Generative Art Timeline · Chapter 8: Tooling Era (2000s)

2007

Cory Arcangel Begins His Photoshop Gradients

Software/Tool · North America

The 2007 Photoshop gradient and smudge tool demonstration from Cory Arcangel's own catalogue of works: a full-spectrum radial gradient dragged and smudged into looping ribbon forms.
The 2007 Photoshop gradient and smudge tool demonstration from Cory Arcangel's own catalogue of works: a full-spectrum radial gradient dragged and smudged into looping ribbon forms. Cory Arcangel, Photoshop Gradient and Smudge Tool Demonstration, 2007. Inkjet on laminate, 43 x 43 in. Courtesy the artist, coryarcangel.com.

Cory Arcangel’s Photoshop Gradient and Smudge Tool Demonstration would go on to become some of the most well known software-based work of the decade. Arcangel continues his work exploring gradients to this day (2024) and the work has been acquired by the Whitney Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Arcangel became known a few years prior for his work creating videos from old video games, “applying archaeology to historical computer technology of the 1980s,” according to Thaddaeus Ropac, his gallery.

Text by Peter Bauman. Generative Art Timeline, Le Random, fact-checked September 2026.

Sources

People

Cory Arcangel

Movements

software art

Filed under

Ideas
video games
Technologies
Photoshop, software art
People
Cory Arcangel
Works
Photoshop Gradient and Smudge Tool Demonstration
Organisations
Smithsonian, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Thaddaeus Ropac, Whitney Museum of American Art

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