Day 1 of the Generator.x conference went without a hitch, featuring a good presentation of theoretical perspectives on generative art. Susanne Jaschko spoke of the experience of the sublime in art, often described as the feeling of being overwhelmed the infinity of space. In this connection, she juxtaposed Goya’s The Colossus with Casey Reas’ MicroImage and spoke about how they both contain a sense of the sublime. She also tried to place generative art in the context of retinal or non-retinal conceptions of art. Erich Berger spoke about the theories behind his performance work, taking his work Tempest as a starting point. As a software-based performer he feels that he is surfing the space of possibilities inherent in the algorithms he uses.

After lunch, the session of shorter presentations had the Spoon collective from Prague struggling to explain their idea of “humanizing” the computer. In the same session Even Westwang presented the work Nomen Nominandum, where a virtual creature inhabits the local area network of a public school in Norway, growing and dying over the course of 3 years. Meredith Hoy spole about historical rule-based models of perception, and like Susanne before her she picked up on the sublime, expanding it to a theory of the sublime that includes the temporal dimension.

Against this solid background, Casey Reas' presentation put pictures to the theory. And beautiful pictures they were. As always, Casey performed with ease, showing the progression in his work over the last 5 years, including his use of Braitenberg vehicles.. He was followed by Gisle Frøysland, director of visual arts at BEK. He spoke about the importance of FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) and presented BEK’s Piksel festival, a yearly event gathering Open Source developers of live video applications.

Amanda Steggell of Motherboard brought a performative strategy to the panel summing up the day. Asking difficult questions, she managed to spark a lively debate. Aesthetics came up as a contentious issue, following up on Susanne’s earlier distinctions of retinal and non-retinal. Interestingly, Casey Reas explained that he is uncomfortable with the term “generative” as used to describe his work, since he feels that implies that he is not present in the work as an active force. Provoked by Amanda, he declared that he is not at all interested in automation.