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thefunnyguys: Hello everyone, welcome to our second Spaces. Maybe we can start with a quick introduction from everyone on the Le Random team. Myself, thefunnyguys, I'm one of the founders of Le Random, and I'm here with Conrad, who is hosting from the Le Random account. Conrad, can you give a quick introduction to yourself?
Conrad: Yeah, I'll keep it a bit short since we had some of these in our last Spaces. But Conrad, otherwise known as NemoCake in the digital space. I work as the analyst for Le Random, helping build out the collection and which artworks and artists we bring into our collection alongside thefunnyguys. I'll hand it off to Peter, our Monk Antony, to talk a bit more about himself.
Peter Bauman: Hey Conrad, thanks. Yeah, so my name is Peter Bauman, Monk Antony. At Le Random, I am responsible for the editorial content. I'm a writer there. I've also been writing this Generative Art Timeline for the last many months at Le Random.
thefunnyguys: And that's exactly what this space will be about. It will be an introduction of our Generative Art Timeline to the community. This timeline will have 10 different chapters, the first chapter being focused on the pre-modern era. And for every chapter, the goal is to have a Twitter space just to discuss the chapter in a bit more depth. We hope to invite a guest for every single chapter to discuss the specific material. For this first one, we have the pleasure to have Marius Watz as a guest.
For those who don't know Marius Watz, Marius is an artist who works with visual abstraction through generative software processes. He has been doing this for the last 25 years. He has exhibited around the world at institutions like the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He has also taught at the NYU ITP Interactive Telecommunications Program, a creative media arts program, as well as at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. And he was also the creator of the Generator.x project about generative art and computational design back in 2005 to 2010. But yeah, hey Marius, great to have you. Feel free to add any more information about yourself.
Marius Watz: Yeah, great to be here. Well, I'm a Scandinavian, so I come from way up north. I'm used to cold. When I got started, there was basically no one that I knew who did anything like this. There was no GitHub. There were FTP sites. There was a comp.graphics FAQ you could download. It was a pretty different world.
But at the same time, it was also a very exciting time in the graphic design world, which I was immersed in at the time, because I actually dropped out of computer science. Computer science was the worst thing I could imagine doing with a computer in the mid-90s, and I started working with designers instead. A lot of my work has been informed by the 90s moment in graphic design, which was all about postmodernism killing modernism, and a very subjective idea of design. And also a genuine excitement about how the world is completely open now that we have these digital tools. And then conveniently later on, there was dot-com. So that was a job as well. And then when dot-com crashed, I moved to Berlin and went full time as an artist.
thefunnyguys: Thanks for the rundown, Marius. I actually see that we also have one of your contemporaries in the audience, Joshua Davis. Hey, Joshua, great to have you on.
Joshua Davis: I'm just here for Marius. I got so much love for that guy. I don't want to steal any of his thunder. Listen, one of the coolest things, I have to tell a story. I wanted to learn. I had reached a ceiling and I wanted to learn so much from Marius that I was following him on what was then social media. It was mostly his Generator.x website, which you guys should totally talk to him about. And he was like, hey, I'm hosting a workshop. And I was like, hell yes, I definitely want to take a workshop with Marius. Only to find out it was in his apartment, in his kitchen.
Marius Watz: Yes.
Joshua Davis: It was in the kitchen of his apartment, a few blocks from where I lived. And I was probably the happiest guy on earth, because I wasn't really doing a lot of 3D and I really wanted to absorb as much as I could. And I got a chance to take this workshop with, I think, two other people. And we just sat in Marius's kitchen. He showed us how to fold and unfold the universe.
Marius Watz: That's cool, Josh. I think that's an excellent anecdote as well, because just to give some explanation, that was actually a side hustle of mine at the time, around 2013, genuinely paying my rent by doing Processing workshops, but also just meeting awesome people. And of course, having Joshua come by, who I've known on and off throughout the 2010s, was amazing, because he's a fucking star. But I also remember you pulled up on a hot red Harley that you parked outside. And I was like, I'm not sure that's safe, dude. It's Brooklyn.
