Casey Reas and Ben Fry develop Processing at the MIT Media Lab under the direction of John Maeda. Processing enables anyone in the world to learn creative coding, educating and inspiring a new generation of artist-coders.
From Le Random’s Generative Art Timeline. Original moment texts by Peter Bauman.
Processing makes a shared creative environment
Processing, initiated by Casey Reas and Ben Fry, joined a programming environment with examples and an open-source community. The archive connects its development to John Maeda’s Aesthetics and Computation Group and Design By Numbers. Its historical importance here is practical: artists could learn, alter code and exchange work within the same environment. The tool’s story therefore includes pedagogy and collective maintenance alongside software design.
Examples made with Processing in 2003, illustrating the early software’s visual and physical-computing capabilities, two years after the project began. Image published by Processing Foundation in Casey Reas and Ben Fry’s history of Processing, A Modern Prometheus (2018). Image source.
Perhaps important enough for the name of the entire decade, Processing is that important to the development of generative art. It will have to suffice to have heavily inspired the decade’s title, which, to be fair, does include other tooling breakthroughs such as Zach Lieberman’s openFrameworks. Created by Casey Reas and Ben Fry at MIT’s ACG under John Maeda, Processing changed generative art irrevocably.…
Jared Tarbell’s Substrate uses a growth rule to produce intricate compositions. Casey Reas’s Process series studies how forms and behaviors interact within a system. These two entries put the chapter’s tools in artistic context. They invite a close look at the relationship between a concise procedure, the range of images it can generate and the artist’s choices about which possibilities to develop.
An output of Jared Tarbell's Substrate, the Processing sketch whose single perpendicular-growth rule produces city-like crystalline structures. Jared Tarbell, Substrate, 2003. Courtesy the artist, complexification.net.
Made with Processing, this 2003 masterpiece by Tarbell highlights one of the powers of generative art and computation: the ability to convey complexity from simplicity. A single growth rule based on perpendicular growth, from just a single line, manufactures intricate, urban-esque compositions. The simplicity of the rule in Tarbell’s Substrate helped to amplify the power of the new tool to creatives and still stands…
In his seminal series Process, documented comprehensively in the book Process Compendium 2004-2010, Casey Reas explores the intricate phenomenon of emergence through his unique artistic system. This system is built on the foundational elements of Forms, Behaviors and Elements, allowing Reas to generate an endless variety of visual compositions with his chosen visual grammar. Each element in this system—referred to as a simple machine—combines…
The early release of openFrameworks adds a C++ toolkit to this history of artist-oriented software. Its entry follows Zach Lieberman’s initial release and later contributions by Theodore Watson and Arturo Castro. Graphics, sound, video and computer vision could be connected within a common working environment. The chapter discussion with Christiane Paul, Casey Reas, Christa Sommerer and Golan Levin places these tools beside artistic, educational and institutional experience.
Wikipedia. 2024. "OpenFrameworks." Wikimedia Foundation. Last modified April 9, 2024. en.wikipedia.org.
With a decade titled the “Tooling Era,” tools clearly played a critical role in this decade’s impact on the history of generative thinking and art. Along with Processing, that was developed at MIT’s ACG by Casey Reas and Ben Fry under John Maeda, openFrameworks was developed a few years later by Zach Lieberman, who had spent much of his early career collaborating with former…
Philip Galanter’s 2003 definition centers systems acting with some autonomy, allowing the history to include practices outside digital software. The same chapter records Data Dynamics at the Whitney, an exhibition of Internet-based work curated by Christiane Paul. Reading the definition beside the exhibition keeps two questions in view: what makes a practice generative, and how do institutions present work whose behavior extends beyond a fixed image?
Figure 8.1, ‘Generative Art Systems,’ from Philip Galanter’s 2003 paper What Is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory, mapping generative methods between order and disorder. Philip Galanter, 2003, Figure 8.1. Reproduced from the author’s PDF. Image source.
In his seminal text from over twenty years ago, Galanter asks and answers, “What is Generative Art?” in the must-read essay for anyone interested in generative art: “What is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory.” This is the essay that nearly everyone cites when defining generative art. This author’s own definition is highly influenced by Galanter. Galanter spoke to this…
Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg, Apartment, 2001; view of a 3D apartment environment in Data Dynamics. Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg; Whitney Museum of American Art Image source.
Curated by Christiane Paul and indicative of the early millennium enthusiasm for digital art—as the Internet sucked more and more of the cultural air—New York’s Whitney Museum hosted two major digital themed exhibitions in 2001 with Data Dynamics (March 2001) and BitStreams. lerandom.art: “Overall, I would say I’m always a little bit skeptical because we have seen these waves before. For instance, 2000 was…
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.
