Week 7 - Fluxus and algorithmic art and simulations
Date: 2025-03-11
- fluxus
- algorithmic art
Fluxus and an Introduction to Procedural Generation
From Some Instructions:
George Brecht was a man of many trades in the mid-twentieth century: a World War II soldier, chemist, tampon designer, and Fluxus artist. Brecht is credited with creating the ‘event score’, a written form of performance art. His inspiration was drawn from his friend, the self-proclaimed un-artist Allan Kaprow, whose pieces icame in the form of live performance piecs or ‘happenings.’ Kaprow would give performers his elaborate instructions to enact within his gallery space.
While intrigued by Kaprow’s ‘happenings.’ Brecht became bored by didactic, overly specific instructions. Brecht’s approach to the event score was less detailed, more oblique, and open to intrepretation. For example:
Three Chair Event
- Sitting on a black chair. Occurrence.
- Yellow chair. (Occurence.)
- On (or near) a white chair. Occurence,
–Spring 1961
A wide variety of artists acquainted with the Fluxus movement wrote event scores, among them Yoko Ono and La Monte Young. At times the scores were performed live at festivals; other times they were read as texts. Keeping accessibilyt in mind, these scores were cheaply printed on notecards and distributed through the mail. This served to skip the ‘gallery space’ step altogether, countering the notion of the physical art object.
….Each contribution is open to your creative interpretation. You’re urged to perform these instructions private, publicly, or ‘negative’ (i.e. not at all). You can decide to simply read the instrucitons - alone, in front of your cat, or before a stadium full of spectators. You can float these instructions on the surface of a nearby lake. You can post your favorite peroframnec on YouTube and tag it’ skywalkers’ gangnam style star wars lego.’ The choice is yours. You’re the artist.
Event scores / “Instruction” Pieces
Concert #1
Robert Bozzi, 1966
On Signal form the conductors, each section of the orchestra performs one of the following actions in unison.
* tie or untie neckties
* unbutton or button up shirt sleeves
* roll up or roll down sleeves
* comb hair
* brush clothes
Each movement should accelerate in tempo and stop suddently.Everything Comes to Make You Move Forward
Dawn Kasper, 2014
First, take a self-portrait. Then locate a comfortable, quiet place to sit. Close your eyes. Clear your mind. Breathe in through your nose and exhale through your mouth. Repeat this ten to twenty times. Focus entirely on your own breathing. Let go. Relax. Once you are finished, take another self-portrait.Instruction
George Brecht, 1961
Turn on a radio. At the first sound, turn it off.Saxophone Solo, Fluxversion 1
George Brecht, 1962
The piece is announced. Performer enters stage with an instrument case, places it on a stand, opens it and pulls out a trumpet, realizes the mistake, puts it quickly back in the case and exits.Piece for any number of Vocalists
Alison Knowles, 1963
Each thinks beforehand of a song, and on a signal from the conductor, sings it through.Time Piece
Luke Fischbeck, 2014
make a series of paintings showing all of the possible ways two straigth lines can touch one another. hang one of teh paintings in every place where you might need to know the time - in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in the car, in a classroom, in the reecption area of an office. wait until the painting becomes a clock.Painting to be stepped on
Yoko Ono, 1960
Leave a piece of canvas or finished painting on the floor or in the street.Smile
Ben Vautier, 1961
5 performers walk about smiling.Out of the Blue
Sarah Rara, 2014
REPLY TO AN EMAIL OR LETTER RECEIVED AT LEAST TWO YEARS AGO. INSERT THE WORD 'BLUE' WITHIN THE TEXT. REKINDLE THE FLAME OR PUT IT OUT. BLUE.Fluxus works from Fluxus Performance Workbook, edited by Ken Friedman, Owen Smith and Lauren Sawchyn, and Some Instructions which I picked up somewhere but cannot remember where and it doesn’t list who edited or published it.
Algorithmic Art
Yoko Ono, Grapefruit
Sol LeWitt, 4th wall: 24 lines from the center, 12 lines
from the midpoint of each of the sides, 12 lines from each
corner, 1976, from Wall Drawing #289 (installation view,
Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art,
1965-2018, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,
September 28, 2018-April 14, 2019
Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings series
Joan Truckenbrod
Lillian Schwartz, ENIGMA
The Artist and The Computer, 1976 video
Do It Exhibiiton - curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
Do
It (home) Part 1
Do
It (home) Part 2
Peter Burr, Dirtscraper video
Chelsea Thompto, Landmarks Cloud Consensus Portraits - site
Sol Lewitt, Wall Drawings
Brent Watanabe, San Andreas Streaming Deer Cam, 2015 - 2016
Francesco Mariotti, CHULLACHAQUI – INTELIGENCIA ARTIFICIAL, 1981 - 1987
The text in the following section was translated via Google Translate, January 2025.
Chullachaqui 5: the ‘color’ of thelema
No information processing can take place without a program and a computer. For “Pappagallo 2,” Mariotti developed “Chullachaqui 5.” Chullachanqui is a word in Quechua that defines beings that seem alive but are invented by witches and therefore can be considered as small demons, however, the Chullachaqui seeks to befriend human beings. Mariotti’s work linked to the Chullachaquis dates back to 1981 in the series of engravings from the book “The Three Halves of Ino-Moxo and Other Witches of the Amazon” by the Peruvian poet Cesar Calvo, where Mariotti combines Ashaninka graphics with electronic circuits (Bendayán 2006).
