UNIT-ON-CHAIN: Casey Reas and Douglas Dodds on Historical Narratives of Generative Art

Unit-on-Chain is a podcast series from Unit London offering a ground for critical discussions for artists and thought leaders from the Web3 ecosystem.

Season 1 of our podcast coincides with In Our Code, a highly-anticipated exhibition of generative and digital art in partnership with AOI, on display from 13 September – 16 October exclusively at Unit London.

For Historical Narratives of Generative Art, the second episode of the series, join Abigail Miller, Associate Director of Web3 at Unit London, in conversation with Casey Reas (artist and professor, UCLA) and Douglas Dodds (former Senior Curator, V&A), about pioneers in digital art, the history of art and technology, and the role of museums and universities in educating the public.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE on Spotify and Apple.

Defining Generative Art

Casey Reas: I don’t make a distinction with generative art of people using computers and people not using computers, as Douglas was saying there’s a tradition, particularly in the 1960s of painters and composers using generative systems for making work. And I think what was so exciting was the generation of people who had been trained as artists had existing practices and started to begin using software and computers because it helped them extend their ideas. It was like an organic and natural part of their work.

Douglas Dodds: Yes, indeed. Going back to 1960s again, one of the first uses of the term “generative” in an art context seems to have been by a German philosopher called Max Bense. Bense was basically the supervisor for Georg Nees as PhD and, Frieder Nake also went along to his lectures. It was Bense who developed this idea of what he called generative aesthetics, really is the precursor to what we now call generative art.

How were art and coding combined in education systems?

Casey Reas: The way that things happen in the university and education system in general often is that people get forked into art or into coding. And there’s very few opportunities for those things to be hybrid.

And so what’s what I find so exciting about what’s going on right now with generative art, is you have people coming from traditional art backgrounds. You have people coming from coding backgrounds and they meet in this space. Like what I’ve found over the decades is that. If people have that desire, they do eventually find their way there, but it usually involves a complete Art degree or Computer Science degree, and then time outside of the university to be able to bend towards the other. So it’s a hybrid space, that is basically it’s difficult to get to because there aren’t many ways that are institutionalised to do that.

Douglas Dodds: I was gonna go back to that question about education and access to computers and so on as well, because again, if you look back to what was going on in the late 60s early 1970s, in the UK at least, there were quite big changes in the education system. And the former colleges of technology were merging with former colleges of art.

So suddenly you had all these artists alongside all these people who knew about computing. Many universities in the UK were centres of art computing as a result of those mergers. So if you think about the Slade School of Art in London, where Harold Cohen went, or you think about Coventry University where several artists went. These people had access to computers for the first time. And, they came at it with a creative mind and the scientists, the computer programmers, if they were smart, were very glad to have them because it, you know, it was another reason for having big computers in universities.

So that was the history of it. But more recently again, you see those sort of overlaps and those collaborations and whole groups of people emerging to do research in particular areas. And a lot of scientists are desperate to have artists to visualise the work that they are doing, so you know, it benefits everyone to be able to do that.

The V&A Collection of Computer-Generated Art

Douglas Dodds: The V&A acquired its first computer-generated artworks as long ago as 1969. They came into the museum collection as a result of that Cybernetic Serendipity show that we talked about at the very beginning of this podcast.

Somebody in the museum had the wit to acquire a complete series of prints that were produced in connection with that show. But sadly for a very long time afterwards they didn’t acquire very much. One or two works by Vera Molnar and Manfred Mohr, for example, but not very much else until relatively modern times when I became involved.

I have a computing background as well as an art one, and I basically just went for it in the early 2000s. I decided that really a museum like the V&A ought to have this new medium represented in its collections, and it was easier to do it when very few other people were actively interested in it.

So, we were able to get works into the V&A collection and the artists were very glad for their works to be in the V&A collection at that time. It’s different now, you know, we couldn’t do the same thing now that we did a decade ago. Certainly for the likes of people, like Vera Molnar, Manfred Mohr and Casey, for that matter. Because so many more people now are interested in them and I’m thrilled by that. Of course, I’m very glad that it happened.

