LO: Generative Art

“Hommage à Paul Klee”, Frieder Nake, 1965

Something in particular that I enjoy about this project is the fact that while from far away, it looks like a hand-drawn drawing, when you look more closely, the generated aspect is apparent in the perfectly straight lines and perfect ellipses– blending those generative codes to create something that mimics that of a human hand, and pointing to the human art artistic thought that went into the code itself. On a website, I actually found a list of some of the variables that Nake coded to determine the generative code: the width of the horizontal lines, the amount, radius, and position of the circles, whether a quadrilateral is to be left empty, or filled by vertical or triangular lines, and more. Although the art is technically generated by code, the artwork still innately reflects Nake’s own artistic sensibilities in that it reveals his style of drawing, what kind of a drawing he is trying to create with the code, and which variables he determined to create these artworks he calls his own.