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Frieder Nake: When we meet, he often asks me, "Oh Frieder, did you again do one of those interviews?" So he's always afraid of me saying things that, if he were with me, he would interrupt. "Oh no, I must correct this."
Peter Bauman: Hello everybody, and welcome to this Le Random podcast. I'm Peter Bauman, or Monk Antony, the editor-in-chief at Le Random. And today I have the incredible fortune of speaking to Frieder Nake, one of the founders of digital and computer and algorithmic art. He is one of the three Ns, along with Nees and Noll. It's impossible to overstate really his contributions to digital art and what we celebrate at Le Random. He is a true pioneer in the world of algorithmic art. He started making it in 1963 and studied with Max Bense in 1965. He was one of the first three, along with the other Ns, Nees, Nake and Noll, to exhibit computer art in 1965.
This person's contributions are simply monumental and it's a true privilege to speak to him today. And this conversation is a follow-up from an initial conversation that we had and became an article at Le Random. So this is, we got back in touch after we published the article, and this conversation is some follow-up questions and a continuation of the conversation. So if you haven't already read the article, I recommend going to lerandom.art. And I'll put the link in the description to the Le Random editorial where you will find it available. Otherwise, I think this conversation also stands on its own. So thank you for listening, and just a tremendous amount of gratitude to Frieder for his time.
In our interview at Le Random, you said that computers don't have qualities, but do you think that humans are the great event in the world, the beings who look for and are capable of experiencing a quality that we call feeling? So yeah, I wonder if you think that's changing with AI, or do you think that AI is changing that? So you said computers don't have those qualities, but do you think they might in the future?
Frieder Nake: Yep.
Peter Bauman: Do you think that might be changing?
Frieder Nake: No. And then, however, and the however is, you know, this old, Marx has written about that a lot, that old dialectics between quality and quantity. It is very helpful for us to use these two important terms. I do this probably in all my teaching. I believe quality versus quantity. However, and in particular in our days with computers in the background, however, quantity can turn into quality.
When, for instance, the number of cases in some particular problem grows so tremendously, and each of the cases is dealt with in a perfect manner, then this gains a new quality. We usually, so to speak, working by hand, head and hand, we deal with two, three, at most five cases. And a big professor may have a group of students under him, so that he can deal with a number of more such cases. But usually this is impossible. And those cases then become more like just two or three practical examples, and we are content with it.
This is under current technological, in the technological situation, this has changed, because you can now run the machine, as long as the cases are similar enough, in a large number. And you may then again have some assistants who go through that machinic produced, produced by machine, large set of cases, that you yourself would never do. And the students then, quite happily doing that job, come up: "Oh look, there was something that was different." You don't have the time. You really don't have it.
And in old, I do not know how they worked in the Renaissance. I do not know it. And most likely my thinking of it is mistaken. But it seems to me that by that time, when the entire set of examples in a certain type of problem was, in comparison to today, small, then they could still, I bet Leonardo da Vinci was capable of doing this, to look through cases with a different view. Maybe not one after the other. They immediately, I believe, discovered patterns. And in the pattern of one particular case, the quality shows up. And you then take up that pattern, that looks a bit different than the others, and develop it further, and you discover a new quality.
Peter Bauman: That kind of reminds me of Max Bense's generative aesthetics. Is that kind of where that's based off of? Those ideas of setting up conditions that make these surprising results?
Frieder Nake: My first reaction to this surprising remark of yours is: fantastic thought. My second is, I would give some money if he were still here and we could ask him himself. But my conjecture is he would at least not be far from this.
It seemed to me, I was close to Bense, but this was a one-sided closeness. He was never really friendly to me, once when I approached him, but that's not important. I admire, admired and listened to him, and read his stuff all the time. And I believe it is full of such vague insights that he wrote one sentence about, just as an aside remark, and went on in what he wanted to do with his extreme rationalism.
