The Metamagic of Mathematics

Having played an important role in raising awareness of the foundational software art of Harold Cohen, Gazelli Art House’s new show, “Awaken, Metamagical Hands,” trains its focus on the second and third wave of artists to have explored the potential of computer code as their primary medium. Critical in driving the second wave in the context of art, design, and computer engineering education was John Maeda, now VP of design and AI at Microsoft, who set up the Aesthetics & Computation Group at MIT in the 1990s. Many of its impressive roster of students are now recognized internationally as pioneers in the domain of interactive art and technology. These include Golan Levin, who has several works featured at Gazelli, as well as Ben Fry and Casey Reas, whose development of Processing in 2001 has since fueled a third wave of code-based art. ​Maeda was invited by Gazelli to co-curate this exhibition alongside Robert Norton, the founder of Verisart, who explains of the exhibition: 

‍We wanted to have the physical and digital live within one NFT so that the NFT serves both as a transaction mechanism for the digital asset and points to the underlying physical asset such as the print or photograph. We’re seeing growing demand to fuse the physical and the digital and whether it’s token-gated prints in the case of LIA and Joshua Davis’s collaborative project CORONATION (2024) or the NFT as a certificate of authenticity as we did for [both] John Maeda and Golan Levin, we’re committed to correctly mapping the relationships between these two mediums and putting this information on-chain for future collectors. ‍

​With a richly ambiguous title drawn from a phrase used by Maeda in the early ’90s and redeployed to reference today’s rapidly advancing AI processes and resurgence of interest in tangible, haptic experiences, this exhibition is a rich and speculative probe into possible alternative futures. Throughout the show, a focus on temporality vies with the spatial constraints of display in a commercial gallery, while there is also tension between individual authorship and the collectivising tendency of open-source processes. Here, LIA, Joshua Davis, Golan Levin, and John Maeda, who all started making generative art in the 1990s, discuss their contributions to the show in light of their long creative journeys with Bronac Ferran.‍‍

‍Bronac Ferran: You have all, in various pioneering ways, made radical and significant contributions to the emergence of software-arts practices since the 1990s. How do you view this current moment and its aesthetic, cultural, and technological challenges and opportunities? ‍

Joshua Davis: This has been an interesting topic for me to ponder, having spent 30 years, dare I say, screaming from the mountaintop about the unique opportunity that generative (code-based) art has as an art form. It’s wild to see how, in the past few years, this art form has taken off in an explosive way. I think, in some ways, we have the NFT space to thank for this. However, this is also worrisome, as it created a gold rush of new players into the space who are not here for the movement but more for the payday. Nevertheless, a shining light is a shining light, and I’m grateful for people seeking out what has been happening pre-internet in the 1960s and ’70s, the demoscene of the ’90s, and our navigation of generative art on the web from 1994 to today.‍

Golan Levin: My influence and contributions, where I can still discern their faint outlines, are fairly minor. As we sit at the edge of humanity’s coming challenges — climate upheaval, etc. — I’m not sure I am well prepared for what’s next. 

LIA: At the moment, digital art receives attention like never before. The good thing is that it seems that it has finally been accepted in the art world. It is no longer seen as merely a “screen saver” (as an uninformed curator in the ’90s once dismissively described my work). 

There is a lot more educational work that needs to be done before the general public and even most of the curatorial talent in the world at the moment can start to understand how code works. I see a lot of works that very obviously use ready-made algorithms with a colour scheme applied — they may look great (because math can be beautiful) but that is just a surface-level way of understanding code and algorithms, when there is so much scope for more interesting things to happen conceptually both inside the code and in the way the artist works on the interplay between work, algorithm, and viewer. 

There are so many off-the-shelf flow fields out there — boring! And because suddenly there seems to be money to be made from digital art, there is a tension between really trying to create new art that has never been made before, or just making something that is easy to sell to collectors because they are already familiar with it, like copying old styles of painting.‍

John Maeda: I think that mathematics was a core barrier for many designers and artists to enter this space. Now, with GPT-4o and the latest advancements in LLMs [large language models], we’re seeing a shift away from the need to be mathematical. Instead, having the right concepts in mind when approaching computational art is becoming more important than the computer code, and I find that quite exciting.

‍BF: Why participate in this exhibition? Are you keen to further explore the possibilities of selling digital editions from longer-form or iterative projects? ‍

L: This exhibition has given me the great opportunity to finally — after a 30-year long friendship — collaborate with Joshua Davis in a public setting. This is something that we both thought was long overdue. To be honest, it has been a long-term question for “media artists” about how to sell their work, and there has always been a desire to investigate selling online as well as multiple attempts that have never quite worked, up until now. So, of course, I have been exploring the possibilities of selling digital editions since the 1990s and throughout my whole career, and I will naturally continue to do so.‍

JM: When Robert first brought up the idea of this show, I immediately wanted to reach out to people I respect and am curious about. It has been a wonderful opportunity to help organize the show and also be a part of it. I haven’t done something like this since my show at the Foundation Cartier.

