Generator: Systems, Logic and the Analogue Art of Programming

Katrina Blannin | Christina France | Hanz Hancock | James Irwin | Patrick Morrissey | Andy Parkinson | Charley Peters | Mary Yacoob

Curated by Charley Peters

Rules and systems are a hallmark of every modernising period since the Enlightenment, presenting an alternative to tradition and intuition. A rule removes the possibility of interpretation and a system is able to create, automatically. Both are objective, counteracting the human tendency to influence or control outcomes. Rules and systems are in many ways opposed to the common notion of art as a field of personal expression. Generator presents a selection of artwork that is by nature ‘generative’, created once an artist cedes control to an external system or set of rules. The artwork thus results not from the wholly instinctive decisions of the artist, but is formed by objective rules or logical instructions that shape its process or material outcome.

In popular use today the term ‘generative art’ is often used as a reference to a form of recent computer art that creates work through a series of algorithms. In From Systems to Software Richard Wright describes systems artists working in the pre-digital age as the ‘last programmers before the computer made that practice synonymous with its own functioning’, making a distinction between systems art’s main concern with process, and computer programming's purpose to control. Generator explores the language of the contemporary analogue ‘programmatic’, in which logic-based systems are employed to define the creation of an art object.

A limited edition print by MuirMcNeill with an essay by Laura Davidson accompanied the exhibition.