We start the modern story of generative art about a decade earlier than the traditional art world with industrialization kicking into gear in London, introducing technology to art. We then cover the rise of modern art, the foundational roots of digital generative art.
From Le Random’s Generative Art Timeline. Original moment texts by Peter Bauman.
Industrial production and the designed system
This chapter opens at the Great Exhibition of 1851, where the timeline places industrial manufacture in conversation with art and design. The subsequent entry on William Morris’s decorative arts firm describes a commitment to craftsmanship and involvement in the whole creative process. These are debates about how things are made, who shapes their production and how patterns enter everyday life.
Industrialization and Technology meet Art According to Frank Popper, “one can only speak of the direct influence of technology on art since the Industrial Revolution, and more particularly when its effects entered everyday life at the end of the 19th century through the progressive design movements known as Art Nouveau and its precedent, the Arts and Crafts movement, in England.” The first world’s fair,…
The iconic firm was modeled on a craftsman’s workshop and took a pioneering stand against the non-functional role ascribed to art. The firm specialized in wallpaper designs with natural imagery but grew to manufacture furniture, textiles and stained glass as well. It stressed handcrafted production over the use of machine. Another important concept developed by Morris Co. was that the artist (or designer) should…
Popper, Frank. Art of the Electronic Age, 10. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997.
Letting chance determine a form
For 3 Standard Stoppages, Marcel Duchamp dropped threads and preserved the resulting shapes. The archive places this procedure beside Hans Arp’s chance-arranged squares, whose account treats the claimed random arrangement with appropriate caution. The comparison helps locate an enduring generative question: which decisions does the artist make in advance, and which decisions are delegated to a process?
This revolutionary work of 1913 and 1914 remains one of the most famous examples of the use of chance in the history of art. Duchamp employed chance operations by dropping three one-meter threads, allowing them to take on random forms. He then traced and mounted these shapes as a commentary on the limitations of standard measurement systems. Duchamp’s exploration of chance and random processes…
This piece’s use of chance demonstrates an early example of an artist relinquishing control to challenge traditional art production techniques. Arp supposedly allowed random processes to determine the placement of the squares on the canvas. This act and the similar work of Duchamp marked a departure from traditional artistic control, serving as an early example of the element of randomness as a creative force.…
The Bauhaus weaving workshop brings textile practices into the history of modern abstraction. Its entry also records the constraints on women’s access to other workshops. The later shift toward abstract tapestries makes the workshop an important place to consider both formal experimentation and the institutional conditions under which it happened.
After Gunta Stölzl asked for a class for women to be set up, the weaving workshop was created by the women themselves and taught by Helena Börner. This was the only workshop available to the women students at Bauhaus as all other workshops, from wood to metal, were open only to male students, and the Bauhaus had no architecture course until 1927.
Gunta Stölzl leads the women in the Bauhaus weaving workshop to alter its aesthetic, emphasizing tapestries based on abstraction and countering the previous Art-Nouveau narrative.
Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948). First-edition cover from MIT’s Institute Archives and Special Collections. Image source: MIT Libraries, ‘150 Years in the Stacks.’ MIT Libraries content is provided under CC BY-NC 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Image source.
Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics was published the same year as Claude Shannon’s "A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Max Bense would apply both their works to aesthetics in his pioneering work, Aesthetica (1965), which laid the theoretical foundations of digital and AI art with computer art. Cybernetics thus played a vital role in both the birth of digital art and artificial intelligence, thus making it one…
Claude E. Shannon, schematic diagram of a general communication system, Figure 1 in “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” (1948), as reproduced in a corrected reprint. Claude E. Shannon, Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948), Figure 1. Corrected reprint hosted by Harvard University Department of Mathematics. Image source.
Claude Shannon’s "A Mathematical Theory of Communication” was published the same year as Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics. Max Bense would apply both their works to aesthetics in his pioneering work, Aesthetica (1965), which laid the theoretical foundations of digital and AI art with computer art. Cybernetics thus played a vital role in both the birth of digital art and artificial intelligence, thus making it 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.