(Scroll to bottom for full transcript)

Casey Reas is an artist and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Working with various mediums including works on paper, software, prints, and installations, he balances his solo work in the studio with collaborations with architects and musicians alike. In his most iconic series to date called “Process,” the artist explores the linguistic process of translating English instructions into computer code. With Ben Fry, he initiated Processing in 2001; an open-source programming language and environment for the visual arts.

Douglas Dodds is the former Senior Curator in the Word and Image Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, where he was responsible for developing the Department’s digital art collections, which range from early computer art to recent born-digital works. He curated exhibitions including Chance and Control: Art in the Age of Computers, Barbara Nessim: An Artful Life, Digital Pioneers, and The Book and Beyond.

Abigail Miller: Welcome to Unit-on-Chain, today we have two legends, the artist Casey Reas, as well as Douglas Dodds, who is the former Senior Curator at the Victoria & Albert museum. Welcome both.

Douglas Dodds: Thank you, Thanks for having me.

A: One of the first topics I wanna jump straight into is the history of digital art. Both of you have discussed this extensively, and I wanted to pose our first question to you, Douglas, about the origin of digital art. People assume it started yesterday and you, I believe quoted a lot of people often say like 5 to 10 years ago, but we all know this isn’t the case? And can you give a baseline to you when digital art started, and when you saw it emerge?

D: You’re absolutely right. Most people tend to think that digital art started just a few years before they started it, but in practice, it goes back a very long time – at least 50 years or more. And really if you are looking at what we think of now as digital computers, then I would say the late 1950s or early 1960s is probably the point that I would start with, but you could arguably take it back much further than that.

A: So who are some of those examples of artists that created that foundation?

D: Some of the very earliest ones were working with what we call analog computers rather than modern digital computers. And I think of people like Herbert Franke who basically switched from analog computing to digital computing or perhaps people like Ben Laposky who was a photographer experimenting with early oscilloscopes. But the earliest people creating images with digital computers were, for example, Georg Nees in Germany, or Frieder Nake in Germany, or perhaps Michael Noll, working for Bell labs in the US. And these are all starting to happen in the early 1960s.

A: And Casey. I wanted to bring you into this discussion. I think it was in 2015, our team was just listening to your speech at the Grey Area Festival. I think it was titled “History of the Future, Art and Technology from 1965 to Yesterday”. And you discussed the relatively short history of programming, and you quoted I think it was Eric Raymond about the real programmer versus The amateur versus the hybrid programmer. And I was just wondering if you could briefly discuss the history of digital art alongside programming? And how did it look of these artists acting in the 1960s alongside what was going on in the tech side?

Casey Reas: Sure. We’ll do a little bit of time travelling. Like originally computers were people. They were people who calculated. And as Douglas said they were analog computers before they were the digital computers that we have now. And so the origin of programming, digital computers very much grew out of science and technology development.

And what happened over time over decades is that amateurs started to get into programmes when microcomputers started to be distributed. They entered the home in the 1970s, and children began to learn computers. There were specific programming languages, one called Basic developed in the 1960s to teach liberal arts students, how to think about software, to think about code.

And so code evolved from being something that was very professionally focused towards research, towards industry, to something that was really a way of thinking. That was a way of, moved into forms of expression. I think of coding very much like, writing, like we learn to write, we learn to express ourselves through language in the same way we learn how to write technically and coding is the same. There’s this new way of coding, that’s about thinking about the visual arts grew out of that. And I think this radical idea of the amateur that grew out of the home computing movement was really much the source for that.

A: Super interesting. So back to you Douglas with this, those leading figures of the 1960s and 70s, did they, would you say, were really programmers and technologists first or did they move into this hybrid that Casey’s talking about back then? Was that when the shift was, or was that later on?

