page_title: Generative art
section_title: Visual art
hierarchical_section_title: Generative art / Types / Visual art
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Sculpture métallique Sculpture et prise de vue par Jean-Max Albert
context_page_description: Generative art refers to art that in whole or in part has been created with the use of an autonomous system. An autonomous system in this context is generally one that is non-human and can independently determine features of an artwork that would otherwise require decisions made directly by the artist. In some cases the human creator may claim that the generative system represents their own artistic idea, and in others that the system takes on the role of the creator.
  "Generative art" often refers to algorithmic art, but artists can also make it using systems of chemistry, biology, mechanics and robotics, smart materials, manual randomization, mathematics, data mapping, symmetry, tiling, and more.
  You can see several modern examples of generative art here.
context_section_description: The artist Ellsworth Kelly created paintings by using chance operations to assign colors in a grid. He also created works on paper that he then cut into strips or squares and reassembled using chance operations to determine placement.
  Artists such as Hans Haacke have explored processes of physical and social systems in artistic context.  
  François Morellet has used both highly ordered and highly disordered systems in his artwork.  Some of his paintings feature regular systems of radial or parallel lines to create Moiré Patterns. In other works he has used chance operations to determine the coloration of grids. Sol LeWitt created generative art in the form of systems expressed in natural language and systems of geometric permutation. Harold Cohen's AARON system is a longstanding project combining software artificial intelligence with robotic painting devices to create physical artifacts. 
  Steina and Woody Vasulka are video art pioneers who used analog video feedback to create generative art. Video feedback is now cited as an example of deterministic chaos, and the early explorations by the Vasulkas anticipated contemporary science by many years.
  Software systems exploiting evolutionary computing to create visual form include those created by Scott Draves and Karl Sims.
  The digital artist Joseph Nechvatal has exploited models of viral contagion. 
  Autopoiesis by Ken Rinaldo includes fifteen musical and robotic sculptures that interact with the public and modify their behaviors based on both the presence of the participants and each other.Jean-Pierre Hebert and Roman Verostko are founding members of the Algorists, a group of artists who create their own algorithms to create art.
  A. Michael Noll, of Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated, programmed computer art using mathematical equations and programmed randomness, starting in 1962.
  The French artist Jean-Max Albert, beside environmental sculptures like Iapetus, and O=C=O, developed a project dedicated to the vegetation itself, in terms of biological activity. The Calmoduline Monument project is based on the property of a protein, calmodulin, to bond selectively to calcium. Exterior physical constraints (wind, rain, etc.) modify the electric potential of the cellular membranes of a plant and consequently the flux of calcium. However, the calcium controls the expression of the calmoduline gene. The plant can thus, when there is a stimulus, modify its « typical » growth pattern. So the basic principle of this monumental sculpture is that to the extent that they could be picked up and transported, these signals could be enlarged, translated into colors and shapes, and show the plant's « decisions » suggesting a level of fundamental biological activity.
  Maurizio Bolognini works with generative machines to address conceptual and social concerns.Mark Napier is a pioneer in data mapping, creating works based on the streams of zeros and ones in ethernet traffic, as part of the "Carnivore" project. Martin Wattenberg pushed this theme further, transforming "data sets" as diverse as musical scores (in "Shape of Song", 2001) and Wikipedia edits (History Flow, 2003, with Fernanda Viegas) into dramatic visual compositions.
  The Canadian artist San Base developed a "Dynamic Painting" algorithm in 2002. Using computer algorithms as "brush strokes," Base creates sophisticated imagery that evolves over time to produce a fluid, never-repeating artwork.
  Since 1996 there have been  ambigram generators that auto generate ambigrams
caption: Iapetus, by Jean-Max Albert, 1985
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