Conceptual art has a deep affinity with procedural generation. Emily Short has referred to this interview with Kenneth Goldsmith as “an above-average explanation of what’s interesting about procedural writing in its own right,” an estimation that I definitely endorse.

Looking at procedural generation as an artistic movement (or, rather, one of the artistic trends that is using procedural generation today) the point of procgen is the mirror of conceptual art. If conceptual art is about art where the ideas are more important than the execution, than procgen is about taking those ideas and making them manifest. 

While many procgen projects are absolutely about turning the output to useful and meaningful ends–testing data, flexibility, entire computer generated games–procedural generation doesn’t start there. It starts with ideas, in the exact same way that conceptual art does. Without Dada’s cutups, would we be able to watch the films we see today? Maybe. But I suspect we might not.

One of the things that I like about NaNoGenMo in particular is that many of the projects are about taking an absolutely bizarre idea–what if you had a book that consisted of only the violent parts of The Iliad? What if you took all the dialog out of Pride and Prejudice? What if Alice went to Treasure Island? Or was chasing after Moby Dick? What if you had a story about recursively polite questioning elves? What do 50,000 meows actually look like?–and make them into actual books that you can read.

Jorge Luis Borges used reviews of fictional books to explore ideas without having to write out an entire novel. Procedural generation lets me explore ideas in a similar fashion–what if the characters in the stories in the 1001 Nights told stories about characters who told stories about characters who told stories…recursively?–but in a way that lets you read the result. 

What if we built the Library of Babel?

No Such Thing as Writer’s Block from Frieze on Vimeo.