And that extreme rationalism, of course, is a bit against what we are talking about here, namely the sudden, surprising idea that comes to your mind, and you have no idea why. Bense's thinking was totally different. He always wanted to go the logic way, the way of radical logics. If A, then B, then C, and so on. This was his kind of thinking.
Peter Bauman: It reminds me of something you've said before about intuition being almost analogous to machine randomness. And is that kind of where you would differ from Bense, that he would say that you couldn't make that kind of statement? But you think, is intuition a human feeling? I mean, do you see them as somewhat similar concepts?
Frieder Nake: At least in my interpretation, now that he's, you know, I do not know, and I probably have not studied carefully enough, would we find something in this direction from him? The fact that he was so good friends, by putting up shows for them, with a number of not mediocre artists, no, really top artists, that fact always makes me, always made me wonder. And unfortunately, I never talked to any of these famous artists. I would not have dared. But he was always friends with famous artists, and when you have such encounters, this leaves you not unchanged.
You know, I firmly believe, maybe that's crazy, Peter, in the exchanges between people. It is extremely important. And that's another form of what you mentioned before, the relation between quality and quantity. You know, between us, between two, three sitting together drinking a beer or something, qualities happen. Hardly ever. It may be that one of us gets drunk. Okay, that's quantity. Or the jump from the quantity of drinking to being drunk, that's a quality.
Peter Bauman: That can be measured, right. Do you think it's something only humans can do? Like, can animals?
Frieder Nake: I do believe in this being a decisive difference of humans against animals. Yes, I do believe this. First of all, our ordinary use of the brain, and then in particular, when we work on this particular problem for a full day, for a week, even longer, and then the jumps, the dialectical jumps: now I have it. This famous, who was that already? Aristotle or so? Eureka. This Greek exclamation, Eureka. That means, now I have it.
Peter Bauman: Euclid said this.
Frieder Nake: Yeah. And this we cannot condone. We cannot control, Peter. This is outside of our, yes, some creativity people. But I don't believe that you can do much training you to become creative. I don't believe in this. But that's romantic and old-fashioned.
Peter Bauman: It's more of a thought or an idea than feeling, I guess, on that level. Is that what you mean by quality?
Frieder Nake: Yeah.
Peter Bauman: It's less feeling like emotional feeling.
Frieder Nake: No, emotion may come in, but it's not immediately there. And I would not by myself bring it up. It is more, I remember, I do remember nice little moments. They have gone, those days. When I was observing and controlling the drawing machine, the plotter, so to speak, drawing machine.
And they were often, I knew vaguely from having run the computer to produce the paper tape that was now to be processed by the drawing machine. I didn't see anything before, no displays. Only when the slow, extremely slow drawing machine did its work, totally according to what the computer had produced. And what the computer had produced was the result of my program. And the same program could now have produced a paper tape whose drawing was not totally different from the next one. But its style was the same. The details were different.
So the same program, I do remember, cases produced something that I immediately threw away, never to look at again. And then the next one coming from the same program was, wow, that's really interesting. So this, Peter, is what in our repeatedly used analogy between random numbers and intuition. Random numbers, of course, can never make up to our intuition. It's impossible. However, within the limits of, could I say, mathematical, at least algorithmic approximations, they do.
When I use that comparison, random number generators versus intuition, I of course know there is no correspondence. But with a machine, as close as we could ever come to intuition. No intuition on the machine. But we can approach it. And this is by the random number generators. I had my own random number generators. And that's only because I was studying probability theory. Therefore, I could do this. This needs special knowledge, really.
“So the same program, I do remember, cases produced something that I immediately threw away, never to look at again. And then the next one coming from the same program was, wow, that's really interesting.” — Frieder Nake 13:54
Peter Bauman: Right. Yeah. I'm really interested in the human hand and that process that you were talking about. So you would create an algorithm that would then produce these different serial results, related but slightly different results. But you still had to choose which of those results to keep and which to discard.
Frieder Nake: Yes.
Peter Bauman: And how? Can you talk about that curation process? Was it based on aesthetics or some kind of your own personal creativity? Or how did you make those particular choices?
