ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at sharing knowledge between artist collaborators and generative processes in the creation of artwork. The discussion is positioned from the perspective of artist-creators dealing with computational media as a medium for both creative production and presentation of the artwork. The collaborative knowledge sharing among the authors and computational processes that drive the artwork are examined through the concept of creating emergent phenomena with computers as a basic development strategy for poetic articulation. In a generative artwork, the form, content, or both may change. Such art will often surprise the artist (Kwastek, 2013) and some artists go as far as saying that a generative artwork is not successful unless this is the case (Lozano-Hemmer and Ranzenbacher, 2001). Dorin and McCormack (2001) propose that generative art is defined by the artist’s role as a creative designer of processes. Galanter (2003) expands on this definition by adding an observation that generative art processes have a degree of autonomy and run independently of the artist. Within this context we discuss critical, compositional, technical and meaning-making questions that arise through this collaborative process between artists and the generative computational processes. In the first section we discuss generative processes as artistic inquiry, which provide a way of understanding ourselves in the world and methods for composing poetic experiences. Generative approaches to art making offer new modes of ambient media experience based on the incorporation of computational processes into the production of artistic composition. The processes, algorithms and models that generate the work are treated as artistic materials. We explore the question of creative agency afforded by a process-oriented approach and articulate the semantic and formal compositional framework for the artwork creation. In the second section we discuss the computational art processes as a space for articulation and sharing of artistic knowledge. Encoding practice, theory and performance is a method for developing self-reflective and collaborative work using code – our software controlling a computational medium – as artistic material. The flexible computational composition is an instrument for cultural expression, and a form of creative knowledge sharing articulated by computer code. It enables a meaningful and creative
dialogue not just between the creators of the artwork and the computational medium, but also with audiences and spectators that experience the semantic media space of the work. In the third section we discuss strategies for meaning making in generative composition. The processes that animate generative artwork provide both creative method and source of inspiration for meaning making. The computer as a medium for artistic composition takes a role of a collaborator with creative contributions of its own, inspiring, provoking and challenging new modes of expression and meaning making. We conclude with a discussion of four examples of our work, One River . . . (running) (2006), in a thousand drops . . . (2012), Becoming World (2014) and Flicker Generative Orchestra (2015).
