From the standpoint of Taoist philosophy natural forms are not made but grown, and there is a radical difference between the organic and the mechanical. Things which are made, such as houses, furniture, and machines, are an assemblage of parts put together, or shaped, like sculpture, from the outside inwards. But things which grow shape themselves from within outwards—they are not assemblages of originally distinct parts; they partition themselves, elaborating their own structure from the whole to the parts, from the simple to the complex. -Alan Watts

What is Generative Art (GenArt)?

Here a fun introduction by Tim Holman:


In brief it’s about creating the organic using the mechanical and having some fun playing on the border of the two. Coding for example, can be seen just as a really powerful tool but that doesn’t belong to the informatic community, why not to use it then to generate something autonomous and unpredictable? why not to use it to generate art?

Here an example using p5js: my version of the Wave Clock.

In brief it’s about creating the organic using the mechanical and having some fun playing on the border of the two. Coding for example, can be seen just as a really powerful tool but that doesn’t belong to the informatic community, why not to use it then to generate something autonomous and unpredictable? why not to use it to generate art?

Here an example: Wave Clock.

We are not just talking about visual art and coding..some good examples come also from music! Some cool examples are John Cage’s note-less 4’33”, Brian Eno’s “Discreet Music LP” and Mozart’s Musikalisches Würfelspiel in which we make use of dice to assemble in more than 7000 different ways the music partiture.

The machine makes the music, but I created the machine… I don’t know where responsibility lies in that situation. —Sean Booth

An interesting concept that we can explore with GenArt is the “emergence”, the observation of the formation of complex patterns from a large number of very simple interactions, as we observe in nature with ant colonies, starling murmurations and maybe consciousness for example. A powerful example to deepen the emergence idea is Cellular Automata (CA).

To play life you must have a fairly large checkerboard and a plentiful supply of flat counters of two colors. It is possible to work with pencil and graph paper but it is much easier, particularly for beginners, to use counters and a board. — Martin Gardner

CA is powerful because is not just a visual trick, but a relelevant instrument for the study of all the branches of science, as wonderfully exposed in A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram. What we mean with CA is basically a grid system in which each cell’s state is calculated on the base of its neighborhood’s state at the previous moment in “time” (previous generation). One of the most famous 2D CA is the Conway’s Game of Life, sure you already heard about!

And in case you prefere MOOCs to books, here there is a good and free academic course to know more about GenArt.