On its trek running circles around the sun, an asteroid skirts past silent Earth. Perhaps the remains of a primordial comet, the solitary assemblage of space rubble known as Asteroid 2015 TB145 is about to have its picture taken. More precisely, it’s about to be microwaved.

Deep within California’s high Mojave Desert near the barren ghost town of Goldstone, sits one of three facilities comprising NASA’s Deep Space Network. On an early Halloween morning in 2015, the largest of the site’s five giant radio telescopes tilted toward a patch of sky surrounding TB145’s journey—and began hurling microwaves at it. Three hundred thousand miles away, those pulses bounced off their target and were sensed by another massive antennae, at Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. The outcome of this scientific operation was a set of images: rough first-ever portraits of the hitherto unknown face of TB145 set against its backdrop of eternal deep space.

Radar images appear as a field of pixels in which their target’s shape is approximated by a backscatter of microwaves. Comprised of tiny rectangles in a complex array of shades from black to white, the sparkling grayscale that demystified TB145’s craggy profile provided a valuable yield of scientific data. The asteroid thus joined with nature’s other previously hidden phenomena upon which humans have, for the first time, cast an analytical eye.

In addition to its scientific harvest, the portrait of TB145 is much like a work of art. Its raw beauty is an alloy of truth and the ineffable that, significantly, was an artistic outcome without artistic intent. In science, art makes itself.

Today, artists using data and other objective sources are in search of outcomes that tap into the same beauty/truth alliance. Theirs is a type of generative art: the byproduct of structured procedures employed in lieu of more traditional and subjective artful choices. Such methodologies involve self-imposed limits circumscribed by rules, systems and patterns, data, code, algorithms, chance, and physical elements such as gravity or other natural forces that comprise an artwork’s conceptual and procedural framework.

Generative art can be likened to tossing random factors into complex physics equations and following through to see what sort of world might emerge—it’s art that could serve as a metaphor for how our real world came into existence. The operational elements of generative art systems create visual outcomes that, like scientific knowledge of things, are not “meant to be” in the sense of having been consciously manipulated to satisfy subjective intentions, but rather are discovered indiscriminately by adherence to the integrity of a discrete process. Generative art is the relishing of form as a consequence.

Nature itself is the model. In his 1917 book On Growth and Form, Scottish biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson describes appearances throughout the natural world with the observation that “form is a diagram of forces.” ¹ The form of an object in nature is related to nothing other than its causal processes as an outcome, or byproduct, of interactions subject to the laws of physics. Forms like a tree are understood as a diagram of how physical forces acted upon and interacted within an organism that ended up as arching and twisted branches. The shape of the branch diagrams the history of its making. It is, in essence, a type of memory, like how a weather chart’s zigzagging lines are a record of climate data. Natural form in all its wonder and beauty is not a creation of godly or artistic willfulness but is instead the unintended outcome of nature’s complex algorithmic forces interacting.

Science works in the same way, when it follows evidentiary methods to generate knowledge outcomes. As an action toward knowing, science is more a verb than a noun. It’s what an infant is doing when it attempts to rise up on all fours, gathers evidence of gravity’s effects, and experiments with successes and failures—then crawls. We’re not all scientists, but we all do science.

Like art, science arouses sensations of the poetic, of having queried the depths of mystery in search of new truths and sensations of beauty. In generative art, the conceptual decision to employ an externally determined order as the substitute for personal choice infuses visual expression with organizing principles echoing those of science and nature. The devotion to such procedure by an artist can itself be viewed as symbolic of how science seeks to understand the world.

In the present, a wave of generative and other science-informed artmaking has appeared, in part as a response to advanced digital technology’s flood of big data inundating social and intellectual corridors, offering opportunities for artistic analysis of critical subjects at an increasingly granular level. For an era struggling with debates about multiple versions of the truth, the presence of objective criteria, facts, and data are increasingly relied upon for wayfinding. Artists are drawn to this nexus and its social provocations.

