Lillian Schwartz first encountered a computer at Bell Labs in the late 1960s. After participating in the MoMA exhibition The Machine at the End of the Mechanical Age, she was invited to tour the facilities by fellow participating artist Kenneth Knowlton, and ended up staying on for more than three decades.
Despite being an unpaid “resident visitor” on a male-dominated environment, Schwartz made artistic use of an incredible range of research topics at Bell Labs. Among her many experiments, it is her work with early computer animation that is perhaps most immediately relevant to today‘s conversations about generative art.
Schwartz developed computer animations, programming on punch cards, 2D and 3D graphics without pixel shifting. She wrote,
“There is a definable chemistry behind the electronic palette, a combination of data, logic, and equations that inevitably begins as an obstacle to an untrained artist and as a potential diversion from his future sophistication. I had to push the early machine and cajole scientists to make the computer an art tool. The functions of the machine could not remain mystical if I was to assess how far it could be prodded.”
The answer, initially, was “not very far.” As Zabet Patterson described it,
Despite these limits, Schwartz had a relentless drive to find the edges of her medium and material. Through her relentless experimentation, she contributed significantly to defining what it means to make art with the computer.
Rafaël Rozendaal, Into Time.com, 2010.
In 2008, Rafaël Rozendaal was commissioned by Rhizome to create a website in which the user could shake a gelatinous dessert. It was a single-serving website—a form of art that had come to popularity around a movement known as NEEN, founded by Miltos Manetas and Mai Ueda in the early 2000s. As Rozendal recalls,
I started publishing each “experiment” as a single webpage in a unique domain name... The domain name was my solution to create digital scarcity and a proof of authenticity: when a collector bought one of my websites, their name would be listed in the title tag of the website, and the domain name is transferred to them. They become the full owner. It was a proto-NFT form.
Like many of Rozendaal’s early works, that work was focused on a simple, humorous interaction, but he soon began to delve also into visual abstraction, using a simple set of rules to develop a seemingly endless set of variations, all at a tiny file size.
In 2012, at the invitation of Rhizome Executive Director Lauren Cornell, Rozendaal was commissioned to present a selection of works for Seoul Square, the world’s largest LED screen. He presented a collection of single-serving websites, including Much Better Than This .com and Like This Forever .com, to name a few. The new canvas was well-suited to Rozendaal’s work. "The idea is that the website is like liquid, or like a piece of gas," he observed. "It adapts to whatever environment it has."
In 2021, Rozendaal named Rhizome as the beneficiary for an auction on the Art Blocks platform, which offered NFTs that were rendered in-browser from computer code that was stored on the blockchain itself. Rozendaal’s work for that auction, titled Endless Nameless, was the largest donation in Rhizome's twenty-five year history.
Itzel Yard, also known as Ix Shells, is a contemporary artist with a background in creative code who achieved early success through NFTs that involved flowing, organic forms realized through geometrical, black and white patterns. A way of reacing these works is suggested by Shells’ moniker, which as the artist has noted, evokes both computer terminal shell commands and oceanic life:
Animals create "shells" to protect themselves- also "shells" is a computer program that takes the command from your keyboard to the OS and lets us start, kill, or automate processes. In short its a way to keep control while so many things are happening out there in the ocean, or, "the ocean of data".
This makes for a potent metaphor in the field of generative art; as has observed, the shell is often associated with the concept of the infinite in African culture:
The scaling properties of their logarithmic spirals; one can clearly see the potential for the spiral to continue without end despite its containment in a finite space – indeed, it is only because of its containment in a finite space that there is a sense of having gained access to or grasped at the infinite
“Grasping at the infinite” is perhaps an apt summary of what is at stake in much of generative art – and, indeed, of art of all kinds.