Frieder Nake: A total mixture of that. A total mixture of that, of course. I don't know. Maybe that was in one particular year or so. I did the following. I used some of Bense's formula, a formula that he called aesthetic measure. So at times, he used the term aesthetic value. This was problematic. And I believe he learned this. But there is something different from value. Value is much more quality. Measure is quantity.
And when we do things using a computer, in our field now, all the time in the field of aesthetics, if not art. And of course, when I was young, I never used the term art. I told the artist friends, yeah, it's okay if you speak of art. But you will not hear me use that term, because it's only for you. Okay. Aside.
So since Bense, and in particular one of his PhD students, had defined a whole series of aesthetic measures, I wrote a program that you could, whose input would be, and the aesthetic measure according to someone should be between something and something. And then the measure of surprise for red should be this. And for blue and for yellow. And the measure of conspicuousness should be something.
So I had this program. This I programmed in Toronto. Took me almost a year. That you get, whose input would be a whole set of those quantitative information aesthetic measures. And then the program was supposed, this is what I had written as a program, to produce something that had those measures. This was the climax in 1968, 69 in Toronto.
I produced two pictures. Large ones. 1.5 meter square. Only. I had a large number of outputs. But they were not turned into real images. Only sheets that we could have used. And one of those two still exists in a museum in Germany. And the other one my mother threw away. That was the nicer one.
Peter Bauman: Do you know the name of those images?
Frieder Nake: Yes. Generative Aesthetics Number One.
Peter Bauman: Okay.
Frieder Nake: And then this is the name of the program, and therefore it's the class name of those images. Whether I still have the output, the printouts, I do not know. I would have to search. But there would be many more.
Instead of colors for those printouts, I just used vertical line, horizontal line, asterisks and so forth to have instead of colors, because the output would not do this. And I printed these like hell. And realized those two only together with three of my friends. You know, we glued little, we had cut little pieces of cardboard, you know, with some glue on the back, and then had drawn these grids into which we then stuck those little cardboard pieces. Was a horrible job. And the fact that my mother burned one of them, the one that I liked more, was horrible. I was in Canada by the time, and when I returned it was not there anymore.
Peter Bauman: Well, so these were made with a physical process where you were individually placing cardboard pieces onto a grid based on where the program...
Frieder Nake: How do you call that, those? They are usually brown and very strong material. You cannot bend it. You would break it. And on those we stuck those little pieces, which was a horrible job, because if you went less than a millimeter out here from here, this continued, and then in the end it was a mess and you could not use it anymore. And therefore I did only those two. They were called Generative Aesthetics Number One, and then they had their individual number. And I believe the one that my mother destroyed had the number 3.22, which meant experiment number three, the 22nd version of that experiment.
[…] the 22nd version of that experiment. I did lots of printouts and then inspected them. Do I believe if this would be realized in colors it would look nice or not? So there's again the intuition, the feeling, the subjective moment.
Peter Bauman: And when you were, so was that also based on how they made you feel? And did you ever consider how they would make the viewer feel, your work? Was this a consideration for you?
Frieder Nake: It was, it was. And it was always, I could say. Of course, when I was working with the […] I started into this, I behaved towards journalists as if none of that existed in me, no emotions. But that was a lie. And whether the journalists believed me or not I do not know. Perhaps they believed and then thought, oh, he must be really stupid. But I have never given up, Peter, insisting on […] not believe this.
But now, since I have gotten older, I wonder that I once believed this. When I was around my 30s, you know. Yes, that was an attitude. You know, I wanted to shock people by saying this: no, I have no feelings. What do you think?
Peter Bauman: Oh yeah, I mean, that is interesting, because you do always have, even with this algorithmic art where the computer makes more choices, there is always these human choices. Even when creating the system there are lots of choices there, of course. And after the system has produced outputs there are more creative human choices. And yeah, I'm always interested in how that's approached. But do you think that AI will be able to make those kinds of choices? Or is that something that only humans can do?
