History of generative art / Chapter 07 · 1990s
The rise of the Internet propelled mass media art, the demoscene and net art as well as early practitioners of Flash like LIA and Joshua Davis.
From Le Random’s Generative Art Timeline. Original moment texts by Peter Bauman.
The public opening of the World Wide Web provides technical context for the chapter’s networked art. Nettime then shows how a mailing list could support debate and the formation of a scene. JODI’s website offers an artwork-level entry. Taken together, these moments shift attention from images made by a computer to the computer network as a place for artistic activity.
1991
January 1991 the first Web servers outside CERN itself were switched on. On August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet. While CERN would not place the Web software in the public domain until 30 April 1993,…
Read the full moment →1995
In the spring of 1995, Nettime, a mailing list and platform that was instrumental in the formation of net.art, formed. The list gathered the earliest net.art practitioners and was where the term took hold. It consisted of JODI’s Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, Geert Lovink, Heath Bunting, Vuk Ćosić and Alexei Shoulgin. Organized by Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz, Nettime as a group met…
Read the full moment →1995
In the early days of the public web, JODI emerged as pioneers of net art with their enigmatic website, begun around 1993, archived at wwwwwwwww.jodi.org. Their webpages, visually jarring and avant garde, challenged traditional site design norms. Navigation relied on cursor movements, with links hidden within repeated images. Some images led to new visual landscapes, blurring the lines between art and exploration. wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/ epitomized…
Read the full moment →Joshua Davis’s praystation combined experimental code-based work with shared source code. LIA’s Re-move brought interactive audiovisual compositions to online audiences and later to CD-ROM. The two entries reveal different relationships between artist, program and viewer, while making distribution part of the historical story. The chapter conversation with Auriea Harvey, Joshua Davis, LIA, Scott Draves and Vuk Ćosić follows these practices through firsthand discussion.
1998
Flash creative coder pioneer Joshua Davis released ps0.praystation.v0, his website for exhibiting experimental design and art using code, specifically Flash. The site also served as an important community resource for open source code. As a place for artists to both exhibit and learn, praystation.com was critical in the development of the intersection of the Internet, digital art and Mass Media art.
Read the full moment →1999
Another important example of net.art and the rise of Mass Media art that was popularizing around the end of the decade, LIA’s Re-move (1999–2003) explores generative-audiovisual compositions that combine organic forms “with the rawness of fin-de-siècle Viennese abstraction.” These works were originally created in Macromedia Director and released “on the internet to be accessible by everyone,” the artist told author Peter Bauman. They were…
Read the full moment →Karl Sims’s Evolved Virtual Creatures used genetic algorithms to evolve simulated bodies and their behavior. The entry distinguishes evolved networks from networks trained on datasets. Later, Scott Draves’s Electric Sheep combined distributed rendering with viewers’ selection of animations. Both make iterative change central to the work, while differing in what evolves and how people participate.
1994
This is an early example of art built on artificial neural networks, although the networks were evolved by genetic algorithms rather than trained on data. The work stands as one of the most significant links from the rule-based AI of Cohen to “Modern AI art,” relying on the evaluation of trained data. The work showcased the evolution of virtual block creatures through simulated Darwinian…
Read the full moment →1999
Described as a “collective intelligence,” this early example of machine learning in art was inspired by the evolutionary art work of Karl Sims. Scott Draves’s software art Electric Sheep is a distributed screen-saver-as-art and pivotal advancement in AI, artificial life and fractal art that originated from the Fractal Flame algorithm. Electric Sheep leveraged a distributed system with a client/server architecture, transforming computer screensavers into…
Read the full moment →John Maeda’s Design By Numbers closes the decade with an explicitly educational environment. Its constrained canvas and syntax were designed for artists and designers learning computation. The entry traces Ben Fry and Casey Reas’s involvement and the subsequent path toward Processing. Read this alongside Maeda’s later interview to follow the relationship between teaching, creative tools and artistic possibility.
1999
In surely one of generative art’s most legendary moments, John Maeda published Design By Numbers, with the aim of simplifying programming for artists and designers at the MIT Media Lab’s Aesthetics and Computation Group. Its minimalist interface and intuitive design enabled users to experiment with computational creativity, inspiring a new generation of digital artists and toolmakers to further fine tune and expand. The system’s…
Read the full moment →In conversation
The complete chronology, including works, ideas, exhibitions and the technologies around them.
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.
Browse the complete archive →
