The advent of long form generative art platforms Art Blocks and fxhash spark renewed interest in generative art and cultivate the thriving scene of today.
From Le Random’s Generative Art Timeline. Original moment texts by Peter Bauman.
Platforms organize a new audience
Art Blocks launched in 2020, followed by fxhash in 2021. Their archive entries explain how platforms made generative procedures available through minting and supported communities around the resulting works. The chapter’s on-chain title identifies a consequential mode of distribution and participation. It sits within the much longer history of artists designing systems whose individual results are not fully specified in advance.
Snowfro, Chromie Squiggle #7997, minted January 16, 2021. From Art Blocks’ genesis series, launched in 2020. Artwork: Snowfro. Courtesy of the artist and owned by Le Random. Image source.
Art Blocks Brings Generative Art On Chain If NFTs unlocked demand, then Art Blocks, founded by Erick “Snowfro” Calderon, provided a space for demand to meet supply, creating a community where artists could manifest the technological, artistic and conceptual advancements of human history to push boundaries in art. The three genesis projects were released on November 27, including Jeff Davis’s Construction Token, DCA’s (Daniel…
In late October, fxhash launched in beta. In early November, they released Project 0, FXHASH Generative Logo, the long-form generative art platform on Tezos’s genesis. Fxhash capitalized on the energy of NFTs, the vibrant Tezos art community, a pre-existing model in Art Blocks and a healthy dose of criticism from artists of the Ethereum blockchain. At this time in 2021, Ethereum was still PoW…
Snowfro’s Chromie Squiggle and Tyler Hobbs’s Fidenza are concrete ways into long-form generative art. The Fidenza entry includes Hobbs’s discussion of designing an output space together with its curation model. This makes the individual image one part of a larger artistic decision: what range of results can the procedure produce, and how will those results be selected? Demystifying Generative Aesthetics develops that question further.
Years in the making, the Art Blocks genesis project’s first iterations appeared on Twitter in September 2018 over two years before its official release on November 27, 2020. Chromie Squiggle—affectionately referred to as Squiggles—is the art project Calderon developed around his years-long pursuit of the project Art Blocks. Squiggles played a key role in Art Blocks’s development, as Calderon would walk around in 2019…
After the dust settled in a chaotic generative art summer of 2021, Tyler Hobbs’s Fidenza in the end remains perhaps the most celebrated. This versatile and aesthetically diverse generative algorithm stood out for its recognizable elegance. Rooted in the flow field algorithm for which the project is now nearly synonymous, Fidenza generates intricate, (mostly) non-overlapping curves that are layered with thick, curved rectangles, creating…
In May, Bright Moments, co-founded by Seth Goldstein and Louie Ryan, began its journey. In a few short years, the ambitious organization traveled to ten—eight—cities around the world, organized a collection of 1,000 contemporary works and created a 10k NFT collection, CryptoCitizens. The journey began at Bright Moments’ genesis location, Venice Beach, California. Starting as a community space for people to enjoy themselves around…
In May, fxhash launched its first live minting event, Art Basel Hong Kong. The event was also one of the first public generative art minting experiences to engage the broader community as well as the traditional art world. With some of the top artists minting on fxhash at the time, the event was an earnest attempt to demonstrate the delights of minting a random…
Latent diffusion models and Stable Diffusion mark another major route through the 2020s. Meanwhile, exhibitions such as Harold Cohen: AARON and Electric Dreams return to earlier systems and technologies. Reading these developments together offers historical context for contemporary questions about autonomy, artistic knowledge and the presentation of computational work.
Unlike DALL-E, which generated images autoregressively from discrete image tokens, Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) operated in latent space and were the step that enabled text-to-image technology to go mainstream. Instead of working directly with pixels like Diffusion Models, LDMs first compress the image into a simpler, lower-dimensional space (called the latent space) using a pre-trained autoencoder. This compressed version of the image retains the…
In August, just a few weeks after the public release of Midjourney, Stability AI publicly released Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image model co-developed with researchers from LMU Munich and Runway ML. The release marked a the third significant text-to-image generative AI model in less than a year. Combined, these models played a significant role is expanding access to creative tools. Stable Diffusion in particular achieved…
Harold Cohen: AARON, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, February 3–May 19, 2024. From left: Untitled, 1982; Untitled [Amsterdam Suite], 1978; active plotters drawing images from different periods of the AARON software. Photograph: Ron Amstutz. Plotter fabricated by Bantam Tools; courtesy Bre Pettis. Image: Whitney Museum of American Art. Image source.
Opening just one day after MOMI’s Harvey exhibition, famed curator Christiane Paul’s Harold Cohen: AARON at The Whitney Museum’s looked at another seminal media art pioneer. This author spoke to curator Christiane about the show, which showcased the work of the symbolic AI artmaking program AARON developed by Harold Cohen (1928–2016). Originally conceived in the late 1960s and early 1970s at UC San Diego,…
If Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s The Call is my work of the year. The exhibition of the year is Tate’s Electric Dreams. The show at Tate Modern is a major exhibition celebrating the early pioneers of optical, kinetic, programmed and digital art from the 1950s and Japan’s Gutai to the dawn of the internet age. What’s striking about the show is it’s Tate’s—one…
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.