Frieder Nake: I do not trust in AI at all, really. This may be to a large extent, it may be true because I am getting older. That may be so. And at the university I'm surrounded in our department by AI people. But the more their work becomes important, the less I believe in it.
We could call the computer a machine to produce choices, to generate, to produce choices. And we program it, so we are even in control of what the computer will be capable of offering for us then to choose from. But this is really old-fashioned thinking, clearly. I guess most of my students would not follow me here, in saying that we are those animals that have the great capacity to […]
of this particular professor, then most likely we'll have all of us, all 10 or 12 of us, will follow him in some way. Because otherwise we will switch class and go to another one, if there is not enough agreement in a fine arts school. This is totally different than the university.
The more, Peter, we get into something that righteously is being called art, the more we get into this, not just into some little examples or so, the more our particular taste, our particular feeling for quality, our quality, very subjective, wins, takes over. And using the computer only rationalizes a bit your set of choices from which you then pick one or three. This is my conviction. It's just simple, naive, in some sense naive. But if we don't keep some naivety, we are lost.
Peter Bauman: What do you think the peculiar traits of algorithms and these algorithms are? Why use them to make art today, or ever? Was it to generate those choices, those that then you could choose from? Or was there another reason besides that initial idea generation? Like, what are the traits of these systems that made them so appealing?
Frieder Nake: There is several little ingredients that brought me to currently firmly believing in this: the necessity, when you use a computer, that the work that is produced by the computer must be dynamic. Now, this is my belief now. And I think in Berlin when we talked, I mentioned this, that all of computer art up to this point in time, I think […] because it's largely static, and you need this.
If, when we do something, could I say really new, this sounds a bit arrogant, then we have to go through maybe even pains of doing something that is already quite convincing. However, deep down, you feel that is still not enough, not right, and in my particular case not important. It is the absolute step from the static image to the dynamic image, to the always already moving and never repeating. This would be, I have said this maybe even in Berlin at that little talk, that is my belief of when it becomes interesting to use computers.
Because computers are those machines that you can use for that purpose. Always changing. There is no other machine. They are all repetitive in some sense. The repetition may take a long, long time. Yes, of course. However, the computer is based on the principle of continuing to change without repetition.
Okay, so that, Peter, was not so long ago. I would claim something between two or three years that this became really, as I believe, clear to me. When we put up an exhibition to show algorithmic works, the computer must be present.
Peter Bauman: And why must it be present?
Frieder Nake: It must be present because without it, the work doesn't exist. This is my radical formulation. And why I say so. In the old, old, old times, it would have been ridiculous if I had said this to the gallerist. Because the gallerist would have told me, Peter, nice idea, but you know what? Look here. These are my rooms. Your computer wouldn't fit into here. Now this has changed, of course.
[…] background, and I may have told you this. In an exhibition two or three years ago here in Bremen, I had four such installations on the walls, and each one of them had behind the screen the tiny little Raspberry Pi computer that is so small that nobody even noticed that there is a computer behind. But for that purpose I had put this particular program onto this Raspberry, and another and another. They could be easily glued behind. The power had to be supplied, yes, that was a bit awkward because it doesn't look nice. And then they ran, and they ran all the time differently.
So in my view, I don't know, I think they, I don't even have pictures of this, of course. I have the program so I could run them again. But the nice little installation, I don't know if they have recorded anything on video.
“It must be present because without it, the work doesn't exist. This is my radical formulation.” — Frieder Nake 30:54
But you know, this is a belief, at least in my development, a step getting away from the computer that now in the computing center is doing something. I collect the results, I carry them to the gallery, they put them up on the wall. That new approach is: here I come with these tiny little things in my pocket. I show them to the gallerist. He says, "What, this is a computer?" That's how you ask. Yes. "Do you have the big screens? We need big screens." Oh no. "Yeah, but we need big screens." No, because that's where the art will happen. However, it happens only if the tiny little computer is also here.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, and there are quite a few artists who share, there's sort of a, not a debate or rivalry, but there's a bit of a tension between artists who maybe advocate for that kind of dynamic real-time work, and then artists who are still using algorithms to make static work that is usually more painterly or uses the aesthetics of maybe the last century. Like, how do you feel about that kind of algorithmic work that chooses not to be dynamic, but chooses to still maybe follow those aesthetic rules of the past?
