Pour une peinture expérimentale programmée, in Groupe de recherche d’art visuel (Paris: Galerie Denise René; GRAV)

In the catalogue for this early GRAV exhibition, Morellet would spell out the group’s relevance to the programmed, digital generative art of today.

Morellet wrote of the ability of “programmed experimental painting,” essentially today’s digital generative art, to be used in order to experimentally “demystify art.” He believed that generative techniques could produce thousands of works of art at a time for aesthetic experiments.

Morellet was proposing a new science of art that he hoped could reveal insights into questions of aesthetics. To conduct his aesthetic experiments, he produced a multitude of works following a program. He called this early material generative art, “programmed experimental painting.”

By producing many generative iterations, Morellet sought to gain more data points for his scientific investigation into aesthetics. He aimed to satisfy “the need on the part of a section of the public who wants to share in the “creation” of works of art, and who are interested in demystifying art and in better understanding it.”

In other words, Morellet used generative techniques as a tool to better understand art’s underlying aesthetic concepts.