current scene to that of the late 1960’s. The utopian world view of Modernism has been fragmented by Postmodernism and complexity theory, undermining the straight-forward world view of reductionist science with quantum uncertainty and emergent phenomena. On a technical level, early computer systems exhibited only a fraction of the complexity of today’s technological infrastructure, which goes beyond the individual computer to encompass an interconnected world of networks and public APIs. A flourishing Open Source scene now supports artistic endeavour, serving up tools and code examples to accomplish all sorts of computational miracles.

Developments in electronic music have provided us with new compositional ideas such as sampling, glitch and microbeats, as well as a renewed desire for synaesthetic experiences. Concepts like live cinema and media facades are closely linked to generative art, as are other fields such as information visualization and computational architecture. Only by considering all these developments along with the historical precedents can one glean an understanding of the concerns at hand.

void reboot();

I would like to propose that we are currently at a crossroads in the field of generative art. Code-based artworks have reached a level of maturity, going beyond simple visual experimentation to expressing more complex visions. Artists like Lab[au] use software processes as an integral part of their work, formulating an artistic project based on the material qualities of computation. Throughout their various projects one can trace the merging of architectural concepts of space with code structures.

The “chronos” series takes a simple mapping of time to color as its starting point, following its logic to provide a visualization of temporal space. The generative art consoles Lab[au] have developed are simultaneously beautiful objects and an extendible delivery platform for software artworks. But perhaps their most complex achievements lie in projects like “5x5x5”, where generative principles are manifested in physical form, escaping the screen altogether.

This move beyond projections and the screen as mediating surfaces is one of the more exciting recent developments in computational systems. The use of digital fabrication technology to literally extrude virtual objects into physical space challenges the screen as a default output device, providing the means for an algorithmic conception of space. Already we are seeing architects using scripting in CAD software to design parametric structures that can respond to environmental input. Meanwhile, artists are experimenting with “data sculptures”, representing normally intangible information flows as physical manifestations.

While generative art is inextricably linked to the computer as a means of production, the work is not about the computer itself. While screen-based work and the investigation of realtime self-contained systems remain an important aspect of generative art, it would be a mistake to think generative work is primarily expressed in pixels. I for one look forward to an extended rethinking of computational aesthetics that encompasses a much wider range of possible outputs.

Marius Watz, May 2010

CATALYSTS – Case Studies in Computational Techniques
New York City College of Technology
186 Jay St V834 Brooklyn NY 11201

March 24, 2012 9:00 – 5:00
Free and Open to Public

Workshops by:

• Phil Anzalone, Atelier Architecture 64 & GSAPP
• Frank Bitonti, FabStudio
• Mark Collins + Toru Hasegawa, ProxyARCH
• Zach Downey, PARABOX Labs
• Erik Verboon, Buro Happold
• Marius Watz, artist

Moderated By: Ronnie Parsons + Gil Akos, Studio Mode[ ] | modeLab
Coordinated by Anne Leonhardt, Sanjive Vaidya, Brian Ringley, Hart Marlow

This event will consist of six one-hour workshops focusing on techniques / case studies that facilitate the implementation of digital concepts into reality. This slam-style event will be conducted by leading practitioners in architectural computation and fabrication.

ArcSurf, 2012. Series of laser drawings on 6mm MDF
20×30 cm, all uniques

Mark Making, solo show at Mediaruimte, Brussels, Feb 29-March 31, 2012

Mark Making is a summary of recent works using mechanical machine processes to explore drawing in physical media (metal, styrene and MDF). Pieces on display include a new Wall Exploder tape drawing, Arc Drawing 1+2 and three CircGrid pieces on anodized aluminum as well as a new series of drawings on MDF titled ArcSurf.

Mark Making is organized in connection with the Generator.x 3.0: Code to Atoms workshop at iMAL. My thanks to Yves Bernard and Lab[au] for making these two events possible.

Generator.x 3.0: From Code to Atoms
Feb 18-26, 2012 at iMal, Brussels
http://www.imal.org/en/activity/generatorx3

Announcing Generator.x 3.0: From Code to Atoms, a workshop and exhibition focusing on digital fabrication and generative systems. This event is an evolution of Generator.x 2.0: Beyond the Screen, which took place in Berlin during Club Transmediale 2008. Generator.x 3.0 is produced by iMAL in collaboration with Marius Watz.

Context: Digital fabrication drastically changes manufacturing by democratizing access to industrial tools as well as changing the way objects are produced, opening the door for the on-demand creation of bespoke objects. Combined with the “craft” of code it becomes possible to directly connect parametric software processes to an instant manufacturing workflow, turning bits into atoms and introducing a paradigm that is radically different from traditional 3D modeling.

Generative systems shift the focus from static models towards a computational logic – what Bruce Sterling calls processuality. Here objects are understood as mere instances of a family of forms, produced by a specific interaction of parameters. Such forms may be data-driven or created through interactive means, adapting to conditions coded into the system. The artist becomes a “gardener” of possible forms, harvesting desirable results in an iterative process of coding and prototyping.

Workshop format: Participants will be chosen from a call for projects, with a focus on experience combining coding practices with digital fabrication. We will have large and powerful laser cutter machine on site, as well as several low-cost 3D Printers (Makerbots). The main software tool will be Processing (http://www.processing.org), but we also welcome users of other coding tools like VVVV, PD or OpenFrameworks.

The workshop will be hands-on and geared towards producing projects ready for exhibition at the end of the project. Participants will be expected to be familiar with code and generative strategies. There will be short tutorials demonstrating certain techniques, but the main focus is on the participants’ own independent work.

Call for projects: Submit projects or concepts for consideration through the online form on the iMAL web site.

Support: Generator.x 3.0 is produced by iMAL, and is made possible by the support of the Brussels-Capital Region, the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, and our sponsors Hackable-devices (Paris and Ghent) and i.materialise.

I’m happy to be able to announce the much-delayed launch of this site, which up to now has been little but a placeholder. The mariuswatz.com domain was registered something in 2005 with the intention of creating an archive of my artistic output, but like the shoemaker’s children the web site of a media artist rarely receives the attention it deserves.

My previous sites unlekker.net and evolutionzone.com will remain online, with the intention of preserving them as-is so that they become time capsules of their respective periods. Buried deep in evolutionzone.com there is even a copy of my oldest portfolio site, which went online in 1996 and features Java applets that still run correctly.

This time capsule strategy might make for some awkward viewing, but at least it’s a truthful archive.

Lecture about the rise of digital fabrication and parametric design, looking at their implications for creative practices. Specifically, Open Source design (Makerbot and Thingiverse), generative systems and data sculpture.

Given Nov 26, 2011 at Code Camping Amsterdam, Hack de Overheid, Amsterdam

Laser drawing on plywood
2x panels, 12″ x 30″