‘Infinite Images’ Charts Lineages of Generative Art

In generative art, the artist’s work is the system that produces images, not images themselves. Its individual outputs may fall short when evaluated on the terms of painting – but those are the wrong criteria. ‘Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms’ at the Toledo Museum of Art, curated by Julia Kaganskiy, elegantly guides viewers through the many methods that generative art can employ, from instructions implemented by hand to sophisticated AI models, and gives them the tools to appreciate it.

The exhibition’s excellent design, by TheGreenEyl, draws inspiration from Max Bill’s Hommage à Picasso (Homage to Picasso, 1972), a work in the museum’s collection that features nested squares divided into fields of black and bold colour. A temporary black-box space in the gallery’s centre hosts installations by Sarah Meyohas and the duo Operator (Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti), leaving triangular areas around the periphery for thematic groupings. Half of the exhibition showcases artists who use generative methods to translate visual and tactile experiences of the world into digital media, or to simulate natural systems. The other half is devoted to works that highlight the aesthetics and functionality of algorithms. This includes 20th-century works by Sol LeWitt and Anni Albers, as well as Vera Molnár’s early computer-generated drawings. It also includes a set of foundational works of the NFT market.

When Erick Calderon launched Art Blocks, a leading platform for generative art NFTs, the first project was his Chromie Squiggle (2020). The rainbow zigzags now appear in the Art Blocks logo and remain emblematic of the works it hosts: visually simple systems where similarity and difference can be observed across hundreds of outputs. Tyler Hobbs – whose Fidenza (2021), the top-selling collection on the platform, is featured nearby – coined the term ‘long-form generative art’ to distinguish the Art Blocks phenomenon from earlier works by artists like Molnár that yielded a few dozen outputs at most. While wall texts mention blockchain and NFTs, they don’t explain how these works enabled the influx of attention and money that supports other artists in the show and made ‘Infinite Images’ possible.

QQL (2022), a collaboration between Hobbs and Dandelion Mané, lets viewers manipulate the system’s parameters using a sleek touchscreen console to modify outputs for display on a large screen. Around the corner, Series #4 – Glitchbox – Token #171 (2021/2025) by 0xDEAFBEEF (Tyler de Witt) invites viewers to play with the knobs and sliders on a modular synthesizer to alter the rhythm and intensity of the movement of ASCII characters on nearby screens. De Witt welded the work’s metal housing to create a tactile experience of materially entangled hardware and software. Despite the stark differences in their interfaces, both QQL and Glitchbox invite viewers to see first-hand that generative art is about the process, not just the result.

Throughout ‘Infinite Images’, the grid emerges as a morphing motif: in the tiled display of Chromie Squiggle, in the matrices of Glitchbox and in Jared Tarbell’s Entity #14 (2022), a digital animation where points on a grid expand, mutate and overflow into a simulated ecosystem. In her essay ‘Grids’ (1979), critic Rosalind Krauss observed that the grid, having been virtually absent in art previously, was everywhere in the 20th century. It was, of course, in the street plan and the loom, but had not yet become the signature form of modern art. Today, the grid is even more ubiquitous: it structures everything from our online shopping experiences to the screens that make digital images visible. ‘Infinite Images’ suggests that contemporary software-based art doesn’t abandon the history of modernism so much as reroute it, inviting viewers to revisit 20th-century abstraction in light of current technological frameworks. At the same time, it keeps us alert to the computational structures that increasingly shape perception, aesthetics and experience today.

‘Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms’ is on view at the Toledo Museum of Art until 30 November

^{Main image: Entangled Others (Sofia Crespo and Feileacan McCormick), Sediment Nodes #1 (detail), 2022–23, NFT. Courtesy: Toledo Museum of Art}