D: Well, the shift probably took place at the end of the 1960s, but as I was saying, really the, very earliest people who were creating the images were scientists, mathematicians, and prototype programmers. Georg Nees was, Frieder Nake was, Michael Noll was, and really, it was only slightly later that people who had a trained artistic background started to experiment with computing too.

You know, there were many artists in the 60s who were used to working in a systematic way, using a set of rules to create the artwork. And for some of them, at least it was the natural next step to progress, to using a computer system, instead of just some sort of logic of their own to create the artwork.

And perhaps some of the earliest examples of that was created by Vera Molnar in Paris. And, Manfred Mohr, who was also in Paris at much of the same time 1968, 1969. So they suddenly had access to big computer systems in universities or meteorological institutes, the places that could afford to help them.

And they managed to wangle their way in and actually start to use them to create artistic works.

A: Super interesting. 

C: Computers at that time were so inaccessible. There’s this wonderful video that Douglas showed in an exhibit he curated a number of years ago of made in the 1960s by German television of Frieder Nake going through the process of making some of its drawings, you know, and it starts by making diagrams on paper, and then, punch cards go into a machine and a tape comes out of that machine. The tape goes into like a two ton drawing machine. The drawing machine produces the drawing. But until that moment, when drawing machine produced the drawing, Frieder didn’t know exactly what he was going to see. And the only reason he had access to those machines was the institutional affiliation. 

And so, people like Vera Molnar and Manfred Mohr, they really needed to seek out a way to use these machines. It was very prohibitive. And so what happened over time is the machines became more accessible and a few dozen artists exploring them became hundreds, became thousands. And so now we have, you know, hundreds of thousands of artists who have access and are exploring this space.

D: Yeah. That’s very much the difference, isn’t it? 

A: Yeah. And I think we often think of generative art today as just using computers, but can both of you speak to like the different machines that have been used in generative art and kind of the relationship to the analog? Casey, you talked about laser machines. We were just listening to a talk about laser machines you gave as well as plotters and how artists back then used those too.

C: Yeah, like in the day before we had screens, like we do now, the way that artists would create their images was through these plotting machines, which were basically these large mechanical machines that were able to move a pin on an X axis and a Y axis and move it down and then pick it up and move it from somewhere else from there.

That was the way that the work was made. And then over time, those plotting machines became more accessible. But then people moved into displaying work on screen and producing work for CD ROM using programs like HyperCard, which was on the early MacIntosh. And then the World Wide Web hits, becomes international and surges in the mid 1990s.

And it’s just unfolding and unfolding of different mediums. One thing I just wanna say quickly  is that I don’t make a distinction with generative art of people using computers and people not using computers, as Douglas was saying there’s a tradition, particularly in the 1960s of painters and composers using generative systems for making work. And I think what was so exciting was the generation of people who had been trained as artists had existing practices and started to begin using software and computers because it helped them extend their ideas. It was like an organic and natural part of their work.

D: Yes, indeed. Going back to 1960s again one of the first uses of the term “generative” in an art context seems to have been by a German philosopher called Max Bense and Bense was basically the supervisor for Georg Nees as PhD and, Frieder Nake also went along to his lectures and it was Bense who developed this idea of what he called generative aesthetics, really is the precursor to what we now call generative art.

The whole thing you can also trace back all the way to the 1960s. Frieder Nake, for example he was the first person to programme a drawing machine to work with a particular computer. He was also the first person to produce the artworks that came out of that system, came off the drawing machine. That was a big moment. For me, it’s a bit like the switch from printed manuscripts to early printed books. It’s a whole new technology that’s coming in that replaces the old technology. But in the early days, there’s quite a crossover and people are using some of the same sort of concepts, the same techniques, because they’re familiar with them and they try and make them work in the new system instead. Certainly there was a lot of that in the 1960s, people producing things that were produced by the computer, but we’re not that different to the things that were being produced before. 

A: So, the 1960s has been a decade of topic, it seems like. I know there’s been quite a few famous exhibitions that happened during this era. I think in 1968 was when Cybernetic Serendipity happened. And Douglas, can you talk about some of the exhibitions that have made these movements?