‍GL: [I am participating because John] Maeda asked me. Am I working on new “long-form” generative art projects? Yes. Do I plan to sell them as editions on blockchains? Sure, probably. Am I “keen” to do so? Maybe? I spent 30 years working in a world in which there was no appreciable market for software art, and I’m privileged to make the majority of my income as an educator, so I’m not in the habit of making art “for sale”. I prefer to think about the art itself, independent of its saleability, and I don’t like the way that art warps itself to accommodate marketplaces. 

NFTs can be doubly problematic because it is technologically necessary to “get it right” the first time — there’s no possibility to revise things or fix bugs, which goes against the fundamentally “soft” nature of software. ‍

JD: Before NFTs, I wasn’t sure I’d ever see a market for digitally created generative art in my lifetime, to be honest. I had done several installations at museums since 2001, but there was never a need for a museum to curate a show solely with the intention to sell the work to collectors. Digital art, for a very long time, lacked the idea of collectability and ownership (again, the blockchain has solved this problem). So, after 30 years, being able to participate in an exhibition that gives me the opportunity to create work with the added intention of it being collected and presented is of immense interest to me.

‍BF: Do you have a particular take on the concept of the metamagical hand? How does this manifest in your work for the exhibition?‍

‍‍JM: The phrase “metamagical hand” comes from something I did in the early 1990s, a little 16-page booklet called Design Machines. I wrote a short poem about how the world would change when the computer could be used as if it had metamagical hands and never got tired. 

I liked the modifier “meta” at the time, which was most commonly used to describe a key on the computer keyboard of the Lisp machine. In addition to “Shift,” there was “Control,” “Hyper,” and “Meta,” which also became synonymous for the “Escape” key. The phrase “meta design” was used to describe the process behind design — the “metaphysical” thoughts that underlie the creative process. I’m a fan of alliteration so the word “magical” felt amusing to put next to “meta”. Thus, “metamagical” was born. It helped me understand my process of writing code to generate complex artworks with what felt like millions of hands wielding pens and drawing away, magically, as in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” [from Disney’s Fantasia (1940)], when Mickey Mouse is cleaning up the kitchen. In my case, however, the brooms don’t get out of control because computer programming is about having complete control.

‍L: My animated works involve hundreds of elements that interact with each other in mathematically complicated ways, 60 times per second, and they are different every time. There is no way any “real” human hands could ever make them, which is what I find fascinating. The reason I love working with code is because I can have many more elements than I could ever control manually, and set them off to run around and do their own thing, making a picture for me. My hands are there typing the code, but once I start the program, the “metamagic” starts.

‍GL: John is making an oblique reference to Douglas Hofstadter’s 1985 book Metamagical Themas, which was influential to both of us. Some of the ideas in that book take direct shape in the asemic writing system of my Cytographia project. More generally, the notion of the “metamagical hand” manifests in my Zoofolia plots, which were drawn by a robot hand, and in my interactive project Meshy, which extrapolates images created by its participant’s hand gestures. ‍

JD: LIA and I have collaborated on a project called CORONATION. Initially, I wanted to call it Alchemy as I feel the phrase “metamagical hand” references the alchemist: a person who transforms or creates something through a seemingly magical process. Isn’t that beautiful?

‍I feel like this is what I have been doing for 30 years — making work through an act of alchemy, a magical process in which a program generates an endless sea of random beauty.

BF: Do you have a view on the phygital terminology and approach that is being advanced within this venture?‍

JD: Over the past years, I’ve been working on a process where I write a program that generates a random rule-based generative animation. Thousands of static renders are produced, and I select only one that instils the perfect balance of the algorithm. I then print this out on canvas and execute a hand-drawn geometric pattern in silver ink over the top. This is an attempt to pull back the curtain and show the human behind the work, to physically mark it with my shaky human hand, revealing the flawed human behind the perfection of the algorithm. This is why I love and embrace the phygital objects that I offer in the exhibition.‍

GL: I’m amused by the inversion in which the physical print or sculpture is considered to be the sidecar to the contract — the ephemeral, mortal coil of an eternal, virtual token. The term “phygital” is not a word I would ever willingly choose to use. 

