#3: Art Exhibition "–Graph"

Join now, where ever you are

UniCapital_88

Dec 01, 2021

You are at the beach, on top of the Eiffeltower, or hiking through a jungle, covered with mosquito bites?

The only thing you need to enter is a functioning internet connection.

Yesterday, the floodgates opened for the art exhibition called “–Graph”.

It is a virtual exhibition, unlike a museum or an art gallery, which in most cases displays physical art pieces.

And the fascinating thing is - the so-called “generative art” is made by code.

So what is generative art?

Generative Art is a process of algorithmically generating new ideas, forms, shapes, colors or patterns. First, you create rules that provide boundaries for the creation process. Then a computer follows those rules to produce new works on your behalf.
In contrast to traditional artists who may spend days or even months exploring one idea, generative code artists use computers to generate thousands of ideas in milliseconds.
Generative artists leverage modern processing power to invent new aesthetics – instructing programs to run within a set of artistic constraints, and guiding the process to a desired result.
Source, see this article

Basically, it is letting the computer generate art pieces with the code you program the algorithm. May sound easy but it requires coding skills and a lot of work since good generative art tries to differentiate itself from the last pieces it put out AND still look amazing. You do not want to create art pieces, that look awful, while you are giving away this control to the algo.

Is generative art a new thing?

No, it already existed in 1965 and the pioneer of computer art, Georg Nees (1926 –2016), was the first to exhibit computer-generated drawings in Stuttgart in 1965.

Four examples of generative art by Georg Nees

Is generative art displayed only online and in art galleries?

Not only! Casey Reas and Tal Rosner collaborated to create "Chronograph", a site-specific software mural for the Frank Gehry-designed home of the New World Symphony in Miami.

See more in this short video, it is beautiful.

So who is Casey Reas?

Casey Reas is more than an artist. He is a professor at UCLA, a co-founder of Processing, the and the Processing Foundation, and I co-founded Feral File in 2020.

Try it out yourself & see what it is like to produce generative art, go on this website

https://processing.org/

and see what your code & output in live-view modus.

You can play with the code, change the shapes and colors and give it a first try in general.

The art exhibition is about “plotter drawings” but what does this mean?

Watch this mesmerizing short video on how a ploter drawing is made & you will get the gist. It feels like magic and its so clean. Basically, it is a pen, led by a computer.