D: Well, as you say, Cybernetic Serendipity was one of the first major exhibitions that was devoted to the computer and art making. It wasn’t just about computers, but it certainly was one of the first occasions when they were shown and when the work of the artists was shown. So that had a big impact on people at the time. It has to be said that the exhibition itself had quite mixed reviews. You know, some people were raving about it and went off and became computer artists, digital artists, as we now call them. Other people thought it was basically just pile of trash really. And they couldn’t see any art in it at all.

So, you know, people were starting from different points, but certainly at that period in the late 1960s, there were several exhibitions that happened. So there were several exhibitions including Cybernetics Serendipity 1968 in particular was quite an important year.

There was a show and a seminar in Zagreb called Tendencies 4, there was an exhibition at the Museum of Modern art in New York called The Machine. And there’s a spinoff from that. A group called Experiments in Art and Technology went on to produce another show called Some More Beginnings, which was an art and science collaboration.

And then a year or so later, there was another one came along called Software, also in New York. So, you know, it was very much a sort of zeitgeist around, at that time. And all the exhibitions were probably a bit mixed in their content, but it was the beginning of a new era in art as well as in everything else. So it was a quite important time.

A: I want to shift the conversation to institutions and how it’s helped or just your general opinions about are institutions like museums –  as well as – Casey graduating from the MIT Media Lab – what was that like and how do you think educational institutions also play a role in these movements?

C: It’s really interesting. I think any answer to that question is wrapped up in a lot of the other conversations that we’ve been having and probably will continue to have for the next short amount of time. I think in general, if we talk about those shows that Douglas just mentioned, Software was more underdeveloped at that time, I would say than machines, than objects, than electronics.

So a lot of that early work was sculptural. It was integrating electronics and sensors into mechanical systems and the software was a little bit less developed at that time. And I think what we’re seeing right now of course, is this huge surge in the software at the moment in a unique way. I think this is the first time that there’s been such a strong focus on the generative visual software. 

But the long rocky road in the history of getting to where we are right now has included a lot of institutional support. And I think particularly in Europe, there’s been a lot of government funding in establishing different festivals that have really been the seeds and the origins for promoting young artists and for the community.

We talked about Herbert Franke a little bit earlier as one of the co-founders of the Ars Electronica Center in Austria has been a major supporter of the broadest range of media art and electronic art over the years. And yes, so if we talk about academics and universities, the MIT Media Lab is the sort of origin point for me.

There I was working in a group called the Aesthetics and Computation Group that was founded by John Maeda who was an artist slash computer scientist that once again, this idea of the hybrid, and that was a very small group, there were only six of us graduate students. And we all came from different areas architecture, maths, design, art, and the idea was to explicitly stated to invent a new culture, a way of making a hybrid between the ideas around Computer Science, that way of thinking and an expanded visual art space. And so we basically sat in a room and made things and did collaborations and worked individually, it was a really productive time.

A: Is that where you met Ben Fry? Is that correct?

C: It’s true, yeah. That’s where I met Ben Fry and then John Maeda had us both working on a project that he was developing called Designed by Numbers, which was a very explicitly minimal coding language for visual designers and artists. It was 100 by 100 pixels, it was grayscale. It was meant to be minimal so that it was approachable.

The different ways of programming, you would sort of set the paper colour and then you would draw a line. And that was 100% the origin for the Processing project. Ben and I were working on that, basically under John, we saw first-hand, doing a workshop at RISD, how you could sit a group of art students in a room. Students who’d never written code before and they could start making things, you know, within an hour or two and get really engaged with it. And so Processing grew out of Design by Numbers basically by removing some of those limitations removing the low resolution and the grayscale only. And, also just it’s important to say that all of the work and Processing also goes back to other legacy at, uh, the MIT Media Lab to Muriel Cooper’s group, which was called the Visual Language Workshop, which was prior to the Aesthetics and Computation Group.