Joshua Davis: That was an amazing time.
Conrad: Thank you so much for that background, Marius, and the little story, Joshua. That's great to have. I think we'll just start it out with, we kind of already had that short introduction to the timeline. This is the first of 10 chapters that we introduce and arguably one of the shortest chapters. The next ones are going to be a lot more compact, full of moments throughout the next decades to come. I just want to ask Peter, what inspired you to begin this large endeavor of creating this comprehensive timeline? And maybe what were the most influential or helpful resources that you came across during your research period?
Peter Bauman: Yeah, it's a good question. I think I started and I didn't intend for it to be as big as it got. Eventually, as I kept researching and researching, it just grew and grew. And even now I'm finding it difficult to stop adding things constantly.
I've even talked with Marius about, we also just felt like there was a lot of history written about this movement, but it was kind of focused on certain areas. We wanted to shine a little light on some of those other aspects of the history that haven't been as well documented.
And then in terms of resources, I enjoyed Art of the Electronic Age by Frank Popper, When the Machine Made Art by Grant Taylor, then Computer Graphics, Computer Art, Christiane Paul's Digital Art, and then A Companion to Digital Art. Those are some of the main sources I used. But countless websites and other smaller sources. Those are some of the larger ones.
Conrad: Thank you so much. And then Marius, I have a short question for you. Is there any ways that you think that we can help to ensure that the timeline elevates and helps contextualize the generative art movement?
Marius Watz: Yeah, I think the kind of framework that I've set out with Le Random already, to me, as someone who's been moaning about this a little bit in the last couple of years, watching the NFT scene completely blossom and come up with amazing artists, etc. But at the same time showing again and again that it doesn't mean that people know the history. A lot of people are like, oh, it started now. And it's like, no, where do you think these tools that people are using came from? And who built them? They didn't find them in a burning bush in the desert.
So I've been concerned with the storytelling of that. And also because the Generator.x project that I did in 2005 was like a leap of faith. Generative art was not very popular in the media art scene in Europe at the time, because it was seen as, that's for the evening entertainment. That's the eye candy. You can show it with DJs and an electronic music act. It was not considered a serious artistic endeavor in its own right, and we had to fight to be taken seriously.
So Generator.x was trying to put down the flag for, this is a serious endeavor. You can see it in art. You can see it in architecture. You can see it in design. These ideas of computation as a material, software as a material, is very impactful and significant. And now, of course, that was nearly 20 years ago, and now all those things are just taken for granted, which is great. That's actually the goal. But the irony is some of that history gets lost in the process.
“And it's like, no, where do you think these tools that people are using came from? And who built them? They didn't find them in a burning bush in the desert.” — Marius Watz 7:00
So I've been wanting to shine a light on the people who were there at the beginning, because not everybody follows a trend all the way through. Lives change. People move on or they take other jobs or they get families, et cetera. And that's just natural. But it also means that for the people that I remember, I want other people to also remember them and to understand what was the significance of their contribution. That's been one of my big motivations. And of course, selfishly, nobody wants to be forgotten. So it's partly an emotional, sentimental thing, partly a purely academic thing of, no, I think we need to understand how these threads pull together and see how the people who were working in the 60s were doing their own thing. Amazing work. But it was also a completely different cultural context.
And I would say even between the people like me who started around the 2000s, like Joshua and me and Casey Reas and Golan, et cetera, versus the people. I was talking to Marcin Ignac of Variable earlier today, and he's the creative coding generation, which came 10 years later. And they had their own concerns. They were missing some of the constraints and things to fight against that we had, but then they had a completely different interest. And I was like, why is everybody generating these artificial landscapes all of a sudden? What is this kind of nouveau naturalism coming out of? So I think storytelling is very important, but also to take each moment on its own merits and understand what was motivating the people working at that time.
thefunnyguys: Thank you, Marius. Yeah, our goal with the timeline is also to make sure that every single generation in the generative art history is very well represented. But what I think makes this timeline also stand out is that it goes back way before the 20th century. As this first chapter shows, it's a pre-modern era and it starts literally tens of thousands of years before the day of today. And I was wondering, Peter, what motivated you to go back thousands of years?
