Algorithmic art

Algorithmic art is visual art whose design is generated by an algorithm devised by the artist - a precise recipe, expressed as code or notation, that determines the form the work takes. The idea has older roots (Islamic geometric pattern, weaving), but the field took shape in the early 1960s, when Georg Nees, Frieder Nake, A. Michael Noll, Manfred Mohr and Vera Molnár wrote programs that drove pen plotters; the act of creation lay as much in the code as in the drawing. The category overlaps generative art and systems art and includes fractal, cellular-automata and evolutionary approaches. In 1995, practitioners meeting at SIGGRAPH formalized the identity of 'algorist', a term coined by Jean-Pierre Hébert with Roman Verostko. Because algorithms are deterministic, artists usually temper them with randomness or live data - authoring the process rather than a single fixed image.

Defining characteristics

• Design generated by explicit rules or code authored by the artist
• Output drawn by pen plotters or rendered to screen and print
• Controlled randomness: pseudo-random inputs keep executions from repeating
• Repetition, seriality and systematic variation across a family of images
• Geometric and crystalline structures - grids, lattices, recursive patterns

Key figures

• Vera Molnár (1924-2023) — Pioneer of plotter abstraction and systematic variation
• Georg Nees (1926-2016) — Author of early computer graphics such as Schotter (1968)
• Frieder Nake (b. 1938) — Among the first to exhibit computer-generated drawings (1965)
• Manfred Mohr (b. 1938) — Hard-edge algorithmic geometry from the mid-1960s onward

Example works

• Schotter — Georg Nees (1968)
• Letter Field — Judson Rosebush (1978)

Sources

• Algorithmic art - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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