And so basically there was a group of hybrids, a group of coder-artists, coder-filmmakers, who had been developing infrastructure for years. And the whole point of the Processing project was to get that infrastructure out of that institution and into the world at scale, so that other people could begin to experiment and explore coding as a visual art form.

A: And for the audience just real quickly, can you give a statement of what Processing actually is, if they’re not familiar with it?

C: Yes, of course. It’s a little bit hard to pin down because it’s many things fused together. So it’s a coding environment, it’s sort of a way of writing code, of writing the text then it runs. But it’s also a language adaptation as well on top of an existing language called Java.

So it looks and feels different, but I think maybe, to take a step back, the whole point of Processing is to write code to make images. And so the whole history of programming education is using code to work with text or using code to work with maths. And so the idea that code is a general way of thinking.

Let’s take what’s so interesting and powerful and extraordinary about this way of thinking about making things and apply it to making images as the first and foremost way. I think for context, what you would often do is you’d have many Computer Science classes and then you would be able to get into graphics.

And the idea of Processing is that you get right into what’s exciting and interesting about coding, but you do it the entire time through making images and through animation and through interactivity.

A: Yeah, super interesting. And to me, it’s almost as the artist is operating in different thought space when creating the artwork today and coding, and to me, there’s a shift in how an artist might approach a subject and there’s this continuity from the history, but Douglas, I wanted your opinion on the use of coding in art today. And if you’ve seen any major changes even from like the 80s, 90s and then to today with coding in the artwork?

C: I’m so sorry, before we do that, could I just follow up on a thought from the last thing?

I’m sorry, Douglas. The way that things happen in the university and education system in general often is that people get forked into art or into coding. And there’s very few opportunities for those things to be hybrid.

And so what’s what I find so exciting about what’s going on right now with generative art, is you have people coming from traditional art backgrounds. You have people coming from coding backgrounds and they meet in this space. And like what I’ve found over the decades is that. If people have that desire, they do eventually find their way there, but it usually involves a complete Art degree or Computer Science degree, and then time outside of the university to be able to bend towards the other. So it’s a hybrid space, that is basically it’s difficult to get to because there aren’t many ways that are institutionalised to do that.

D: I was gonna go back to that question about education and access to computers and so on as well, because again, if you look back to what was going on in the late 60s early 1970s, in the UK at least, there were quite big changes in the education system. And the former colleges of technology were merging with former colleges of art.

So suddenly you had all these artists alongside all these people who knew about computing. And many universities in the UK were centres of art computing as a result of those mergers. So if you think about the Slade School of Art in London, where Harold Cohen went, or you think about Coventry University where several artists went. These people had access to computers for the first time. And, they came at it with a creative mind and the scientists, the computer programmers, if they were smart, were very glad to have them because it, you know, it was another reason for having big computers in universities.

So that was the history of it. But more recently again, you see those sort of overlaps and those collaborations and whole groups of people emerging to do research in particular areas. And a lot of scientists are desperate to have artists to visualise the work that they are doing, so you know, it benefits everyone to be able to do that.

A: Yeah, definitely. How do you think the role recently, I would say in the last five years of the NFT and the blockchain has either forked people or brought people together in this space?

C: It’s definitely brought people together in an unprecedented way from all different corners of the internet. You know, NFTs have folded in people working with focusing on like 3d rendering and animation, people working with illustration, with photography, with poetry with generative art – what we’re talking about more, directly today. 

And I think from my experience, those were all separated communities, and now everything’s flowing together, I think people are crossing with other people that they hadn’t met before. It’s the most dynamic time that I’ve ever been around on the internet for software oriented, digitally oriented art.

A: Douglas, in one of your talks you have mentioned digital art as a whole or computer art has traditionally been snubbed by the art world. Why do you think this? And do you think with NFTs, it will continue that pattern or is that kind of revolutionising how people are viewing them?