“Chullachaqui 5” was developed by Manolo Rodríguez and programmed in BASIC 2.0 on a Commodore C64, which was the same machine used during its presentation in installation format. The “Pappagallo 2” setup included, in addition to the computer, a 5 ¼ floppy disk drive for reading the program (the classic Commodore model 1541) and a “dot-matrix” printer (model MPS 803) that allowed the public to take home a printed sheet with the processed texts.
The Commodore C64, produced at the end of 1982, was one of the first low-cost personal computers, and unlike other competing machines of the time, such as the Apple II, IBM PC or Atari 800, it was launched at an aggressive price and with distribution in department stores to encourage its domestic use, even beating European competitors such as the English Sinclair. The Commodore used the MOS Technology-developed 6510 8-bit processor, with 64 kilobytes of RAM and a sound processor that provided some sophisticated advantages in sound processing for that time despite having only 3 programmable filter channels (MOS Technology 6581/8580 SID). An additional advantage of using the Commodore C64 was its composite video output which, as in the case of video game consoles of the time, allowed the use of conventional TV monitors. The Commodore C64 was one of the longest-lived machine models in history, being produced for over 12 years.
“Chullachaqui 5” allowed the generation of random stanzas from any text. There was a certain level of sophistication in relation to this randomness, for example, it not only meant that the order varied, but also that the number of stanzas in the poems played by the machine was modified. The result is interesting, explains Mariotti: “On the one hand, randomness allows us to see how the order of a poem is often an attempt by many to prefix a meaning, but there are many other meanings.” Perhaps one of the most emblematic works in the field of random poetry is Raymond Queneau’s “Cent mille milliards de poemes” (Queneau 1961), a book composed of stanzas divided by breaks in the pages that allow readers to combine stanzas from different pages to generate new compositions and meanings.
Tribute to syntactic thinking
The effects of randomness, especially some of its most surprising results, increased enthusiasm for artificial intelligence. “Papagayo 2” coincided with one of the final stages of the first great boom in artificial intelligence, which had begun in the seventies with semantic networks and continued in the eighties with meanings generated from perception (Steels 2006). Artificial intelligence was not only perceived as a solution to the problems of post-industrial automation, but also, from a philosophical perspective, it was linked to improving the quality of human life.
However, since computers are syntactic machines (Kallinikos 2002), they are only sensitive to the form of specification given by the data entered, but not to the meaning (Dreyfus 1992; Dreyfus 2001). This syntactical thought can also lead to new meanings, to ways of thinking that we would never have imagined. The random sense produced by works of art often tells us things that we do not imagine. Beyond the automation of the machine and its logical-deterministic purpose, the randomness that is produced can also give rise to singular results. Many artists have worked with some kind of randomness to generate new forms of visualization that have resulted from complex genetic algorithms and evolutionary programming (Sims 1991; Maeda 1999; Maeda and Burns 2004).
There is a fundamental aspect attached to the principle of randomness, which is the mixing of different contents to create hybrid results. Although this is a field that may have reminiscences in collage, today it is used more frequently due to the excess of available information (Lyman and Varian 2003) and its level of interoperability. What is commonly known today as mashups, a term that initially comes from the ‘mix’ that DJs make of different musical extracts to generate new rhythms, can be seen as the result of media content associated with functionalities that are not predefined and therefore function as symbolic processors (Dietrich 2000). Much of the failure of artificial intelligence has today led to the generation of collective or social intelligences that come from new forms of information interoperability (O’Reilly 2005).
Is there then an intelligence in random thinking? Many of the combinations that are generated are surprising, but many others are disappointing and lack meaning. A chaotic poetic work like Toti’s obeys an order and a search for meaning in nonsense. Therefore, when listening to or reading the statements generated by “Pappagallo 2” one is not entirely surprised, and the computer seems to become a natural component of the full exercise of Toti’s poetry. Mariotti’s “Pappagallo 2” and the regenerated Totian poems show that, beyond a semantic search, poetry is still the space where decontextualizations can produce an order that only human beings can understand and feel.
Theo Trian, TL;DR [the shape of the internet (orgy)], 2015
Theo Trian, Radicalization Pipeline, 2021
David O’Reilly, Mountain, 2014
Reading
Emergence by Amy Goodchild (25 - 30 minute read, overview)
Read Chapter 3 - Cybernature of Mitchel Whitelaw’s Metacreation on Artificial Life - link to PDF. In the PDF this this starts on the 75th page and continues to the 114th page, on the early and recent history of algorithmic art and ecosystems. Page 75 has a picture of “Interactive Plant Growing” and the section ends after a description of Natalie Jeremijenko’s A-life art. About 35 - 40 minutes reading.
Ecosystem project (final)
Creating a single, cohesive ecosystem of various entitites interacting in a digitel simulation. These should consist of various objects, respond to forces, and produce novel output each time it is run, throughout its run.
A-life begins with a notion of life that is wholly materialistic, involving no soul, vital force, or essence. In the words of the convenor of the first artificial life workshop, Christopher Langton, ‘Living organisms are nothing more that complex biochemical machines.’ Langton contends that rather than being any special substance or force, life is ‘a property of the organization of matter.’ Further, this organization is not simply a complex structure but a dynamic structure, a system active in real time: for a-life, life is most importantly manifest in behavior.
- Your project should consist of class and objects, and the environment should have forces. This could be gravity, wind. Create attraction forces, and create images or animations that fit your ecosystem concept.