Generative art has been defined as “any art practice where the artist creates a process, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other mechanism, which is then set to motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a complete work of art.” (Philip Galanter).

The label of generative art does not address the content of the work, only an aspect of its production. A generative art piece can be visual, sound-based, textual or conceptual in nature. It has been argued that conceptual works like the instruction “Draw a straight line and follow it.” (LaMonte Young, Composition 1961 1-29) can be seen as generative art or software art.

In the contect of Generator.x, we will use the term generative art to describe works where the generative aspect is either the focus of the work or the primary means of expression used to communicate its content. To narrow the scope of discussion we will limit ourselves to works that are implemented as software.

Further references on generative art:
- Generative.net
- Runme.org
- 'What is generative art', a paper by Philip Galanter (PDF)