D: Well, it’s true that in the 1960s, the few artists that were involved with computers really struggled to get their work accepted, and they also struggled of course to survive, to make money from it. Some of them played around with different models for how to, to sell their artworks. It’s the same story today really. Do you produce one thing and sell it for a lot of money? If you can sell it at all, or do you produce many things like prints and sell them for a smaller amount, but still end up with a large amount of income. 

In the early days they were lucky if they had any income at all. So with the emergence of the NFT space now it throws up whole new possibilities, not just for younger artists who are natives of this space, but also the older generation of artists who are in some cases, at least starting to migrate their work from the previous milieu, whatever that was, into an NFT format instead. So you’re actually seeing people reselling things that they’ve produced before and possibly even sold before in a different medium.

The irony of it for me is that sometimes the NFTs are actually going for more than the original artworks, you know, the hard copy or even the file, the software might have produced some years ago. It’s a very dynamic area, as Casey’s said, it’s a very interesting space to be in, but it’s hard to know quite how its all going to settle out. 

A: Yeah, definitely. And Casey, for you, what has been your personal experience with this then as an artist who’s been creating before blockchain really got integrated as a mechanism to sell things?

C: That’s a really thorny one to try and answer in a direct way. 

It’s been two years of rollercoaster, emotional, intellectual engagement. I think I can maybe give one anecdote that for me is quite interesting. I developed a piece of software called the Path software, which is basically drawing software in the early 2000s. At the time that was produced, it wouldn’t run in real time. What I was really excited about was the animation, was the way that it morphed and moved and changed overtime. And so at that moment, it became a series of print editions back in 2002. And then I revived that, worked on that again maybe eight years ago and presented it as a full wall uh, projection inside of a gallery.

For me, that was a really wonderful way of dematerialising the work, having it really be focused on the system itself and the quality of the motion and the gestures of the lines, which is what that work was primarily about – these sort of systems based drawings. But then recently I re-explored that again, as an NFT.

I think for me, the difference is instead of having one version of the software that contained everything now I had 1000 different versions of the software. And each one had its own signature or its own sort of distinct thumbprint or mark. For me, it felt really good to have this longer form version that more people could have a relationship with, an association with, rather than existing as an installation in a gallery and one point in space for like a month of time. So that’s growth that I’m really excited about.

A: Super interesting. And when creating a long form generative artwork, do you think it’s a different space you occupy, almost as an artist in creating? Because you don’t think about a singular piece almost. Again think about 1000 to unlimited possibilities. Is that different for you?

C: For me, the only reason I got into writing code making generative art in the first place was the multitudes. It was the idea, I think, more important than the image. It was the idea that what I’m seeing right now has never been seen before and is never going to be seen again. So that’s always how I’ve thought about the work.

In the past, when I would make a singular piece of code, then it would be more of a durational experience. And you wouldn’t be able to see as much of the space of exploration at one time. So I think in a way it’s made it more defined and focused and pointed, what the work has always been about. Maybe it was a bit obscured before, but for me there’s been no shift. That’s always been the nature of the ideas around the work. 

A: Very cool. I wanna shift the conversation to the exhibition here at Unit London titled In Our Code. And just to give the audience a little background information Douglas Dodds here has written a beautiful foreword that will be published online as well as in catalogue format which you can pick up at the gallery.

Casey Reas is exhibiting in the show, which is extremely exciting. And the show here at Unit London has brought together 11 generative artists. We’re specifically discussing the relationship with input/output and framing generative art not as a movement, but as a medium as well.

And giving the art audience that doesn’t know the technicalities of code, a different way to view the artwork. And I wanted to ask both of you, in today’s landscape, how important it is to have person exhibitions physical exhibitions with digital artwork, because I think a very big trend, especially during COVID when everyone was stuck at home, was viewing all this work on the computer and also what you guys look for in exhibition and where you see that moving to in the future.