More than a century ago, antecedents in the mutual influences of science and the arts stirred radical changes in artists’ strategies for reflecting reality, prompting a shift away from the primacy of figurative representation and acute craftsmanship. Piet Mondrian was prominent among a string of luminaries in forging a new sense of artistic beauty and truth that he declared as equal with that of nature, rather than simply imitative of it. He sought a “purely pictorial form that appeared eminently ‘real’ and ‘concrete.’ It existed in its own right, a fully-fledged artistic reality.” ²

All the arts strive to attain an aesthetic plastic of the relationship existing between the individual and the universal, the subjective and the objective, nature and spirit. . . . The essential characteristic of the New Plastic in painting is a composition of rectangular color planes that expresses the most profound reality. ³

Limiting himself to forms bounded by a Cartesian grid, Mondrian surrendered much of what had been left to personal choice in artmaking up to that point. His vertical and horizontal black lines functioned like a simple dataset. He’d narrowed his options to permutations generated by adherence to this set, limiting his own personal subjectivity and achieving in works of art a metaphorical reference to how objects in nature had come to exist. For Mondrian, art was an act of nature.

Science around the time of Mondrian (1872–1944) accounted significantly, perhaps exclusively, for such evolving artistic practices. By the nineteenth century’s final years and the beginning of the twentieth’s, assaults on the status quo had included Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Gregor Mendel’s genetics, James Clerk Maxwell’s science of electromagnetism, Dmitri Mendeleev’s creation of the periodic table, Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of disease, the rise of knowledge in thermodynamics, the confirmation of atoms, the discoveries of x-rays and electrons, the inventions of the telegraph and telephone, Max Planck’s development of quantum theory, and Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. It was an era of acceleration in radical new views of how nature works, the tenor of which implied an earlier history where truth may have been riddled with errors and fictions.

In paintings of the same era, the changing position of linear perspective’s vanishing point diagrammed for modern art a journey parallel to that of science, whereby the pictorial space in which art had previously notarized orthodox views of nature began to accommodate a new aesthetic for new views of nature based upon emerging science. Perspective’s vanishing point began its sojourn deep in the illusionistic pictorial space of Neoclassicism, ricocheted through the shallower pictorial spaces of Impressionism and Cubism, and ultimately disappeared on the flat material surfaces of Suprematist and Constructivist paintings. The force of rapid scientific advancement elevated principles of an evidence-based search for truth, disrupting longstanding beliefs about reality and sparking the inevitable agitations of new knowledge contradicting old. Its tensions were manifest in art’s exchange of the pictorial for the real, analogizing science’s exchange of fictional for factual.

The beginnings of a generative impulse simmered beneath the science of the time, emerging from the endeavor to make sense out of accelerated change. While Impressionism, Cubism, Constructivism, Suprematism, Dada, and beyond were being mischaracterized as “anti-art” by their critics, science raced ahead. Attempting to keep up, artists had in common their refusal to participate in orthodoxies that had served the past with an art that no longer adequately represented changing views of reality.

As a result, a science-laced generative impulse gestated throughout the ensuing twentieth century’s art history, trailing the implication that an inclusion of made-by-itself elements in a work of art will imbue it with qualities of beauty found in a nature that was being redefined by science. Scattered variations on the theme appear throughout the century’s medley of radical stylistic forays: repurposed forms and “readymades” whose origins lay not in artistic intent but in functional usage; experiments in randomness and chance; candid foregrounding of process; gravity-directed drips and splashes; raw canvas into which paint aimlessly spilled, soaked, and stained according to the dictates of its chemistry; and unplanned flourishes, smears, erasures, and apparently unauthorized marks. All of which can be seen as referencing, whether consciously so or not, an allegiance with the beauty model provided by nature: form without deliberate intent.

Further discourse underlying generative art gathered momentum in the early 1960s with the advent of Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT). ⁴ Established by artist Robert Rauschenberg and Bell Laboratories engineer Billy Klüver to support collaborations between artists and engineers, the project prompted an expansion of artists’ palettes and visual vocabularies into alluring new arenas of electronic media and industrial materials. More significantly, it spawned appropriations of the language and models of science itself for use in artistic expression.

EAT was accompanied by the birth of the ecology movement and its awakening to nature as a delicate balancing act among the laws of physics, the consequences of global industrialization, and the poetics of a nature-human symbiosis. Concerns over the ultimate fate of Earth’s natural environment converged in an increased collaboration between the science and art worlds, thawing their icy Two Cultures ⁵ relationship and opening doors to further modes of collaboration.