‍L: I like the combination of both digital and physical. Although, one reason I work in digital media is that I can’t really deal with the logistics of artworks as physical objects. (It’s not that I haven’t tried — the reality of selling physical objects is that you end up with a storeroom full of stacks of packaging materials and, if you misjudge the market, stacks of unsold artworks, which become a most excellent thing to procrastinate about.) 

For me, the pure digital was always the more interesting thing. When I started with generative art it was difficult to create images that were printable at an acceptable quality. It wasn’t impossible, but there were a lot of tricks that we had to develop to get printed ink on paper to “feel” anything at all like pixels on a screen. Nowadays there are collectors who prefer 100% digital, and collectors who prefer to have something physical, so with a “phygital” approach both types of collectors can be happy.

JM: When I was at MIT, one of my dear colleagues, Hiroshi Ishii, had this idea called “tangible media” — a take on future computational systems as primarily physical and tactile instead of just visual and graphical. I think it was from him that I first heard the phrase “physical plus digital,” or so-called phygital.

BF: Is there an ethical or aesthetic tension between open-source community and the contemporary digital art marketplace?‍

JM: The contemporary marketplace for art is fueled by scarcity and open source can change that equation. Someone with just one tool can control how that tool works within their own artwork, but open sourcing it means anyone can use it. I think about photography when it first came out — there was likely a commercial motivation to share that with others. New tools are either held onto by their owners or shared for some kind of monetary gain, or in the case of open source, for free. We’re in a time when open source is just a good idea, especially as technology changes so much. Sharing what we know helps society move faster.‍

JD: I navigate the open-source community, having started in this space 30 years ago with the Linux community. This idea of open-sharing and open-learning, which has always stuck with me, rapidly accelerates creativity and is something I will always embrace. I run a Discord server where we openly share ideas and practices on a whole host of topics ranging from Java to AI to node-based toolsets. 

While I may openly share the building blocks for creating a piece of work, I’m not too worried about any ethical or aesthetic tensions. The work I create is uniquely mine and would be hard to replicate from the code I share publicly.

GL: It depends on whether and how one is using open-source programming tools, or using the actual code to other people’s artworks. On the one hand, the majority of today’s software art is built using open-source software development toolkits for the arts, such as Processing and p5.js. Such toolkits have allowed many more people to work creatively with code. A windfall of artists’ donations to the non-profit Processing Foundation are a testament to the impact that open-source communities have had on artists, and the gratitude these toolmakers have earned. On the other hand, there are always unscrupulous people in the cryptocurrency world who will take the code to an artwork and abuse its unwittingly flexible license, selling the artwork as their own. I have seen it happen several times. ‍

L: Yes, there is definitely [a tension]. To sell, you really need to make something figurative and aesthetically pleasing. Landscapes and flowers do well, along with artworks that digitally imitate traditional and well-known themes or techniques. I mean no shade on artists who do this, but it’s pretty much the opposite to the aesthetic and my interests: angular, sharp-edged abstraction rendered in black and white or with stark, sparse colour palettes. But I can’t really make work like this and sell. 

As artists, we found ourselves caught between two competing forces. On the one hand, here is a clear opportunity to make some money from digital work, which is new. (In the past, we often simply gave it away on our websites.) On the other hand, in order to take advantage of this, we have to make work that “the market” wants to buy, and that runs counter to the desire to experiment and produce work that might not be able to be sold because it is too new or “weird” to be understood by mainstream buyers. I have a piece in this exhibition, There You Go, a Landscape!, which explicitly calls out this tension: I folded to the pressure, and made a landscape.

‍BF: When you think back on your own trajectory from the 1990s to now, do you feel that this moment of increased mainstream attention, or at least the shifting context of reception, was what you were paving the way for at the time? Has anything been lost along the way?‍

L: When I started my journey back in the mid-nineties, there were only a handful of people who were working with a similar attitude and aesthetic in using computers to make art. Because there were so few of us it was only natural that we found each other, and we definitely had fun together, pushing boundaries and exploring all the fascinating things you could do with a computer and the internet. 

What has gotten lost with the commercialization of digital art is the intimate, niche community that we had together for a long time, and the experimental freedom that came with working without expectations of audience or large-scale success — we were basically permanently outside of the mainstream spotlight, and there’s a lot of freedom there. 

The commercialization that is now emerging does seem to be opening new markets and possibilities, but it has come at a price. We saw this with Art Blocks and their back-then completely opaque curation system that elevated a number of never-before-heard-of artists to overnight millionaires. If everyone with a copy of Processing has a chance at that kind of wealth, and if the general buyer has no way of telling whether the artist is actually doing something interesting, or just copying and pasting a ready-made algorithm and applying a pretty color palette, then the quantity of digital art “out there” of course massively increases and, as a consequence, the overall quality has sunk. Moreover, it has become difficult to actually find new, good artists working in this space.