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think for me what was really exciting was, it was difficult to really find dates that everything quote-unquote began. So you could go back to 1850 or 1860 with the start of modern art, but then you miss this entire first chapter that we're about to cover. I felt that a lot of those moments were too important to pass up, and that the history of mathematics and computational thinking, and logical and algorithmic thinking, that part of the story of generative art has these kind of ancient roots. It's going to be fun to dig into these today.
thefunnyguys: I think the first moment ever in the timeline is also a really good example. It's called the Blombos Cave drawing. And just to make sure, by the way, before we dig in, if you go to timeline.lerandom.art, this is where you can follow along. This is where the entire timeline will be uploaded. At the moment it's just the first chapter, but over the next few weeks, months, we'll be introducing the subsequent chapters. But yeah, so the first moment is the Blombos Cave drawing. This dates back 70,000 years before Christ. Could you share a bit more about this moment, Peter?
Peter Bauman: Yeah, so for me this moment was brought to my attention by Philip Galanter. Galanter talks about how this is an example of tiling, and it's also one of the first known works of art created by a human. But it is similar to other prehistoric art that's been found in caves that also uses a lot of geometric patterns and symmetrical designs. So this is something that is maybe representative of a larger cultural era than just this piece itself. And it's something that maybe not everybody would consider a work of generative art, but Galanter did believe that they did qualify as generative, because the marks that were made by the artists back then used this kind of manual symmetry-based algorithm. I'm curious, Marius, would you consider this generative art?
Marius Watz: I've been doing this for a long time, and I find it a little bit of a stretch. I think the items that you've pulled together on the timeline are really interesting and thought-provoking, and I think they do point towards humanity's kind of awkward coexistence with machines, and then realizing we can augment our abilities through machines, but also learning to look like a machine, to look at the world like a machine. And so of course I do believe that there is an innate human interest in systems, which many of the points you have on the timeline do show.
The cave drawings is kind of arbitrary, but what it shows is, okay, so one of the reasons why artists work with generative systems is also often to free themselves of the need to be the author of every mark. If a system is controlling the marks, then you also have a certain amount of freedom. You are liberated as an artist, and also you can explore the system into new directions that you might not have originally imagined. So of course in that sense, sure, maybe the human who made this had an artistic intent, or was fascinated by, oh, what happens if I make a multitude of these marks?
Because of course you have to remember that the human eye is a line detector and a pattern recognition machine. Pareidolia, the idea that the human eye will try to find patterns where there are none. That's why you will try to find faces in urinals or bushes or whatever have you. So the human eye is strongly drawn towards, if it was a machine learning system you would say that it was overtrained and it gives false positives, which of course is a very interesting thing in itself. So I think there is a tension between, did we really intend to make these patterns, did we set out to make these patterns, or did we discover them and then kind of follow them? You know, the La Monte Young poem about, draw a line and follow it.
Conrad: I think that's a really great conversational point, how some of these moments can be seen as arbitrary, and how you evaluate them and see how they may fit in the long history of generative art. And then moving on to, I think, the second highlight moment that we have, from 1000 BCE, is the I Ching. Peter, if you maybe want to expand more on this moment's significance, and maybe the overall significance of the binary system within the digital world, would be great.
“If a system is controlling the marks, then you also have a certain amount of freedom. You are liberated as an artist, and also you can explore the system into new directions that you might not have originally imagined.” — Marius Watz 13:59
Peter Bauman: Yeah, so this is another moment that was recommended by somebody, and that was Georg Bak. I think that it's another crucial point about the timeline, is that we're very open to feedback. We're open to many different kinds of experts offering their feedback and making the timeline better and more interesting and more complete.