Frieder Nake: And put a lot into the production of that work, yes.
Peter Bauman: Yeah.
Frieder Nake: This is another stream. My thinking, I guess it cannot be different, is to a large extent very old-fashioned. In comparison to a 30-year-old artist nowadays, my thinking is, he will be friendly if he talks with me, but otherwise he will, when he then goes away with his friends: "Oh, the old guy. Not nice, but he's the old guy." This is my thinking, because I envy them for being so young. I don't get out of this old-fashioned kind of thinking.
And my own aesthetics is extremely tied up with geometry. Just a few days ago, I have worked on this installation, the nine states, and have changed a bit of the Gerhard Richter part of it. So it's a bit nicer. Nice, deceptive word. And I have worked on two others where what I want to do is, again, trivial. But it's within my frame of thinking.
State number 11 will draw straight lines. Colored lines. But they will all of a sudden break and continue in a different direction. And as one of them breaks, all the others must follow. So there is some happening within that image where there is, so to speak, many individuals, lines, just lines. But to program this, that the others must realize that one of their friends has decided to do something different, and then to follow suit and flock again in a certain way. This is my thinking behind. It is not one of, they are animated or so. It remains dynamic geometry.
However, a bit more interesting perhaps, the decision is when we actually see the image. We see it. And it may be it's ugly. May well turn out. When we see it, it's different than when we think it. But my thinking goes more and more into such a direction. I want to be with the happening in the image, whatever form, color the happening is now controlled by, and thereby come up with perhaps slightly new kind of image happening. It is program. But it is not reprogrammed in the sense that I would know exactly what is going to happen. I give this up. I give more, should I say autonomy, a bit more autonomy to the dynamic image.
Peter Bauman: Okay. So yeah, I guess in that way it's harder to follow these aesthetic applications of the past with dynamic work.
Frieder Nake: Yeah.
Peter Bauman: I mean, it was so nice to talk to you again and to kind of follow up on some of the ideas that we talked about before. I just want to...
Frieder Nake: We will continue this definitely, Peter, and don't be shy. It is true, a lot of my time. Occasionally I think about it and then I'm amazed how much time that I use for my students. I need this. This is the other side. I need to be with students.
What you and I talked about now is some kind of alienation in the thinking.
Peter Bauman: Yeah.
Frieder Nake: For most of us alienation is a negative term.
Peter Bauman: And it is. It has a lot of negative connotations.
Frieder Nake: Yeah. But if we don't allow occasionally at least to be alienated from our own existence, we cannot, now I use the term, we cannot create. I think in being alienated from something I have done until yesterday, to get away from, contains a bit of, I feel alienated. I feel alienated from what I have done until yesterday.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. I guess you have to find some sense of alienation to express your own individuality. And I think as a writer, some of that has to come out in me as well.
Frieder Nake: It has to.
Peter Bauman: Talking with you always brings up ideas in my mind.
Frieder Nake: I would become religious.
Peter Bauman: There is no danger.
Frieder Nake: There is no danger. But somebody, an outside observer, would say so. Because isn't this the danger of being alienated from what you are accustomed to and what you like? Isn't that the source for other people believing in whatever kind of God? God helps them not to be afraid of being alienated.
Peter Bauman: Certainly gives people a sense of belonging.
Frieder Nake: For us, alienation is creativity.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe those are polar.
Frieder Nake: Absolutely. These are polar positions.
Peter Bauman: Thank you for your time, and great to always, always really fascinating to chat with you. So thank you, Frieder.
Frieder Nake: Thank you. Thank you, Peter.
Peter Bauman: Bye-bye.
Frieder Nake: Bye-bye. Take care.
