9 Formal Ways of Making Art: Code as an Answer to a Dream
Ernest Edmonds
Writing computer code is quite an exacting task. It makes one think very hard about what exactly one wants to do and typically leads one to take a fairly structured approach to whatever that is. This applies just as much to making art with code as it does to making anything else with code: aircraft control systems, holiday-booking websites, or whatever else. It is not surprising, therefore, that many of the origins of software-based art can be found in art that already used a language of formal structures, geometry, mathematical series, and so on. Computer code offered an answer to the dreams of some of the artists who were using mathematics, procedures, and formal structures even before computer programs existed.
9.1 Systems in Art
If we go back to well before the invention of the modern computer, we can find words from Cézanne that seem to point forward to a more formal view of art making: “The technique of any art consists of a language and a logic” (Doran 2001, 17).
An artist’s language consists of many elements: colors, lines, shapes; the logic is the set of rules developed by the artist for selecting those elements and putting them together. Of course, Cézanne was not referring to the formal rules of mathematics and certainly not to the logic of a computer program. Nevertheless, one can see both in his work and in this statement the seed of much that has followed.
Another significant grounding point was in K. S. Malevich’s essay of 1919, “On New Systems in Art” (Malevich 1988, 83–118). In it, he introduces the notion of making art with the help of “a law for the constructional inter-relationships of forms,” by which he meant the language, or system of form, rather than representations of the visual world. Furthermore, he maintains, “nowhere in the world of painting, does anything grow without a system” and “in constructing painterly forms it is essential to have a system for their construction, a law for the constructional relationship of forms.”
As in Cézanne’s case, we need to be careful not to project too much of the modern approach to the use of systems in art onto Malevich. But his remarks are clearly pointing in the same direction as Cézanne’s and, as we will see, in a direction that leads to at least one stream of art today.
In relation to Malevich, Maria Gough explains how, by discarding realism, the important question arose of “what would be the logic or principle by which the non-objective painter would organise” the elements of the painting (Gough 2005, 22). The situation was one in which Malevich discarded realism, or painterly illusionism, for a realism based on the painting itself as an object. He explained that the “new painterly realism is a painterly one precisely because it has no realism of mountains, sky, water” (Malevich 1968, 133). Gough goes on to argue that “if the first task of early-twentieth century abstraction was to get rid of the referent in a painting … its second task is the determination of new logics or principles by which this ‘painterly content’ might be organised” (Gough 2005, 22).
A founding step in the Constructivist1 tradition, the discussions of the General Working Group of Objective Analysis in 1921 in Moscow (Lodder 1983), is also a key relevant moment in this argument. The group drew a distinction between composition and construction in making their art. Briefly, composition was seen to be about arranging forms according to relationship rules, and construction was about making a work according to a plan for its production.
The discussions of the group were complex, and they did not all take the same position. It is probably best understood through Maria Gough’s careful analysis of the composition and construction drawing pairs that the group made (Gough 2005). She shows that the group had at least five interpretations of construction, so clearly the artists were still wrestling with the problem of which “logic or principle” should be used. There is no reason to think that there should be only one, but for the argument of this chapter the most relevant idea was the introduction of the notion of making a visual artwork according to a plan rather than by the application of rules of composition. In 1921, of course, the plans were executed by the artists themselves. But later, artists began to express these plans in the form of computer programs. Then, as we see later in the chapter, the construction of the artwork was done by a computer.
9.2 Mathematics and Procedures
In some respects we could argue that there was nothing new in using organizing principles in painting. The portrait painter is constrained by the sitter and the principle of making a likeness. The painter of townscapes has long used the principles of perspective. However, the so-called abstract artists had to find new, more or less internal principles to use. Max Bill (see figure 9.1), for example, famously took the problem on by advocating the use of mathematics. In 1949 he argued that “it is possible to evolve a new form of art in which the artist’s work could be founded to quite a substantial degree on a mathematical line of approach” (Bill 1978, 110).
Max Bill. Ardiv III. 1972, screen print. See color insert. (Reproduced by permission of Ernest Edmonds.)
Bill saw this as the next step to take and, with Richard Paul Lohse, he was influential on many artists in Europe. Lohse said, of his own work, “To obtain new operative bases it was necessary to systematize the media so that they could form logical sequences and would permit a multiplicity of operations. The result: variability and extensibility” (Lohse 1992, 22).