So with the I Ching, it's something that would have its effect on generative art a bit later. John Cage and Manfred Mohr were quite directly influenced by it in the 60s. But it's something that goes back 1300 years. It was this ancient Chinese text, and it's what really introduced the world to the binary system and the concept of yin and yang and on and off. It was one of the first texts to introduce the world to that mathematic but also philosophic concept that has been so crucial to the development of modern computing but also generative art.
Marius Watz: One thing that's funny is actually I was very much influenced by the I Ching in the 90s. It was one of the first forms that I tried to develop as a system, because realizing that it was binary and that you could count through the iterations, and then later creating variations of it. So not only did I have it on my website in like 1995, and I will post pictures, I also have a tattoo with a pattern that's based on the I Ching, although a kind of Batman-like symbol that comes from it.
I think I learned of it from the Blade Runner author, Philip K. Dick. And it's the one that's set in San Francisco with the Nazis having taken over the world, and one of the characters is consulting the I Ching for wisdom or insights on his current predicament. And I looked it up and I was totally fascinated by the form, of course, because at that point I was quite early in my own formal explorations. And it became a reference to this idea that you can have a single form that has a parametric range, so it can take on many different forms. And I did a couple of treatments of it.
So I think the I Ching, even though I don't think it was created to be first and foremost a formal system, it definitely has those properties. And it's a parametric form. It's deterministic. It can be explored from zero to 63.
Conrad: Thank you so much for that response. I think we'll talk even a bit more on other binary systems later on in this highlight. But to move on to our next moment, we are going to talk about Euclid's Elements, which appeared 300 BCE, a monumental work. Peter can probably give a bit more insight on this moment.
Peter Bauman: Euclid's Elements was another textbook, and it's probably the most influential and longest used textbook of all time. And it's still a key work in geometry and still studied even today. So it's 13 books about making logical proofs and attempting to ascertain certainty by starting off with really basic principles and using logical proofs to investigate the unknown.
It was critical to this, again, this concept of algorithmic thinking, and also something really crucial to generative art and coded art, and just about visualizing the beauty of mathematics. And Conrad and thefunnyguys, just earlier today, we were talking to Zach Lieberman, and Zach was telling us about how he calls himself a wildlife photographer of math, and that what he was really trying to do is search for the beauty of the subject. And I really think that Euclid's Elements are the roots of thinking about logic, which led to the algorithms that make this kind of art, but also just visualizing art and this concept of geometry. So that's why this was in the chapter.
So how about you, Marius? What do you think about the role of geometry in your work or in your creative process, or how do you feel about it on the timeline here?
Marius Watz: So as someone who nearly flunked my third year of college, or high school math, because it was science math or calculus, and I was just terrible at it, it wasn't something that I took to easily. But yet I have spent the last 25 years of my life calculating vectors in both 2D and 3D and implementing Pythagoras's theorem as though I was just breathing.
So math is something that I am not innately drawn to. I don't explore mathematical proofs, et cetera. I have a friend who would read Russian math papers translated into French, and I'm like, yeah, that's a commitment that I've just never had. But I'm fascinated of course by what becomes possible once you imagine space. A lot of my work is about imagining motion through two-dimensional, three-dimensional space, and thinking of how can you create new forms by, or just navigating, space. So of course without the classics, Euclid, et cetera, those things would not be possible.
So I have an ambivalent relationship to it. There is also a really interesting movement of math art where they have art exhibitions all dedicated to sacred geometry, things that take the Platonic solids and tilings and all this stuff. And I find it very interesting, but as an artist I wonder, but what are you bringing to it? Are you just finding the most interesting tiling of this form of math? But it's a known form, so what are you bringing to it? And I think that is also a point of tension for generative artists, because we can all find algorithms that are extremely powerful, like the Voronoi diagram, an extremely good form that the human eye finds immensely interesting. But if you're a coder, you know that that's kind of just the demo. Anybody can do that as soon as you implement it.
