This is the review written by Truls Lie and published in Le Monde Diplomatique Norway.

In the exhibition Generator.x the artists insist on computer code as their way of expressing aesthetic ideas. The form is the content. Code is the method.

Truls Lie, Editor and publisher of Le Monde diplomatique Norway
Translated by Marius Watz

There is something “raw” about the exhibition at the National Museum of Oslo. Kunsthallen (the new pavilion at Tullinløkka) currently hosts Generator.x, which consists of small cubicles of computer and sound projections, as well as cubes wallpapered with computer-generated images. The exhibition space makes it possible to show large-scale visualizations of computer art: Graphics, columns of numbers, wire constructions, sound spaces, light projections that seem to “drip ink”, circles, curves, doodles, maps and “psychedelic” shimmering colors.

The rawness of the show is its insistence on pure computer-generated imagery – the material of the art work is the computer code. The artists (the hackers) use generative computer algorithms as the only raw material – the code is their aesthetic material. The tradition of the National Museum for romantic or social-realist painting here gives way to the hypermodern – the same Modernism examined the potential of the material of art itself (for instance Ad Reinhardt’s focus on the surface or flatness of painting).
At the same time this new art – which has received the label generative art – breaks with preceding art forms to such an extent that many would reject it as art. Or at best classify it as superficial design: Hackers as artists, technology generating art – no way!

Generative art has matured over a decade. Artists who insist on code as the only method for expressing aesthetic ideas don’t normally have academic artistic educations. Many of them can’t draw. Brush and chisel has been replaced by the PC – which Marius Watz, curator of Generator.x, calls “the great democratizer”. [1]. The code is the method. The form is the content. They break with traditional forms of visual art, but often find role models in the abstract art and sculpture of the 60s.

It’s worth noting the distancing from so-called Software artists. The latter appeared when some artists put aside their canvases and took up keyboards and electronics some years ago. Technology became a target for irony, demonized or worshipped. Today these artists are more political and critical of society, often participating in the Open Source scene.

But there is something democratic about generative artists and software artists, anchored in popular- and street-culture. They are often connected to club events and crossover scenes. There is a streak of distaste for middleclass high culture and the idolatry of masterpieces – a lack of respect for tedious education or the “LehrJahre” of artists. The code tools are immediately available, one can sample or quickly generate music and image sequences. The most crafty even tangle with the sublime, as they “visualize” the entire contents of the Bible, the Koran, the phone book or traffic on the internet – what traditional artist could have done that, based on actual data?

In this net-based environment, often tied to the Open Source movement, the work ethic is one of sharing – they exchange knowledge, software and ideas. A bartering economy exists where they help each other, develop software together and generously share finished code. Artists and hackers distribute graphics and flash videos rapidly over the net. Even at the exhibition web site one can find free art friendly code tools like Processing or VVVV. An eight year education in art is not required to create something of interest. These computer circles are autodidactic, democratic and anti-capitalist.

Even if there is not always a critical nerve or a source of meaning in generative art there will be no end to the aesthetic play and experiential thirst for knowledge in front of the net-connected screens of the of the world. We are many out here, boys and adults with greedy hands, attracted to these “toys” – just as the artist throughout time has played with paint, clay, sound and light.
It is also interesting to note that these computer tools will within a couple of years become so “helpful” that they become an invisible part of the background. That many people will get used to code almost as a part of their language – the same way language influences our ideas about reality. Daily use of information tools will also gradually influence the spectrum of our expressions, the way media influences our perceptions of how the world works. And the computer or hyper-advanced handheld mobile phone is for many users becoming a human prosthetic much like the use of glasses or contact lenses. Imagine a future where your glasses send small projections onto your retina, where you receive email, news, a movie, where you use your glasses as a videophone and to enjoy generative art. When you have made it that far the generative art will have become part of you, and cease to exist as “art”.

The code-oriented generative artists spend long nights coding, trying and failing.
The man behind the Open Source system Linux, the Finn Linus Torvalds, some years ago wrote in the article “What makes Hackers tick” that the three most important motivational forces a human has is “survival”, “social life” and “entertainment”. [2] The first is both obvious and basic. And social life is sometimes actually more important than survival, some people sacrifice themselves for their families, their country or a political / religious conviction. But how important is entertainment as the third motivational force? Can you imagine a generative artist kill himself if deprived of the possibilities of code? If he doesn’t die from boredom, it is at least possible to consider that his hierarchy of needs is robbed of some form of quality of life. Torvalds describes “entertainment” as being what made people like Einstein “tick”, what motivated their experiences and their powers of creation. A search for understanding – the same that any philosopher, artist or researcher today is searching for. Where experience intersects aesthetics, where the desire to play oscillates between order and chaos.
But does the obsession for code, for technique as aesthetic enjoyment, have any meaning outside itself? The computer genius Golan Levin, who in the last 8 years has created much generative art and code at the well-known American university MIT, could not answer his own question: What if the randomly generated expressions of art are simply arbitrary?
The Norwegian artist HC Gilje, who participated in the Generator.x conference insists on the use of video footage of people and settings, processed after the fact by software / code. He argues that we are corporeal creatures that must relate to recognizable surroundings. His computer-manipulated video art often consists of montage, distortions of elements and visual variations. He is playful where the art combines image and music, but at the same time one can sense a “work of sorrow” in the live video footage in his work. [3] As Lev Manovich points out in an article [4] on the web site www.generatorx.no, the now 10 years old generative art scene ought to go beyond what montage and surrealism has done before. The challenge outside of the “objective” code could now be to question the human subjectivity of the day – just like the media- and computer-dominated world of consciousness that more and more of us inhabit.

© LMD Norway

[1] See also interview with Watz on the web site www.generatorx.no
[2] Pekka Himanen, The Hacker Ethic, and the Spirit of the Information Age, with texts by Linus Torvalds an Manuel Castells, 2001, Vintage.
[3] See also www.bek.no/~hc/
[4] See also article by Lev Manovich, «The Anti-sublime in New Media», 2002