Open Edition • Free • Sept 19th → Oct 26th, 2024 • View/Mint on Highlight
A shortlisted work in the Finnish National Gallery's genart competition, Combine24, where artists were asked to use the gallery's collection of CC0 (i.e. public domain) art in a generative art project.
All art is infested by other art.
— Leo Steinberg
Imagine an artist having to start from scratch with each piece of art. Not just a blank canvas, absolutely nothing. There is no accessible art history or even memory of the artist's own work and somehow they've erased everything they've experienced in relationship to art-making. Paint doesn't exist and neither does javascript or any other programming language.
Actually, no. That's ridiculous. It's like asking someone to form a sentence even though there is no established language or to build a chair with no materials, tools or knowledge of what it is to sit.
We'd probably get a lot of hand-prints.
But that's not how it works, thankfully.
Art is a conversation that looks at the whole of our experience and responds to it. It looks at nature, politics, society, humanity, science, everything, anything and yes, what has already been said through art and builds on it.
I like the quote above for this project (and all the Combine24 submissions) because each project consciously injects some form of previously existing art into these new works.
In making art (or having any conversation) we repeat ourselves or what we have heard from others or observed from our experience. We may do this subconsciously; thinking we are creating something from nothing... but it has to come from somewhere. It may be a composite of ideas that we've ingested and recomposed to create something novel, perhaps, but without that particular set of inputs, would we have generated the same output?
We can claim some sort of intuition that we may innately have that drives our novel takes or conclusions but where did that intuition come from? Surely some observation or experience as well. It may be applied subconsciously but again, all we are really bringing is some transform on something we've consumed.
Even if we introduce randomness, is it really that? It certainly isn't with generative art where we carefully use psuedorandomness to make sure each piece is deterministic (reproducible) with a given seed.
And that seed is pretty easy to understand... it's just something that reduces to a number that you can pass to a piece of code so that will give you the exact same sequence of "random" numbers each time so that the art renders consistently because the algorithm makes the same "random" decisions each time.
So it's hard not to wonder... can we reduce our existence to this as well?
Is there free will or are we (and the universe) deterministic?
Is anything actually random (or subject to free will) or is generative art an abstraction of a deterministic universe?
Is the current state of the universe merely a seed as well?
Does superposition prove free will or does superdeterminism kill that?
People have been arguing this for millenia and I, for one, don't have any real answers. This project explores the possibility that free will doesn't exist and that the universe is deterministic... and because of that, all art is deterministic as well... regardless of whether it's intentionally reproducible like long-form generative output or a freehand painting.
Something may be hard to predict, but that doesn't preclude it being deterministic.
Perhaps the artist's context is the seed, even if it can never be returned to, because, well, time.
There are 10 shortlisted works for Combine24 and the results vary wildly. Each artist started with the same prompt but went their own way at a certain time.
Did their context determine what they created? Did they really have any "say" in it? Did the last thing they read push them one way or another? Would I have created the same project had I waited another week?
What does this have to do with repeating things or adding noise?
For me, thinking about how varied the different projects were for Combine24 is a manifestation of how each artist's seed (which is to say their context/biology/history/etc) determined what they chose to do with all those public domain works that the Finnish National Gallery put out there to be used.
Even whether an artist participated was determined by something that may not have included free will. Some participants are from Finland so they had a relationship to who was putting on the competition. I have created a few projects in the past that have remixed CC0 art so I was drawn too it.[1][2][3] I created those because one of the first NFT projects I was ever meaningfully exposed to was Nouns, which were CC0 and the project encouraged "extensions" using their assets.
The projects may be novel, but they are repeating some version of the past while introducing noise as they pass through the artist.
This is not to say any artist lacks creativity, or on the flipside is all that creative in the first place, just that maybe that free will doesn't factor in, only their raw materials and experience.
All this to say, this art wouldn't exist without the art that came before it, or what our personal experiences were navigating our lives. Maybe there were elements of free will, or maybe there is nothing new under the sun, just new permutations of same pre-existing elements that inevitably become more nuanced while they are transformed.
Do we have a choice in what we experience?
Do we have a choice in what we think and do?
Does it matter?
Simply, this project is about how we repeat what we experience while adding the noise of how we understand things.
••••
Do check out the project page, where you can generate sample outputs and read a statement from a slightly different angle.
URL Params for custom sizes (Print notes, etc)
Repetition and Noise was created using p5js and a shader. Make sure your GPU is enabled.
Key Commands:
S : Save the current frame as a jpg
URL Parameters:
?ext=png : Render image as a PNG rather than a JPG
?width=x : Render image with x width (read notes below)
?print=true : Use with "width" to render larger than 5000px
wide
Render notes:
The default renderer can only render up to about 5000px wide because of how it uses a shader. If you want a
super high resolution file for printing, use print mode, as this can render at much higher sizes.
For example: ?width=10000&print=true
For high resolution images, please use a Chromium browser (Chrome, Brave, Edge, Arc) as Safari gives up pretty easily, at time of publishing at least.
By the way, with all of these URL params, chances are the URL already has some params in it. In that case, instead of using the ? when you append, try something like: &width=7500&print=true and leave all the other params already there.
View on Highlight ⤤
Return to Portfolio ⤺