Generative Art Before Computers: The Pre-Modern Era
Spanning tens of thousands of years, we begin by surveying the advancements in art, mathematics, science and computing history that led to the modern era of generative art.
From Le Random’s Generative Art Timeline. Original moment texts by Peter Bauman.
Pattern as a procedure
The timeline begins with patterned marks and repeatable processes. Its account of Blombos Cave introduces a question that runs through the archive: when does a maker’s use of rules become a generative system? The entry presents Philip Galanter’s interpretation while acknowledging that the autonomy of a simple tiling system is debatable. Islamic geometric art offers a further route through symmetry and the construction of complex designs. These entries establish the timeline’s broad historical lens; they do not suggest that their makers used today’s terminology.
The earliest known drawing made by humans is generative. Ochre cross-hatching found at Blombos Cave in South Africa is the earliest known drawing yet found anywhere. “They qualify as generative because the placement of individual marks has not been decided by the artisan, but dictated by a manually executed symmetry‐based algorithm,” according to Philip Galanter. Casey Reas has spoken of how logical, systems thinking…
Islamic geometric patterns, emerged in the 8th century during the Islamic Golden Age, influenced by Greek, Roman and Sasanian Persian mathematics and ornament. An example of a generative process predating the computer, Islamic artists used these complex geometric shapes to create intricate, symmetrical designs that were used to decorate buildings, manuscripts, textiles, and other objects.
Procedural art can unfold in sound as well as images. In Kirnberger’s musical dice game, published in 1757, dice select among precomposed measures. The composer prepares the possibilities, while the operation determines a particular sequence. Read beside Leibniz’s work on combinatorial reasoning, the game opens two distinct lines through the archive: systems for arranging symbols and systems for producing variation.
Johann Philipp Kirnberger, Der allezeit fertige Polonoisen- und Menuettencomponist, title page of the 1767 printing, Berlin: George Ludewig Winter. The work was first published in 1757. Johann Philipp Kirnberger / George Ludewig Winter. Bavarian State Library copy, reproduced via Wikimedia Commons; scan photographer unidentified. Image source.
Known as Musikalisches Würfelspiel (“musical dice game”), this method first published by Johann Philipp Kirnberger was a monumental event in the history of art and chance. The game was a musical composition technique in which pre-composed measures were selected by rolls of dice. Serving as one of the earliest examples of aleatoric (chance) music, it stands as one of the earliest examples generally of…
Leibniz’s Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (“On the Combinatorial Art” 1666) was one of several cornerstone papers he would write throughout his life on concepts such as symbols, binary systems and formal logic. His voluminous writing and tinkering with machines would prove hugely influential to the development of computing. “On the Combinatorial Art” expanded his habilitation thesis at Leipzig. In it, he proposed a system…
The Jacquard loom used punched cards to control woven patterns. Its relevance here is both artistic and computational: a textile pattern could be encoded as instructions, and the archive traces the card mechanism into Babbage’s unrealized Analytical Engine. Following these entries together keeps material practices in view when reading the later history of programming.
The Jacquard loom used punch cards to control the weaving of patterns in fabric. It introduced the notion of a program stored outside the machine on punch cards, which would later result in generative weaving and modern computing. Charles Babbage would go on to utilize Jacquard’s method of punch card programming as one of computing’s earliest pioneers. “Computers did not pave the way for…
Foundational to the development of cybernetics, this unrealized mechanical computer aimed to use punch cards, inspired by the Jacquard Loom, to perform calculations. One of the earliest designs for a programmable computer, it also had a significant impact on the development of modern computers and programming languages.
Ada Lovelace’s 1843 notes connect machine calculation with the possibility of working on symbols and music. That conceptual opening closes a chapter which moves between craft, mathematics and mechanisms. For a published selection from the same period, read Timeline Chapter 1: Ten Top Moments; the chapter conversation with Marius Watz supplies a complementary discussion with a transcript.
Computer programming is born, as Ada Lovelace’s 1843 notes on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine set out a program for computing Bernoulli numbers, making her the first published computer programmer. Her work demonstrated the potential for computers to perform complex tasks, foreshadowing the development of modern programming languages. She even envisioned the computer’s ability to create programmed art. Inspired by the notion of combining science…
This guide connects selected entries from Le Random’s archive of 1,147 moments. Dates follow the individual records. The excerpts, source references and image credits come from those records; follow a moment to read its full account and related interviews.
The archive includes historical precursors and surrounding developments as well as generative artworks. Inclusion does not mean that every object or event was described as “generative art” in its own time.