So I have an ambivalent relationship to math as a pure thing in itself. But of course, people like Zach or Golan, who are just absolute geniuses at algorithms and math, they've done things that I just could not follow. They would just casually be talking about implementing finger video tracking when everybody else was trying to, oh yeah, I'm into particle systems right now. So it's a different level of literacy with math, I guess.
thefunnyguys: That's interesting, and this also reminds me of Math Art, the collection by Herbert W. Franke. We actually collected two of these pieces for Le Random, from 1980 to 1995. He created many, many works in this math art category, and this was his first NFT mint, 100 pieces that he created from this Math Art collection. And I do also resonate that math shouldn't be the end. It should be a means to the end, I guess. Operator, maybe you're aware of this artistic duo, recently did this generative choreography collection on Art Blocks. They have these rules for art and technology, and one of them is that it should never be a tech demo. It never should be about the mathematics or technology itself, but always about something more, something beyond that.
Marius Watz: Yeah, that was, I think, a really good addition. There is also Jim Campbell. He made a diagram of media art which is basically just a scrolling list on the left side of possible input devices, mechanisms and detectors and sensors, and then on the right hand side the outputs, which would be screens or machines. What he was implying was that a lot of media art, particularly in the 90s and 2000s, had a basic formula. You take an interesting input and you transform it into an interesting output, and then the question is, what are you adding to it? So I think this is also always a critical issue in art. What are you adding to it?
But then I have also seen so many artworks where you are just dumbfounded by the simplicity of the thing, like Andreas Gysin and Sidi Vanetti's piece at the Materialized exhibition just last week, which is flipping through four letter words. It's as simple as it can be, but it's also enormously poetic. Of course if everybody had access to a flipping letters machine, then it would probably be less interesting. So there is always some tension between, not "looks rare" as in NFT terms, but something which confronts the viewer with an experience that they did not anticipate. There's always great power in that, even if the idea underlying it is extremely simple. So I'm not trying to say that you have to be complicated or find new things, because it's always about the quality of the experience that you have in the encounter with the art.
“So I'm not trying to say that you have to be complicated or find new things, because it's always about the quality of the experience that you have in the encounter with the art.” — Marius Watz 24:21
thefunnyguys: I agree. Then the next two moments, they take us to the Islamic world. So at year 700, we mark the emergence of Islamic geometric arts, and 820, I might butcher the pronunciation of this name, al-Khwarizmi writes On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals. Peter, maybe you can expand, why are these two moments so significant?
Peter Bauman: Yeah, so this is moment four out of ten that we're talking about now. And this emergence of Islamic art and these geometric patterns around 700 is definitely not meant to be a specific date. It's more of a general time period around here. But this was an example of a generative process that predates the computer, a generative system. It's a highly ordered system and a system with low complexity, and it's another kind of tiling and symmetry-based system that much of this Islamic art is based off of. Mostly it was decorative, which also reminds me a lot of something we'll talk about next chapter, which is the Arts and Crafts movement and Art Nouveau. William Morris started using some of these. He was using natural forms, but he was also using them in a grid like Islamic geometric art.
So in addition to tiling, like we were just talking about with math, the Islamic world at this time was also this cradle of mathematic civilization and innovation. And I think that was an important reason why geometric and tiling math arts appeared in this region. And then of course the word algorithm actually gets its roots from the Latin word for, I will also butcher his name, al-Khwarizmi. So that Latin term, Algoritmi, is what actually led to the word algorithm. So two hugely important moments on the timeline that we sort of combined into this moment number four in this ten moment list.
Marius Watz: I think you also need to mention the impetus for Islamic geometric art is also the prohibition against depiction of human form, et cetera, in the Islamic faith. I'm not sure about the exact religious technical details, but you can imagine if European artists had been just forbidden by the pope to depict natural scenes or humans, where would they go with their creativity? Well, they would go into patterns and tiling, et cetera. And of course the influence of the Arabic world and their advancements is largely because of this.
[Garbled: roughly 30 seconds unrecoverable in the source transcription.]
Humans have the same brain now as we did then. The difference is the tools that we've evolved, partly technical tools, but also the knowledge that we have. So the sci-fi post-apocalyptic nightmare of humans without knowledge, would we go back to being cavemen? It's a really interesting thing to consider.
