Manuel Barbadillo

This computer-generated art thing is new, but maybe not as new as you think.

Manuel Barbadillo was an artist from Spain who was influenced by reading Norman Wiener’s work on cybernetics and applied those ideas to his art, which evolved into a modular system of shapes. He used the computer to generate combinations of these and search for ideas. Working from grids of asterisks that depicted the shapes the computer generated, he painted the final version by hand.

This kind of collaborative human-computer process is, I think, an important thing to keep in mind. Computers can only use metrics they can quantify, even if that quantification is too complex for humans to understand. So I think that human-centric art is always going to involve some degree of mixed-initiative human involvement. And I think building tools that make it easy for the human to converse with the human about the design is one of the important challenges facing us today.

There are many pioneers of generative things. Some I know about, like Frieder Nake, Vera Molnár, and Lillian Schwartz, but I’m still finding lots more I haven’t heard about before.

http://dada.compart-bremen.de/item/agent/229

“My Way to Cybernetics”: http://www.atariarchives.org/artist/sec13.php