Why Love Generative Art?

Three more approaches not mentioned in the article:

  Pixel Sorting
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A subtype of glitch art. Generally you do it horizontally or vertically. You choose contiguous intervals in a bitmap and sort pixels in it by color, hue, value etc. Here's a moose I made based on a Wikimedia Commons photo: https://www.reddit.com/r/pixelsorting/comments/7oioko/moose/

  Glitch art
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Also has its own subreddit. People over there get excited over printers breaking down in the middle of printing a page, etc. Sometimes results are truly intriguing.

  Primitive
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Geometric primitives. The ingenious library written in Go. It transforms an image into a composition of 2D overlapping, translucent polygons. Output is available chiefly as an .svg https://github.com/fogleman/primitive Using this and images from a search engine, I made a calendar with animals. I could post it if anyone's interested.

> The problem with generative art is not that it isn’t considered art by everyone.

Abstract Art in general isn't considered "Art" by everyone, especially in the days of Abstract Expressionism and Jackson Pollack. While I do appreciate the thoughts around generative art, these discussions are not new. But it is a new generation using new tools, re-discovering the arguments from the mid 20th century.

The question isn't whether it is art, or whether other people think it is art. The question is why do those questions matter to you (the generic you, not OP or any specific commenter) as an artist. Are you doing it to get validation from others? Are you doing it to sell the work to others? Or do you have your own reasons for your work, aside from the opinions of others?

For me, art is about self expression and self exploration. If other people call it "art", great. If they buy my work, even better. But I'll do my work, either way.

It's a really handsome piece of work. I love the papercraft aesthetic. Well done.

One of the randomizations I generated was uncannily like a winking eye. But sadly I only discovered the shareable link after I had lost it. Oh, the ephemeral nature of generative art!

> I think you’re accidentally digging backwards to find them.

You might be completely right. Though I’m not sure I understand what you mean by digging backwards. The problems I see are, of course, the main problems I’ve personally run into. I have a hard time telling a compelling story to someone who doesn’t know anything about computers or math. When I look around, I can see that many other people have the same problem.

My point was that generative art is and always has been considered art by some people, but it still has issues convincing traditional artists.

> If you want to make a living in art, selling to collectors and galleries, it’s really not about pragmatic economic concerns like these

Just curious - have you actually tried selling art? This might be extremely presumptuous, but your statement sounds like lack of experience. It’s almost entirely about pragmatic concerns, so much so that it becomes harder to make art when you need to make a living. There are millions of people trying to make it in the art world and failing.

> It’s about having a community of patrons and collectors who can’t help but talk about and trade the work at galleries and dinner parties.

I don’t mean this to be rude at all, but this is a pure fantasy. There are almost zero living artists who have this kind of following, the only ones who do are famous, and they didn’t have this before they were famous.

> As that catches, people will inevitably surface the “good stories”

That depends on you giving them the good stories, right?

> Codifying them as “main problems” might just leave you missing opportunity when the winds change.

You might be right, point taken. They’re my “main problems”, and not necessarily yours or the future’s.

However, if you look around, you’ll see that the problems I called out have been problems for a long time, and they are problems with other genres too. Photography is also harder to value, because of it’s reproducibility, which is why it has never (yet) reached quite the same status as a Rembrandt painting or a Michelangelo sculpture. Hopefully you’re right and in the future, we can value the creativity itself, rather than the object.

Generative art would be more compelling with clean, commented source attached. Even to non-programmers. I am always drawn to good explanations for inexplicable beauty, but what better explanation for the unknown than procedures to repeat it? (Especially if the source itself is formatted artfully.) I would love to see human readable DNA for example, one day.

Edit: Not that I believe DNA to ever be human readable, I'm referring to a level of abstraction that might be, and the expression of awe that art can evoke in relation to this and many other natural processes.