But I see this as, as soon as you have a system of writing, what becomes possible that wasn't possible before then? Okay, so I'm from Scandinavia, the Viking culture, et cetera. They were more tradesmen than the violent warriors that you see in movies, et cetera, but they did not have very good mathematics, and it was a problem. They didn't have currency. This was also a problem. They would carry hack silver, which was literally chunky pieces of silver bracelets, et cetera, that you could pay for things just by cutting off a decent chunk.
And when you have numbers and then money. I remember, I think in maybe like '15, '16, for the first time I think I finally understood the real meaning of currency, that it's a consensus about value translated into something that is absolutely meaningless, a piece of paper, but we all agree that it has the equivalent value to physical goods, and so we can trade with them. And the power that that abstraction produces is really the core of all technological devices. Okay, before the internet, you couldn't imagine a world where you connected with everyone at the same time. And then suddenly that was possible. And then suddenly you had the web, and then suddenly you had social media. So these kind of evolutionary leaps, even though they're not evolution, they're technical evolutions, is what creates the possibility space for human experience. And now we even have magic internet money, which we collect digital pieces of art with. So we're taking it to the extreme.
thefunnyguys: The next moment in the timeline that we would want to highlight is a moment in 1514. Albrecht Dürer creates the engraving Melencolia I. And what's particularly interesting about this moment in my opinion is that Vera Molnár, one of the pioneers of algorithmic art, was highly influenced by this engraving, and more specifically also by the magic square that's featured in this engraving. And I was wondering, first of all Marius, you mentioned you're inspired by the I Ching. Is this also something that inspires you, this magic square by Albrecht Dürer, or some other creative coders who are inspired by this moment?
Marius Watz: Yeah, I think again there's a lot of people I... I'm not familiar with this piece at all actually, and I have never heard of the magic square. Of course I know Dürer, but to me I think the equivalent would be, I don't know, my interest in architecture, which particularly in the 90s was a huge influence on my thinking and the forms that I was interested in, whatever is kind of Japanese pomo architecture, et cetera, which of course have a lot of these ideas in them and also reference these ideas quite a lot.
Honestly, not so familiar with the magic square. I tend to be a little, as an autodidact, like I dropped out of university at 20 and I never studied art history. I have a kind of eclectic collection of the things that I really feel like I know, because there are gaps in the knowledge. I didn't learn the whole continuity.
thefunnyguys: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, definitely. I was actually visiting the studio of Hans Dehlinger in Berlin just a few months ago. I think most people know Hans Dehlinger, his plotter drawings. But he also showed me some works on his Mac. They were visualizations of the magic square. And that was for me, that was actually my introduction to the magic square. I didn't know this concept before Hans Dehlinger showed it to me.
Peter Bauman: I just think it's such a fascinating piece to explore and take the time to look at all the different elements going on. I mean, there's the magic square in the top right, which means that the numbers in each row, column and diagonal, they add up to the same. So this painting is also from the year 1514. And then if you look in the middle of the magic square, it has those two numbers together. So there's a lot of symbolism.
This was also really important for the development of perspective and proportion, and how it's still impacted even computer art. And Vera Molnár really did talk about how important this was to her when she was young. What she said was, looking for a foundation and something that she could hold on to, and making non-figurative paintings. So it definitely, I think, would have been on the list regardless of Molnár talking about it. But that only highlights its importance, I think.
Marius Watz: I think the idea of perspective, and the idea that there's a lot of art from the Middle Ages that is kind of pre-perspective, where you have a different understanding or acceptance of vanishing points or how an image is laid out. And then when perspective gets introduced, things have to behave in a naturalistic manner. It's super interesting.
I remember, again, having been blown away by the realization that of course perspective is an algorithm. And I got my start working with ray tracing, which of course, mirror balls and checkered boards, planes until as far as I could see. And then being fascinated by the precise mathematical modeling of reflections, et cetera, et cetera, which of course is all coming from this. And the idea that you could model a scene as a collection of objects and then simply shoot rays or simulated particles through it and detect what is it that they hit by modeling the properties of light, which is super, super interesting. And we take it now for granted. And now I can render a 20,000 by 20,000 pixel image in Blender doing all of this. It'll take a while, but it's amazing.