‍JD: I wasn’t sure that any of this would ever happen in my lifetime, so I’m super grateful that it did. I’m also grateful that some collectors took the time and due diligence to research the space and find people like me and LIA, who have been making work in this space for three decades now. We have a vibrant history but, because it didn’t happen sooner, we lost some really great software like Flash and Director. To conserve this work, it may need to run in an emulator or be ported, which might cause it to lose some of its initial essence.‍

JM: I didn’t do anything with the intention of paving the way for the future. I was just exploring, curious, and wanting to share methods for doing that. That’s why I created Design by Numbers, an early attempt at teaching computation to artists and designers. Thankfully, Ben Fry and Casey Reas, who were contemporaries of Golan when they were part of the Aesthetics and Computation Group, continued this work. Today, the world is much different. At a Processing Foundation event, I was amazed by how many younger creatives are discovering computation and have mastered it to a level I never thought possible.‍

GL: My colleagues and I in John Maeda’s research group at MIT made certain experiments 20-odd years ago that anticipated some of the kinds of things we see today. I don’t feel under-recognized for this — much of our work was poorly documented or quickly ceased working in the browser, so it’s natural that these ideas would be rediscovered and reinvented, especially as our group’s tools, like Processing, were adopted by ever-increasing numbers of artists.

As much as the population of software art creators has expanded post-COVID, the collective understanding of computational art seems to have correspondingly shrunk. Now it’s all generative NFTs in browsers on blockchains. Perhaps it’s just me, but the field seemed less defined, more open-ended in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The mainstream attention has followed the money, not the critical theory.

BF: Are exhibitions like this ahead of the curve? Is digital art’s increasingly commercial context driving exhibition innovation in media art? Or is the notion of media art as a separate domain now redundant?‍

JM: The idea of media art is old, but it was radical when sophisticated pigments first allowed for painting. 

New media takes time to be absorbed by culture and become passé. Exhibitions like this introduce a way to express the computational era, where people who can speak machine share how to speak machine. This is important and is done through making art available in the marketplace, which is the foundation of creative commerce.‍

GL: For commercial galleries, this show is perhaps [ahead of the curve]. I’m presenting interactive software installations. Such works need to be activated by participants in real time. Even relative to marketplaces for digital/NFT art, this premise is still somewhat edgy — most collectors prefer static images and video. 

People smell money and increasingly just make copies of things that have been known to sell. Consider the number of imitators that the French generative artist Zancan has for example. This copycat phenomenon is the opposite of innovation. On the other hand, the number of new people drawn to the context, and able to make a living from it, has increased exponentially. This has made it possible for some very exciting new voices, like William Mapan and Melissa Wiederrecht, to find perches in this expanded landscape.  

[The idea of media art as a separate domain is redundant] in the sense that everyone is a computer artist. But I think there will always be a technological vanguard of artists who make it their mission to explore the aesthetic possibilities enabled by new technologies, or who seek to understand how new technologies are transforming society. On the other hand, I think that media art has matured, and is no longer quite so techno-optimistic; some of the “shine” has come off new technologies, and we have a more nuanced understanding of their sinister aspects.

‍JD: I’d argue that gallery exhibitions like this are actually way behind. I was building installations within the museum space in its heyday from around 2001 to 2006. It just lacked the ownership component and how to collect and present this work. So I’m optimistic that we have a great opportunity to make up for lost time. I could easily build a retrospective of 30 years of work, encompassing hundreds of thousands of images and animations, and that’s exciting.‍

L: It depends on the shape of the curve. We could say, for example, that the curve peaked in 2021 when NFTs were at the top of their hype cycle as the main or at least the most financially significant vehicle for selling digital art. Alternatively, we could see the NFT hype as kickstarting the actual, real, sustainable curve. The bubble has certainly burst but, as a result of the hype, a lot more people know that generative art exists. 

Those of us who have been patiently working at it since before it was financially attractive will continue to do so, but now more people outside of our circles know a little more about what kinds of things are possible in this space, even if the generative art NFT bubble itself barely scratched the surface of how software can be and has been used to make digital art. I am inclined to prefer this second version of “the curve,” because it lets me be excited about potential new forms of digital art, and new ways that it might manifest in the future. 

The term “media art” was always a bit vague — it included a lot of various disciplines, from video to net art to interactive art and so on. So, I guess, when we continue calling digital art “media art,” we are [being] as vague as we have been for the last few decades. That’s fine with me.