D: For me, I still appreciate the physical element in artwork. So the opportunity to be able to see the artworks in a physical form, in a physical space is actually really important and brings something to it that you basically don’t always get online. Particularly if the artwork is derived from something physical, or is meant to be shown on something physical. Even that physical thing is just a monitor or the way the artwork reacts to a particular space. So that’s a very important aspect of it. But I think the other thing that’s really crucial is the curation that goes into it, that first of all, the selection, but also the way in which the artworks are displayed. So, exhibitions like this one are absolutely vital for that reason alone.

A: Casey, I would love for you to speak about your work in the show as well.

C: Yeah, certainly. I also just wanted to agree with what Douglas just said. That was well put another piece of it for me is experiencing the work with other people, being with people while you’re looking at work, talking about it, experiencing it together. That’s something that has been lost and I’m so excited that we’re beginning to experience together.

So, sorry, Abigail, you wanted me to speak briefly about the work in the show.

A: Yeah, because I think one of the beautiful things about this show is with generative art, there are so many different niches of generative art. For example, like Sophia Crespo and Helena Sarin, they operate within GAN, Artificial Intelligence, which really differs from your artistic practice.

I’d love for you to give an opportunity to the audience. That’s listening to talk about the story of your work. Since it also relates to the kind of conversation we’ve had today about the history of generative art, since it plays with the past project of yours.

C: Wonderful. So the reason I started writing code in the beginning was because I wanted a new way of drawing. I had been drawing that was really my primary medium, my way into the visual arts. And I had ideas for kinds of drawings that I wanted to make, which I knew weren’t possible to realise in any other way.

And so when I started art school, I had two years without a computer just my generation. And so I spent a lot of time drafting, working with pen and working with ink and producing work that way. For me, the work in the show is an extension of that drafting. It’s the code that I wrote to draft and explore drawing in a way that I couldn’t in any other way.

It’s based on these forms of geometry, a circle with different behaviours, the way the circle moves and when it overlaps with another circle, the way it behaves and that’s the base layer beneath everything. And then the drawing forms on top of that diagram layer. The works in this show are not real time works, but I think of it as synthetic photography. It’s looking at the drawings and then selecting one. I run it with many different seeds and see how it grows in different ways. 

There’s a strong, organic feeling and quality to this work. It’s very much about software environments in an abstracted microworld way. Then I go down different trees and make selections from there. And so I think of this work as photography, but as photography from a complete world that I’ve imagined and created through thinking about code and drawing.

A: Thank you. And you’ll be having three pieces in the show as well. And we’re excited for the input that you’ve chosen at least the object to represent that inspiration. It does pay tribute to that history of drawing in your oeuvre. And we’re coming up to the very end and I was just wondering if you, either of you had any closing comments before we do a little fun activity we do with every guest.

D: If I could just put in a little plug for the V&A collection. As you know, before I finally left the museum, I built up the V&A’s digital collection over many years, but one of the works that we were very pleased to acquire was one of Casey’s which is still on display actually in the museums. So if anyone is passing, you should go and have a look at it near the, one of the exhibition halls near one of the shops has been running almost continuously for probably six or seven years now, I guess. It’s Processing 18, which is in the same series as the works that, or some of the works, at least that Casey is exhibiting in the current show.

A: Oh, wonderful. We’ll make sure all of our guests here at Unit London are aware and we make sure that they know to go visit the V&A.

C: Oh, since Douglas might not say it, but the V&A collection that he put together is just extraordinary. It is, I think, the strongest collection of the origin of this work in the world and just to encourage people to go.

A: Yeah. Before we get to the ending, Douglas, do you wanna expand on that? Cause I think that’s an amazing point that we’ve highlighted in your bio, but if you just wanna quickly talk about the V&A as an institution and the collection. 

D: Yeah, of course. Well, as I’ve often said, in other talks in fact, the V&A acquired its first computer-generated artworks as long ago as 1969. They came into the museum collection as a result of that Cybernetic Serendipity show that we talked about at the very beginning of this podcast.

