Algorithmic art

Algorithmic Art
Catalyst Club, 14th April 2011

Friday, 15 April 2011

Hello, my name’s Tom Hume. I want to spent 15 minutes talking to you about algorithmic
art. It’s a big topic, so I’m going to have to rush through it a bit. I’m going to make things
harder for myself by talking about it in three ways: objectively, what it is and the history.
Subjectively, how I came across it and some interesting characters I’ve encountered. And
personally, how I’ve been turning it to my own advantage.

“Algorithmic art, also known
as algorithm art, is art, mostly
visual art, of which the design
is generated by an algorithm”


So the ﬁrst thing you do when you want to learn anything about anything is go and look it up
on wikipedia, which gives you this deﬁnition. Like lots of things you might be told by
computery type people, it’s simultaneously factually impeccable and practically worthless.

“An effective method expressed as a
ﬁnite list of well-deﬁned instructions for
calculating a function”


OK, so what’s an algorithm. Wikipedia is as helpful as ever. A normal dictionary is a bit more
friendly. Anyone in their 30s may remember the canonical example of an algorithm, as seen
on home computers in high St branches of Dixons throughout the 80s.


“A precise rule (or set of rules)
specifying how to solve some problem”




“A precise rule (or set of rules)
specifying how to solve some problem”

10 PRINT “TOM IS COOL”
20 GOTO 10




Maybe it helps to give you some really simple examples. Here’s a spirograph, which gives you
a nice simple example of an algorithm, done mechanically. The pen follows some deﬁned
steps, which are repeated over and over again - producing these patterns.

In a bit I’ll show you a spirograph which ﬂattened cities.


It’s not a new idea.
an Arabian mathematician who was active around 820 AD in Baghdad. It is believed that his surname, al-Khowarazmi is the source
for the term algorism.
Early arabic (Islamic?) culture was mathematical, so it’s not surprising to see algorithmic
patterns emerge here. Here’s the Brick ceiling of a vault in the Bazaar of Yazd.


Here’s another. Trippy isn’t it?


...and another, again in Yazd. More pretty bricks.

“Supposing, for instance, that
the fundamental relations of
pitched sounds in the science of
harmony and of musical
composition were susceptible
of such expression and
adaptations, the engine might
compose elaborate and
scientific pieces of music of any
degree of complexity or extent”


Jump forward until pretty well around the birth of the computer, and you had Ada Lovelace.
Ada wrote the first algorithm intended for machine-processing and is therefore the worlds
first computer programmer, and in one of her letters she mused on whether the computer
might have been used to generate beautiful music. (I’m going to make Ada a little bit sick
later on, by the way)

So you get the picture: this is nothing new, in fact it’s quite old.


Modern computing was really forged in the ﬁre of WW2, and it’s not surprising that
machined-generated algorithmic art really got kicked off then: the equipment just didn’t
exist before.

A chap called D P Henry bought an old Sperry bombsight computer from an army surplus
warehouse in Manchester - it’s from a WW2 lancaster bomber. He’d served with the R.E.M.E.
in the war and had an enthusiasm for its inner workings, so he played around with it a bit -
the pen and paper bits you can see above were his


...and he had it produce intricate drawings like these. It’s the worlds deadliest spirograph.


As computing moved from being purely military, you could see more experiments kick off.
Initially they were in academia at universities.

In 1953 notices like this started appearing on the noticeboards of Manchester University’s
computing department: weird discordant love letters... which it turned out a chap called
Christopher Strachey had been generating using the Mark 1, which is generally accepted to
be the ﬁrst machine with the characteristics of a modern computer. MAnchester University
Computer

These became known as the Manchester Love Letters. They’re generated randomly by a
machine: algorithmic art doesn’t have to be visual (though having machines produce text
with any understanding of what they’re saying is an order-of-mag harder)

DARLING DARLING
        MY LITTLE EAGERNESS FERVENTLY DESIRES YOUR
IMPATIENT LONGING. MY FERVOUR LOVINGLY LONGS FOR
YOUR CHARM. YOU ARE MY AVID WISH: MY LOVELY FELLOW
FEELING: MY PASSIONATE FERVOUR.
                                YOURS BURNINGLY
                                           M. U. C.



Computer


DARLING DARLING
        MY LITTLE EAGERNESS FERVENTLY DESIRES YOUR
IMPATIENT LONGING. MY FERVOUR LOVINGLY LONGS FOR
YOUR CHARM. YOU ARE MY AVID WISH: MY LOVELY FELLOW
FEELING: MY PASSIONATE FERVOUR.
                                YOURS BURNINGLY
                                           M. U. C.

DARLING SWEETHEART
YOU ARE MY AVID FELLOW FEELING. MY AFFECTION
CURIOUSLY CLINGS TO YOUR PASSIONATE WISH. MY LIKING
YEARNS FOR YOUR HEART. YOU ARE MY WISTFUL SYMPATHY:
MY TENDER LIKING.
YOURS BEAUTIFULLY
M. U. C.



Computer



Ben Laposky’s Oscillons: long-exposure photography of ﬂuctuating oscilloscope patterns,
were also published in the 50s


Because the equipment for doing these sorts of works tended to be expensive, many of the
pioneers came from academia or big business.