To me, so that is maybe my relationship to perspective. Particularly, perspective allows the calculation of a 3D scene as though it was seen by the human eye.
Conrad: I think there's ways that that art piece can link to a bunch of different avenues of creative coding. And then moving on to moment number six of the timeline, or the highlight of our timeline, further exploration. So we're expanding on the importance of foundational binary systems. We talk about Gottfried Leibniz and his publication of On the Combinatorial Art from 1666. Is there a specific significance that this piece holds, Peter, that you want to expand a bit more on?
Peter Bauman: With Leibniz, yeah, I think we really see this continuation of Euclid and the use of logic, because this particular paper would be influential in the history of computing and algorithms. It really laid the foundation for things like symbolic logic and computation and formal logic. And it would influence some other moments on our list, like the Analytical Engine of Charles Babbage that Ada Lovelace used, which we might be able to talk about a bit later.
So yeah, I mean, I think this is just another example, especially by Leibniz, who's somebody who was one of the most brilliant people in human history, who co-founded calculus and had this career as a mathematician, but also impacted many other fields as well. So really fascinating moment. And then of course Leibniz would go on a few decades later after this and basically invent binary, or is considered the person that is credited for the invention of binary. So this moment is meant to encapsulate almost the entirety of Leibniz's impact.
Marius Watz: I'm very interested in this moment in time, when the start of the rational era begins, when humans start looking at the world around us and seeing it described in terms of laws that can be described and calculated, and being able to describe the world around you according to these laws, and then being able to use these laws to create further abstractions and predicting phenomena that you haven't even seen yet, and being able to see that, yes, I was correct in these assumptions.
The Greek mathematicians, they calculated machines of war, et cetera, which we of course have seen with computers later, the first computers being bombsight calculators and calculators for parabolic arcs. And to see how humans evolve in lockstep with our understanding of the world and technology, and what we do with it, both beautiful things but also awful things, is a constant source of fascination for me.
thefunnyguys: We have, I think, four moments left. We have two more moments to discuss, but we can distill it down to just two moments. It makes more sense to discuss two of them in depth than just rush through four of them. And the first moment we would like to make sure we discuss is 1757, the Kirnberger musical dice game, which Mozart also engaged in. And I believe this is the first moment in the timeline that touches on music and the randomness that is present in the creation of music. Will this be a recurring theme, Peter?
Peter Bauman: We are definitely going to start seeing more music involved. And I mean, this is actually one of the first, if you really think of generative art in terms of the broad history. We kind of looked at the ancient roots, and that was a lot about symmetry and tiling and patterns and math and logic. And now we're getting to the era of stochastic systems, when they started being added.
And this musical dice game by Kirnberger. I mean, Kirnberger was the first to do it, in the middle of the 18th century, around, well, we have 1757. And then Mozart was clearly the most famous. He did it around the end of the 18th century, around 1793. So what they would actually do is if they wanted to create a waltz, a waltz is 16 bars, and they have these 176 bars arranged on tables and they'd roll a dice 16 times. And each time they rolled the dice, that was one of the bars of the waltz, and then it could be performed. So it was really kind of impactful and important moment, and kind of finally this introduction of stochastic systems into generative art history.
Conrad: It's interesting because this was also one of my references for pre-modern era generative techniques. As we get further down the timeline, we'll talk more about people like Max Mathews. The introduction of generative music and generative compositions have played a very vital role, even into some of today's artists like DEAFBEEF, who are heavily inspired by their work.
And then to touch on this last moment that we really want to highlight, and arguably, I think, one of the most important ones from this pre-modern era, is Ada Lovelace and the first computer program that she ever created. And I think as we learn more about computer art history, or just computing history, you will learn a lot about the woman's vital role, and there's significant contributions. There's others like Grace Hopper and her first compiler system, and Annie Easley and her work at NASA. Peter, maybe you want to expand more on Ada Lovelace and maybe some other significant women in the field?
