Feb 9

Contemporary Generative art

[See Parametric 3D Form lecture from IACD 2015]

Here’s a sculpture, NODE10 3931 by John Powers:

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How was this made?

(Compare Polymorph by Jenny Sabin.)

Let’s have a look at some formalist generative artworks:

Generative works need not be wholly formalist experiments in geometry or abstraction. Some generative works allude directly to figuration, eating, sex, death.

Asemic Writing

Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means “having no specific semantic content,” or “without the smallest unit of meaning.” With the non-specificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning, which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret.

The liminal territories between familiarity and chaos, language and gesture.

“By this art you may contemplate 
the variation of the 23 letters.” —Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel, 1960.

This is research by S.E. Petersen (1995), showing activation of the cortex by “word-like stimuli” including what she called “false fonts”, or letters from an imaginary alphabet.

Alphabet Organique (France, 1780s); Deseret Alphabet (1847-1854)

Hélène Smith’s “Martian”:

Paul Klee, Frontière (1938)

Joan Miro: surreal writing (1940s);
Bruno Munari, Scritture Illegibili di popoli Sconosciuti (1940s)

Every people has its own writing, that of the Arabs and different from that of the Chinese, which is different from that of Sri Lanka and so on. However, each of these scriptures has a precise graphic rule for reading to be facilitated.  These writings (for us illegible) are legible for the respected peoples. Why not try to construct other systems with other specially designed rules? What do you read? I do not know. These scriptures are also as beautiful as a drawing.

Max Ernst, “Maximiliana ou L’Exercise illégal de l’Astronomie” (1964)

Manfred Mohr, Roman Verostko

Luigi Seraphini, Codex Seraphinianus (1982)

Xu Bing, A Book from the Sky (1987-91)

Golan Levin et al., Alphabet Synthesis Machine (2001)

David Ha, NeoKanji (2016)

Klingon Alphabets

Asemic Magazine

The Plotter