One area of influence can be seen in the New Tendencies series and the artists associated with that development. Extensive documentation and commentary has been provided by Margit Rosen (Rosen 2011). New Tendencies began in 1961 with the participation of artists who used the “notion of making a visual artwork according to a plan.” As Rosen points out, the work was often programmed, although the program was executed by the artist. The really interesting development was the call for the 1968 event New Tendencies 4, to be held in Zagreb, for works that used a computer and in which the programs were executed by computer rather than by hand. The exhibition presented and discussed computer-based art and took place at more or less the same time that Cybernetic Serendipity was showing in London (Reichardt 1968). However, despite the conceptual coherence of the inclusion of computer programming as a medium within New Tendencies, those people showing such work in 1968 did not include many artists who had previously been involved in the New Tendencies events.
This became a significant public debate, and the contributions to that debate by Alberto Biasi and Frieder Nake are included in Rosen’s book.2 It seems that New Tendencies 4 was contributed to by people who were primarily scientists, whereas on previous occasions the contributors were artists. Nake wondered if the main task in the future should not be to bring these two groups together. New Tendencies 5, held in 1973, in many ways did this, although from a current perspective it seems that the togetherness was being side by side rather than integrated.3
Compared with the developments on the Continent, a rather more integrated development took place in Britain. This is an integration, or a set of close connections, that has not been recognized very much in the literature. Partly under the direct influence of Max Bill and Richard Paul Lohse, systematic methods and mathematics became important to artists in the UK.
Alastair Grieve’s 2005 book, Constructed Abstract Art in England, describes important developments in British abstract art from 1950 to 1970, including the work of Mary Martin, Kenneth Martin, and Anthony Hill. In 1954, they were included in the important publication Nine Abstract Artists (Alloway 1954) and in the associated exhibition, often seen as a turning point in British abstract art. They influenced, and sometimes taught, a group of British artists who became known as the Systems group. The Arts Council of Great Britain exhibition Systems toured in 1972–1973 and included artists such as Malcolm Hughes, Colin Jones, Michael Kidner, Peter Lowe, Jean Spencer, and Jeffrey Steele. Apart from the direct influence of mathematics in its own right, as advocated by Bill, the significance of mathematics in nature as described in D’Arcy Thompson’s groundbreaking 1917 book On Growth and Form was very important to many of these British artists as discussed, for example, by Grieve (2005, 226–228). In particular, in 1951 London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts mounted an exhibition, Growth and Form, which led to a multidisciplinary book4 that explored structure and form in many aspects of the world, including in art (Whyte 1951).
In his introduction to the catalog for the Systems exhibition, Stephen Bann provides a full historical context for these artists’ work and makes one point that is particularly relevant to this chapter. He asks what had attracted these artists to the tradition of Constructivism and answers that the appeal “without any doubt, is the attraction of systematic procedures based on an order which is not necessarily apparent in the final work” (Bann 1972, 9).
9.3 Computer Programming
Perhaps computer programming was waiting in the wings. In 1967, Jeffrey Steele (see figure 9.2) had speculated about “the extension of the scope of an idea within the terms of its original proposition by the use of computers, which could thereby both assist and clarify the creative process itself.”5
Jeffrey Steele. SYNTAGMA SG III 104. 1992, oil on linen, 61 × 61 cm. See color insert. (Reproduced by permission of the artist.)
Then, in 1969, he made a proposal for an experimental workshop in the newly established Portsmouth Polytechnic, which in the end was not implemented. However, Stroud Cornock had just established the Media Handling Area at Leicester Polytechnic, and together he and I presented a paper at Brunel University’s “Computer Graphics 1970” conference in which we discussed the future impact that the computer would have on art practice and the creative process.6 In 1973, Malcolm Hughes established the Experimental Department at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he installed a computer for the use of his postgraduate students. In such ways, the connections between the Systems group and computer artists in Britain began to grow.
At this time, the Hughes operation at the Slade had strong connections with Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University), where I started. By 1968, I was writing computer programs as part of my art, beginning with the single mainframe computer that Leicester Polytechnic owned at that time. I arranged the elements of a twenty-part relief, Nineteen, by writing a program to search for solutions that matched the rules that I wanted to follow (see figure 9.3). I realized that the systems that I, and others, used in our art could be described in computer programming languages. Once programming became used in art, the form of art now known as generative appeared (Brown 2003). Generative art is one of the notable new art forms that arose in the twentieth century.
Ernest Edmonds. Nineteen. 1968–1969, multimedia, 183 × 145 × 17 cm. See color insert. (Reproduced by permission of the artist. Image courtesy of Jules Lister.)
As discussed in chapter 2, in generative art (CG-art) the artist specifies a set of rules by writing a computer program. A computer then uses the program to construct the artwork. Often it is in real time, and the audience watches the generative process (LC-art, in the taxonomy of chapter 2). Unlike a film, of course, a time-based generative work can go on forever without looping. Furthermore, the computer can respond to events in the world, such as people walking up to it, and so the generative artwork can become interactive (CI-art). Such interaction is fully in the spirit of Systems art.
