The Work Of Art In The Age Of Algorithms
The word “algorithm” has tangled roots. It dates back to a ninth-century AD Persian
mathematician, Al-Khwārizmī, who published a influential treatise called On Calculation
With Arabic Numbers. Three centuries later, the work was translated into Latin as Algoritmi
de numero Indorum. “Agoritmi” was the translator’s mangled attempt to render AlKhwārizmī’s name in proper Latinate form, but the “mi” at the end of the word made it
sound instead like a plural noun. The word slowly morphed from a proper name to a term
describing a method of calculation.
At its heart, an algorithm is a list of rules that govern a sequence of operations. You can
think of algorithms governing everything from the most obtuse mathematical formulae to
the behavior of mundane objects. The logic of a soda machine can be written
algorithmically:
1. Accept coins
2. If coins are equal to $1.00, then:
2a. allow user to select soda
2b. release soda can
2c. if soda is the final can in the machine, turn on “empty” light
2d. reset system to await new coins and return to step 1
3. If coins are greater than $1.00, release appropriate change and then execute step 2a
We live today in a world teeming with algorithms. Algorithms are the light bulbs and oil
fields of our age: they trigger immense social change and build vast fortunes. Google
designed its original search tool around an algorithm called PageRank; it made its billions
from an algorithmic approach to advertising. Any region of our life that is touched by
software—and, really, what isn’t touched by digital code in some way?—is by definition
being shaped by algorithmic logic.
Imagine, for the sake of argument, time-traveling back to the 1970s, and informing the
critics and the curators of the day that some of the most interesting art at the dawn of the
twenty-first century would turn out to be algorithmic in nature, built out of the orderly
rules of software. The proposition itself might not have shocked, but I think the assumption
would have been that those future artists were embracing algorithmic approaches to art as
a critique, foregrounding the sterility and lifelessness of the machine. An algorithm, almost
by definition, must be predictable; it is a series of rules, after all, and while culture can often
thrive by breaking rules, when computers try their hand at rule-breaking, they simply crash.
Art that borrowed its underlying logic from an IBM mainframe must be somehow mocking
that logic, exposing its hollow regularity.
But when you immerse yourself in the algorithmic art of Leo Villareal, it becomes clear that
the future didn’t turn out that way. When you stroll along the pulsing underground
passageway at the National Gallery of Art, and watch the streaks of Multiverse dart past you,
or stare up at the rippled starbursts of Microcosm at the Norman Museum of Contemporary
Art in Kansas, what you experience is not a mock deconstruction of the tyranny of the
algorithm, but rather, the exact opposite: an exploration of the possibility and surprise, the
uncanny alive-ness, that can emerge from the elemental rules of code. It’s fitting, then, that
some of Villareal’s most influential projects have appeared at the Burning Man festival in
the Nevada desert, which itself a kind of uncanny fusion of Dionsysian ritual and computer
science hackathon. Thirty years ago, if you’d asked the Manhattan artists and the computer
programmers to collaborate on an event, you would have barely gotten a cocktail party out
of them, much less the four-day multimedia bacchanalia that is Burning Man.
Villareal represents the most accomplished example of a new kind of creator: the artist as
programmer. In this sense, his intellectual roots connect more directly to the first computer
scientists who designed artificial life simulations, and to game designers who use code to
concoct entire imaginary worlds. (And perhaps to avant-garde composers like Cornelius
Cardew, whose open-ended score for his 1967 work The Great Learning involved
algorithmic principles.) Yes, Villareal’s works involve daring physical constructions, largely
woven together out of immense pixelscapes of light emitting diodes (or LEDs.) But the same
can be said of a scoreboard at a baseball stadium. What makes Villareal’s work come to life
is the system of rules that govern the behavior of all those pixels. As he says, “The essence of
the piece is the code; colored light is the manifestation.”
But of course, the spectator only engages directly with the manifestation of those colored
lights, which means that the “essence” of the piece remains offscreen somewhere, a secret
logic hidden beneath the shimmering flocks and trails of the LEDs. As one watches those
pixels dance, the mind naturally tries to peer around the surface manifestation, and detect
the underlying patterns that govern their behavior. Those hidden rules are surprisingly
difficult to decipher, because what happens on the surface level is an example of what we
call emergence: complex, unpredictable behavior rising out of simple, predictable rules.
Emergent behavior is ubiquitous in the natural world: interconnected neurons firing create
the emergent property of consciousness; ant colonies collectively solve immensely
complicated engineering problems without any individual ant being smart enough to even
recognize the problem itself, much less solve it. Neighborhoods are often an emergent
property of urban settlement patterns: a higher-level identity that arises out of a million
uncoordinated actions. In recent years, emergence has migrated to the world of software,
with simple algorithms conjuring up higher-level forms that can seem miraculously
intelligent or lifelike—and indeed, a new generation of digital-age artists have begun to
explore the generative possibilities of onscreen creation. But by taking his programmed
microcosmos and putting it into physical environments, whether those environments are
museum walls or the sands of the Black Rock desert, Villareal adds a crucial dimension to
the work. The life on the screen is not merely contemplated in a private exchange between
viewer and software. Instead, it becomes part of a large public encounter. Seeing those
flocks and trails forming on the panels above you makes you see the flocks and trails of
human groups around you with new clarity.
Making art out of emergence, as Villareal does, necessarily involves a certain loss of control.
(Kevin Kelly’s influential early book on emergent behavior was called Out Of Control for a
reason.) It is a truism to say that creative works evolve in ways that their creators never
dreamed of, but when we use this language, we are largely talking about the effect of altered
interpretative environments. We perceive a Manet or a Rothko differently in the twenty-first
century, because our eyes have been trained by layers of cultural experience that separate
us from the work’s origin. But the brushstrokes themselves haven’t changed. But with
emergent art, the change is not merely interpretative, because the work is constantly
changing: new shapes and clusters and patterns rippling across the screen, shapes that
Villareal did not deliberately envision. What Villareal creates is not so much a work as it is a
space of possibility. Behind the scenes, the task of the artist-as-programmer is much more
formal than traditional aesthetic creation: he or she is writing software, after all, a linear
series of rules. But on the surface of the work, in the manifestation of all those glowing
LEDs, the exact opposite happens: the rules somehow conjure up a swarm.
I think this movement from algorithmic code to emergent swarms is the source of the rare
and infectious joy that Villareal’s work elicits. It is, in some strange digital sense, life-giving.
It takes a thousand soul-less electronic diodes and turns them into a thriving ecosystem of
light. The computers were supposed to turn us into automatons, punch card slaves of logic.
But we underestimated the power of emergence. We underestimated how the algorithm
could be harnessed in the service of play and of possibility. Like Burning Man itself,
Villareal’s screens are a reminder that the digital age may well turn out to be more open and
chaotic and ripe for new configurations than the assembly-line regimen of the industrial
age. There are ghosts in the machine, after all. We just need to figure out the right
algorithms to bring them to life.