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lots of race-conditions occurring, which is a layer of temporal complexity. So the whole thing is
'generative', but with a _very_ complex set of rules, so complex in fact that the brain gives up and
rationalises it as being 'random', or if you get a nice-looking glitch or bit of data visualisation, as a
'happy accident'. So the point is, at the risk of contradicting myself, this type of computer-generated
glitch is generative, but I'm not confident that that's what people mean when they use that word. Just to
over-emphasise the point, to describe the generative rules for a computer 'glitch', you need all the rules
for the whole computer, so you start by describing the rules for the execution pipeline, the instruction
set, the registers, the arithmetic units, etc etc. That isn't generative art! Or am I splitting hairs, Jose?
It's a good question, and yes, there is tension. Being a pragmatic sort, I know that by engineering
situations in which random, or rather, deterministic-yet-very-complicated things are encouraged to
happen, I can gather rich visual material containing levels of complexity, beauty and interest that I
could never conceive of making 'by hand', ie. without the assistance of these tools. However, I find
myself getting increasingly frustrated these days with the images never being quite right, because I
haven't got enough control. The only solution I can think of so far is to make lots of experiments, and
hope a few good ones emerge. It's not very efficient,and I don't like the idea of throwing mud at the
wall and hoping a few nice splodges appear - it's not very 'Art' is it?
So, with the first set of glitches I did, I used the computer to make them, but I selected the ones I
preferred, cropped them exactly how I wanted, and changed the colours. These three processes might
seem trivial, but it's important to make the point that a human mind was involved! I'm reminded of
Ken Knowlton's views on computer _assisted_ art, which, to roughly paraphrase are: use the computer
for what it's good at, but don't let it make all the artistic decisions. In any case, the triviality of these
three processes was their strength, because they didn't allow the glitches to get altered very much.
These were the rules I operated within, and they were the _only_ processes allowed, so we come back
to the idea of pushing against rules, which I'd like to give an example of, but first I need to describe
the mathematical idea of 'injective map'. (Bear with me!) When changing the colours in a glitch, I was
actually changing the colour palette, so if I changed red to blue, then _all_ the red areas changed to
blue in the whole image. So, I mapped the colour palette to a different palette, and it had to be an
injective mapping, which means that two different colours in the original palette couldn't be mapped to
the _same_ colour in the new palette. What this means intuitively is that edges don't get lost in the new
colour scheme, so the image remains essentially the same. However, despite this self-imposed rule, I
could cheat! If I felt, artistically, that a glitch was too complicated-looking and I wanted to erase some
of the edges, I could make a new palette which included colours which looked the same, but were not
quite the same. OK, big deal. But then I found a more interesting solution, which was to create palettes
which included pairs of colours of equal perceived value. These are the sorts of colours, which, when
placed next to each other, appear to swim in-and-out, and your brain can't quite tell where the
boundary is. So, again, the effect of this was to simplify glitch images, but staying within the rules.
Glitches usually have a high ratio of edge to area, so this technique worked well enough for them.
I've digressed, so, returning to your question briefly in the context of my other experiments, there's
always an element of unpredictability in the process. The photograms are a nice example, because you
never exactly know how they will turn out until they've been developed. Even if we take the most lo-fi
ones, the cityscape photograms where I made the 'buildings' from strips of paper which I moved
inbetween multiple exposures, there's a huge element of unpredictability because everything's invisible
whilst you're making it. Currently my most fruitful area appears to be using the computer screen to
make photographic exposures, because there I've got lots of control over the glitchy images I like,
allied to the analogue unpredictability of the photographic process, which produces effects that I could
never have imagined. I embrace it all, but chuck out the rubbish and keep the better stuff. But it's fair
to say, the work I produce is very hit-and-miss, but I end up putting most of it on my website anyway
because I'm interested in the feedback, which brings us back to the human psychology side.
[J]