Artists who studied with Malcolm Hughes at the Slade and used the computer include Paul Brown, Stephen Bell, Stephen Scrivener, and Dominic Boreham (see figure 9.4). The last two of these went on to study and work with me at Leicester Polytechnic, where Systems artists Colin Jones and Susan Tebby also taught. I moved to Loughborough University, and Stephen Bell came to study with me there. Malcolm Hughes was an external supervisor at Leicester, and Michael Kidner was an external examiner. Both Michael Kidner and Peter Lowe were artists in residence, working with computer experts, at Loughborough University. So the connections between the Systems artists and those using computers were clear.
Dominic Boreham. STOS 55. 1979, plotter drawing, ink on paper, 50 × 50 cm. (Reproduced by permission of Ernest Edmonds and the artist.)
Such direct personal connections, as well as the shared ideas about the use of procedures and structures, grew stronger over time, and there are many more connections than this short chapter has room to mention. The development of computer art in Britain, and in particular at the Slade and Leicester Polytechnic, has been documented in a book by Catherine Mason (2008) and another edited by Paul Brown, Catherine Mason, Charlie Gere, and Nicholas Lambert (Brown et al. 2009).
It is important to point out that art made by computer programming is not to be equated with digital art in general (see chapter 2). The latter includes all kinds of ways of making artworks that involve computers, the Internet, or digital data and may not involve the artist in writing programs at all. When a program is the medium, the artist is encapsulating rules and procedures in a formal description and arranging for a computer to act out the consequences. This makes programming an obvious extension to the methods used in the art of the Systems group (Bann 1972). In this sense, the constructive tradition might be said to continue to break new ground through artists writing computer programs.
In fact, none of the Systems group artists, and none of the UK abstract artists who preceded them, wrote computer programs. But their art was a strong influence on those who did, as I come to in a moment.
Another facet of this inspiring stream of activity was that in the early 1970s Harold Cohen, already a highly respected artist, started his lifelong quest of writing and developing his computer program AARON that automatically produced drawings and paintings, most recently in partnership with the artist himself, as Cohen puts it. By this he means that having seen a painting by AARON, the artist responds by making changes, applying modified colors, for example, that are stimulated by that painting. So the partnership results in a work jointly composed by Cohen and AARON.
Cohen was a frequent visitor to the Slade and also visited both Leicester Polytechnic and Loughborough University. Some members of the Systems group met regularly with other sympathetic artists, such as John Carter, Nathan Cohen, and Trevor Clarke, in the context of Exhibiting Space (Exhibiting Space 1986)—although, as I recall, the presence of computer-based art there was limited to my participation. Thus the Systems and the computer artists overlap and have many connections. As I have indicated, writing computer programs is an extension of the Systems approach and one that provides new opportunities afforded by the technology itself.
The artists in the Systems group and the computer-based artists who followed them were working in different media and with different agendas. But their approaches overlap significantly, and they have influenced one another—sometimes in ways that are rarely documented in contemporary art histories, another “neglected avant-garde” (Grieve 2005).
From a personal perspective, I was interested in the constructivist tradition and related art from my student days. For example, as a student, I worked on an analysis of a Mondrian painting and found mathematical regularities in it, regularities that were almost certainly not in Mondrian’s mind, I admit. A key step in completing Nineteen was the use of a computer program. I used a structured approach in completing the work, but it led me to understand that the notion of computation and the use of formal structures and procedures could be valuable in making the work.
When I came across the Systems group, very shortly afterward, I was immediately in tune with the work. My difference with them was simply that I came at the ideas more or less as a result of finding the value of computer programming, whereas some of them were seeing the potential of programming as a way forward from Systems art. In any case, I have practiced ever since using systems and structures to underlie the making of my artworks. Sometimes I embed those systems in code, and sometimes I apply them manually, but the principles are the same whichever route is taken.
Whichever way we look at it, however, the search for principled ways of making art has been important. It came with the moves toward and into abstraction that have now been with us for over a hundred years. Perhaps artists were destined to embrace computer programming as an important new and pertinent form of expression, as an answer to many artist’s dreams.
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This chapter is an extended version of the introduction to the catalog of the GV Art exhibition Automatic Art: Human and Machine Processes That Make Art, curated by Ernest Edmonds, July 3 to September 10, 2014.
1. I use the term “Constructivist” here in the broadest sense.
2. Alberto Biasi, “Situation 1967,” in Rosen (2011), 268–269; and Frieder Nake, “Reply to Alberto Biasi,” in Rosen (2011), 270–271.
3. See the chapter “1973: Tendencies 5,” in Rosen (2011), 473–528.
4. The book was conceived as a catalog but grew into a full book and termed a “symposium.”
5. Personal communication, 2014.
6. We revised the paper and later published it (Cornock and Edmonds 1973).
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