Peter Bauman: When we made the 10 moments in all of generative art history, we included this moment with Ada Lovelace and how she became the first computer programmer. I think it's just so important on a lot of levels. What I thought was so interesting is that she understood very intuitively, and almost seems like almost instantly, the potential for computers to perform artistic tasks. And she was really inspired by combining science and art. And she was one of the first people, I think, to understand that computers have the ability to extend human creativity, and that we could use the logic and the rules of computers to create works of art.
And she's one of the first people to, on top of just being arguably the first computer programmer, the first person to understand the power that that would have, even in terms of creativity. So this was just a monumental moment, and also works pretty well as this transition. Chapter two is when we will really start to see the beginning of modernism in art and in history. And so this is a nice way to end this chapter, with a theoretical programmer, but one of the most important moments in art and generative art history.
Marius Watz: I remember being introduced to the story of Ada Lovelace as a kind of quaint, obscure fact, like, did you know? But then later I was kind of dismayed when I realized, wait, the whole history of early programming and computers is just full of these women who got very little credit at the time. And certainly in my early exposure to computers, science and programming, they were never mentioned.
And I think so that there is a historian called Mar Hicks, who has written some wonderful books about that history and how originally women were allowed to program computers because it was seen as a kind of low value skill. The computer was just originally a human who did calculations. And it was an extension of the phone ladies of the Second World War, et cetera, the early, early entry of women into modern industrial jobs, et cetera. And of course, that might be a little bit of a distraction, but I find it super interesting, because it's the idea that I very much grew up with, which is that men are just somehow naturally gifted towards technology. It's complete bogus. I've taught so many random students where you kind of learn to detect how able is this person to grasp innate concepts about technology and systems, and to understand that if you exploit one system, you are able to express other ideas.
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At the time. It's quite a poignant thing that we need to keep in mind, and that also goes to the current scene. Okay, so I wish there were a lot of forgotten women in the early generative art scene of the 2000s. There aren't. There are some. I knew some women who were active then, apart from LIA. There are only so many women that I knew who really pursued it as an art form for more than a couple of years. So I'm really delighted to see the space that we're in now have a lot more presence of wonderful female programmers, like Melissa Wiederrecht. I have no idea how her algorithms work, and I think it's wonderful.
thefunnyguys: Before we wrap it up, I would like to give Peter quickly the mic to introduce the next chapter, chapter two, which will be added to our website.
Peter Bauman: Thanks. Yeah, so the next chapter is really exciting. This first chapter, chapter one, was about 24 moments. Chapter two jumps up to around 120, and it covers the 100 year period from basically 1850 to 1950. Essentially it covers the modern art movement. And of course that was so instrumental to the development of generative art, with the abstraction of modern art. So we'll look at that, we'll look at the art history side and the abstraction of art, but also look at technological developments and further mathematic and information and technological developments and computing that led to the development of computer art. So very excited for this chapter two, which will be on timeline.lerandom.art.
thefunnyguys: Only thing that is left for us to do is to thank our amazing guest, Marius Watz, for freeing up some time and discussing the history of generative art with us. It was a real honor. Thank you, Marius.
Marius Watz: I'm delighted to be here, and I'm honestly impressed that you guys are going so deep on this and considering things that are not just the spectacular one liners, but the deeper history of how we ended up at this peculiar moment in time. So I'm delighted to be invited. Thank you very much.
Peter Bauman: Thank you, Marius. Thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.
thefunnyguys: Yeah, it's an honor to have you on board with us. So it's great to hear your thoughts and little stories that you have along the way. Thank you, everyone in the audience. Thanks for tuning in, and I hope you found this interesting. And please follow us, as we will be sharing more chapters in the timeline that Peter has been compiling over the last month. And yeah, hope to see you all soon. Bye bye.
Marius Watz: Bye bye guys.
Conrad: Bye.
