SciArt Magazine - All Issues December 2015 | Page 7

known to the visual arts and illustration communities
worldwide. Noll argued in a 1967 essay for the magazine
IEEE Spectrum that the computer was a new medium
for creative works. The practical applications were also
enormous—the influence of the 3N group would extend
beyond art and also change the way architects and visual
production designers for different industries would approach the use and implementation of patterns in their
own works.
Much of this work would evolve into the fractal art
movement—a subset of algorithmic art in which mathematical functions help inform what a particular fractal
pattern will look like when it is finally visualized. Practically all fractal art is computer–generated, and nearly all
of it is also digital. Some of the most famous examples of
fractal art are those works based on the ‘Julia set’, a complimentary set defined from a mathematical function.
But fractal art wasn’t the only thing born from the
work of the 3N group. Roman Verostko, an American
artist currently based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is thought to be one of
the most important influencers
of algorithmic art. In 1970,
he was introduced to
‘generated’ possibilities
from coded procedures
run by computers.
“With this technology” he writes
on his site, “we could create
instructions for generating visual
forms; we could now compose the ‘score’ for
drawing!”
Verostko would soon progress quickly from writing
simple algorithms capable of drawing elementary designs to ones of much greater complexity. “These procedures,” he continues to write, “have brought me to a new
frontier of visual forms, forms we could never envision
without algorithmic recursion driven with computing
power. These art forms do not describe or refer to other
realities—rather they have a visual life of their own.”
Verostko told me over the phone that his early experience in theological study profoundly shaped much of
how he approached his artistic life later on, and that “in
some ways, I carried the same ideas into my algorithms.”
Ultimately, for Verostko, algorithmic art brings together
“spontaneity and chance and emotion, in conjunction
with the same picture field with disciplined, constructed, well–organized structure.” The artwork is an expression of “tensions that are opposing each other, and at
the same time they’re stabilized.”
An incredible example of Verostko’s work is his 1998
installation The Manchester Illuminated Universal Turing

Machine, an homage to the famed British computer scientist Alan Turing, whose many groundbreaking works
include the abstract Turing machine, capable of simulating any algorithm’s logic. This, in turn, spawned universal Turing machine (UTM), which simulates an arbitrary
Turing machine by simulating the description of a Turing
machines as well as its own input. “The idea tickled my
brain,” Verostko writes of the installation’s genesis. “The
binary text for a UTM struck me with profound wonderment. I felt privileged to have been living during the
time this idea evolved into machines that were changing
world culture.”
The result is a set of artworks in which algorithmically
generated forms are presented side–by–side with their
corresponding UTM algorithms (as expanded binary
texts).
Verostko and fellow artist Jean Pierre Hebert would
later, in 2011, coin the term ‘algorist’ to describe the
small but growing community of artists who take
part in algorithmic art. Hebert would actually
write an algorithm that expressed their ‘algorist
manifesto’.
These kinds of ideas aren’t just
unique to Verostko. Hobbs, the
Austin artist, says his
interest in algorithmic art is an extension of his interest
in patterns and randomness.
“Nature is jam–packed with the
collision of these two forces, and given
that computers are particularly good at working
with both patterns and randomness, I think they’re
the perfect medium for exploring the intersection
of the two,” he says.
You can see this in his artwork entitled Community 5.
It envisions a modified version of Tim Conway’s Game of
Life simulation, with multiple species instead of