Georg Nees was working at Siemens when he produced this work: a structured operation by random
generators that lead to the discovery of new images. This graphic visually displays the relationship between order and
disorder, and the effects of chang. He was one of a group of artists from the 60s who became known
as the Algorists
Manfred Mohr, Herbert Franke, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, and Vera Molnar

e


Herbert Franke - another of the algorists produced a range of pieces which I ﬁnd by turns
strangely beautiful and appallingly retro by todays standards


...and then in the seventies you have David Em, who I think has the best job title in the world:
Artist in Residence at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

But some of his art has dated really badly. This looks bloody dreadful nowadays, I think in the
80s it might have been incredibly futuristic.


(ﬂowers of learning, 1989 plotter work)
And then there’s this chap, Roman Verostko. He’s an artist who’s been working since the 60s.
He’s an ex-monk, who when he was ordained worked on a programme to modernise church
art: the church has always funded lots of art, but it tends to be fairly traditional.

Roman does lots of work generated by programs written in BASIC, and output on a plotter.
This is one of his “ﬂowers of learning”.


he happened to be over from Minnesota doing a talk at Lighthouse in the North Laine a few
years back.
He’s been back since and I was lucky enough to get some time with him talking about the
history of algorithmic art. Fascinating guy.

Talk at LightHouse to students: students considered printed work to be a representation of
something on a screen. “No”, he corrected them. “It’s not like that, it’s more that the plotter is
an extension of my hand: the interaction between lines of ink on the page is important”


I became interested in all of this in 2009, a couple of weeks before meeting Mr Verostko.
Now my day job for the last 10 years has been running a little software company in the North
Laine, we make things for mobile phones. We periodically enter teams into what are called
Hack Days: you get a load of geeky programmer types together for 24 hours, set them the
task of building something from scratch in that time, overcaffeinate them and offer prizes of
consumer electronics to give them an incentive.

So we did one of these things and wanted to do something arty. So we hid phones in the 4
corners of the main hall in Imperial College where the event was held, had them look for
other phones and read the names. Most modern phones have a thing called Bluetooth - it’s
like a short-range radio, it’s mean to replace cables - and every phone that does Bluetooth
has a name. So we got these names, wrote some software to turn the names into little tunes,


So, remember that I got into this through that mobile phone piece?
Well, I thought I’d play with that a bit more. I thought it was interesting that you could take
anything and turn it into music. I’d like to say I was inspired by Ada Lovelace, but I’d be lying:
I didn’t read that quote of hers until much later.
So what else could I turn into music... Well, I was brought up on a diet of post-war comedy:
chiefly Goon Shows, Spike Milligan’s Q programme and novels. So I’ve always found Hitler to
be, frankly, a comedy figure. For me he’s more an object of ridicule than fear.
And the more I thought about it, the more that turning something truly awful into something
incredibly harmless - like, say, tuneless talent-free ambient marimba and woodblock music -
was kinda interesting.
So I downloaded a copy of Mein Kampf, skimmed it for the most hateful bits I could find, and
ran it through the software we’d used to make tunes out of phone names.You’re listening the


Everyone’s got to eat, so I released put it up for sale on iTunes in the UK, US, Australia,
Canada. And Amazon. And kinda forgot about it.

I mean, it’s tuneless rubbish. I’m no musician, I don’t know what a scale is, never played
anything, clearly no talent involved. And whilst I’ve not got my ﬁnger on the pulse of popular
culture, there isn’t much of a market for ultra-right-wing ambient EPs, is there...

... or is there?

Sales of talent-free neo-nazi ambient music over time

£30.00

£22.50

£15.00

£7.50

£0 Dec-10 Jan-11
Oct-10 Nov-10
Aug-10 Sep-10
Jun-10 Jul-10
Apr-10 May-10
Feb-10 Mar-10
Jan-10
Nov-09 Dec-09
Oct-09

Untitled

Business is booming.
I’m selling nearly £25 a month of this rubbish at the moment. Vast majority EU, then the US.
Grossed about £250.

Worrying because I have friends with actual musical talent who’ve sold less. And who don’t
take kindly to my suggestions that they’d bit a bit more successful if their track titles were a
bit more Nazi.

Makes yer think, dunnit?


- it’s old enough that the founders are dying, but young enough that people keep coming
into it thinking that it’s new. It’s interesting as an outsider, seeing the birth of an art
movement. They’re trying to give it a sense of history - archiving in Bremen.
- it raises questions over creativity. Plotter vs screen in Verostko. The system is everything
from his brain through the machine, the pen, onto the page. That means the word is affected
by the tools: the programming language he uses is best for some kinds of thing. It affects the
output.
- it raises questions over ownership, for me. Do I owe Hitler money?


• The value of history


output.


• How much creativity is in our tools?


output.


• How much credit should the artist take?


output.


• How much credit should the artist take?
• People will buy any old shit on the net


output.

Thank you!

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/
dynamosquito/4342328373/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/adavey/
4873778094
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/piven/
4835933539/

(Photo Credits)

Algorithmic art

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