Additional appropriations of mathematics, patterns, algorithms, and eventually computation and coding served to fashion generative modes independent of subjectively biased choices and more involved in an art made by its own internal machinery, shifting the role of the artist from omniscient creator to that, like the scientist, of an instigator or proctor of experimentation and its outcomes. Throughout, such artmaking strategies implied a Mondrianesque investigation of the universal and the real, and queried evolving ideals of beauty.

Traditional artistic purpose and the conventional notion that a creation is meant to be the way it is only by the conscious will and artistic dexterity of a creator, were thus repeatedly called to account. The use of impersonal criteria to generate an artistic outcome provokes the realization that beauty and its inveterate companion truth do not have to result from the esoteric designs of a creator. As a linkage to science and the ways and outcomes of nature, the symbolic character of generative art is that beauty and truth are already there to experience, where intent is absent. In that, art begins to probe the poetic dimensions of science.

Historically, a perception of the beauty/truth alliance permeates the poetic, philosophical, and spiritual discourse around the human relationship to nature and the universal. As poet John Keats wrote in 1819,

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. ⁶

Among others, generative art continues history’s quest to wrestle with Keats’s edict. As science changes the playing field upon which reality is understood, stubborn mythologies and misunderstandings crocheted into the fabric of social institutions and knowledge conventions begin to unravel. Truth along the way can become tortured in a maelstrom of disputed anxieties over the old and the new. Beauty can become hostage to the insistence that there must be a creator for it to embody truth.

A perennial subject of contemplation, disputes over the beauty/truth duality include deep questions of what is known and needed to be known of existence. Like the enigmas of space time, explorations of beauty or truth lead inevitably from one to the other and back again. From its perspective as a metaphor for the workings of science and its outcomes, generative art is implicated in such a contemporary discourse and its considerations of existence, transcendence, and meaning.

Today the past, as if only yesterday, is echoed in iterations of art made by using methodologies not unlike those inherited from an art restricted to permutations of horizontal and vertical lines plus primary colors, or as well from the self-generated appearance of an encounter between archaic asteroids and a NASA microwave beam. Both can lead to a deeper appreciation of truth and beauty as an outcome instead of a persuasion.

The impulse toward generative art harkens to the same thread of radical change begun by artists a century ago, when they gave expression to how science then, as it continues to do now, precipitated reconsiderations of how the universe works and our place in it. Beauty, truth, and eroding orthodoxies of fictional beliefs are interwoven into the shifting paradigm of a human relationship to nature. The arc of science compels that, along with all of nature’s other forms, we ourselves are outcomes of generative processes. In nature, which is us, beauty does not glorify the conscious intentions of a creator but, rather, emanates from within us as an emergent sensation of something ephemeral, profound, and true.

A perk of human biology and a gift of having traversed long evolutionary pathways, we are the lucky finders of beauty where it wasn’t meant to be.

NOTES

The phrase “We, the lucky finders of beauty where it wasn’t meant to be” first appeared in my writing as part of an essay for the exhibition ENERGY, which took place at the Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design, in 2010.

1. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1917), 11. On Growth and Form was a seminal work in the field of biology, emphasizing the role of physical and mathematical principles in shaping the forms of living organisms.
2. Werner Haftmann, Painting in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1 (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1960), 202.
3. Piet Mondrian, New Design: Neoplasticism (Bauhausbücher 5, 1925) (reprint, Zürich: Lars Müller, 2019), 6, 10.
4. Experiments in Art and Technology’s proactivity in promoting art–science relationships in the mid-1960s to early 1970s opened avenues of communication and interaction between the two domains that underlay the eventual use by generative artists of quasi-scientific methodology.
5. “The Two Cultures” was a 1959 Rede lecture by British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow. It was widely understood as a despair over the notion that the arts and sciences existed hopelessly on polar ends of a cultural spectrum, and that their individual contributions to society were handicapped by this separation. The lecture was published as a book, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, that same year. Its premise permeated the discourse as various social forces began to bring the two cultures closer in the second half of the twentieth century.
6. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819), the message the English Romantic poet John Keats conveys to the urn is summarized in the ode’s final lines:

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

…………………………………………

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