Jaron Lanier’s Moondust

This generative music game for the Commodore 64 was one of the first video games produced with the intention of being a work of art. It was created by Jaron Lanier, the American computer scientist and artist who is active to this day. Moondust serves as another example of the rise of video games, propelling digital and generative art. It again highlights how generative music has impacted computer graphics, often preceding it, as at Bell Labs with Max Matthews—which preceded generative imagery by several years—and David Cope’s EMI work with primitive neural networks.