Somebody in the museum had the wit to acquire a complete series of prints that were produced in connection with that show. But sadly for a very long time afterwards they didn’t acquire very much. One or two works by Vera Molnar and Manfred Mohr, for example, but not very much else until relatively modern times when I became involved.

I kind of got a computing background as well as an art one. And I basically just went for it. In the early 2000s and decided that really a museum like the V&A ought to have this new medium represented in its collections. And it was easier to do it when very few other people were actively interested in it.

So, we were able to get works into the V&A collection and the artists were very glad for their works to be in the V&A collection at that time. It’s different now, you know, we couldn’t do the same thing now that we did a decade ago. Certainly for the likes of people, like Vera Molnar, Manfred Mohr and Casey, for that matter. Because so many more people now are interested in them and I’m thrilled by that. Of course, I’m very glad that it happened.

A: Yeah, it’ll be very interesting in the coming years to see collection-building as well as I think the collector base has been very expansive with NFTs specifically in generative art of who’s been able to collect. So it’ll be very interesting how those make their way back into those institutional collections at some point.

So that’s extremely exciting and we’ll make sure the whole audience knows to visit the V&A to specifically see Casey’s work since it has that direct relation to Processing.

So what we do at the end of all of our podcasts is we ask a set of four questions to all of our guests. They are the exact same questions. And we just ask for you to answer them in one word or one sentence, and they are purposely vague and ambiguous. So interpret as you may. Douglas, if you wanna be the first one to respond and then we can go to Casey and we kind of do it in that manner.

Our first question is what does In Our Code mean to you?

D: Generative. Generative art. It’s where it’s at now. 

C: For me, that means in our minds, in our ways of thinking, just sharing ideas and ways of making meanings and structures with each other.

A: Okay. Our second question is also quite vague. What inspires you in this space?

D: I love to see the creativity that’s going on in this space now. You know, I’ve seen some of it in the past and it’s just astonishing to see how it’s grown, how many more people are now engaging with it through NFTs, through online, through all sorts of ways that weren’t imagined 50 years ago.

C: Similar for me. It’s seeing a unique voice emerge as we’ve discussed. People have been working in this area for over 60 years. So when you see something that you’ve never seen before and you see a body of work by somebody that is just really charged and unique, that’s the biggest thrill.

A: Definitely. And our third question, what is one artist you’d love to own an NFT by?

D: Actually she’s not in your show, but would have to be Vera Molnar for me. Hopefully she’ll have NFTs to share, because she’s just such an important figure in the history of digital art and deserves to be recognised as so.

A: Truly. 

C: I actually don’t think I can answer that one.

A: It’s been one of the toughest questions actually. and people have been very creative with it as well as we leave, like the word artist we don’t say alive or dead. So there’s been quite some unique answers to it. 

D: If I’m allowed to have one on behalf of Casey, then I would say Casey Reas.

A: Lovely. And so our final question is what technological advancements do you think the space needs?

D: There’s a whole issue, I think, around preservation and access over time, which I’m not sure has been totally resolved yet. You know, it’s one thing to own an NFT. It’s one thing to have a certificate and possibly have a file of some sort, but how you keep it accessible, I think is gonna be the crucial thing for me.

C: I agree with that answer completely. To go down a different path. I think it’s display screens. I mean, I’ve seen them shift so much over the 30 years that I’ve been active in the space, but my dream is just to have this roll of screen, like a textile and you basically just unroll it. You cut it to any arbitrary dimension that you want. It’s sort of the thickness of a piece of wool and it just displays what you need to display. I think that display technology moving from big box machines to LED walls to the flat panels we have now, it’s shifted in a way that’s made this more accessible. It’s made it emerge, but it’s so unsatisfactory.

A: Yeah. All great answers. And so thank you again, both Douglas and Casey for joining us. Today on this episode of Unit-on-Chain. And again, just for the audience, you can view, Casey’s work, In Our Code and the exhibition here at Unit London that runs from September 13th to October 16th, as well as read Douglas Dodds’s writing online and pick up a physical brochure here too.

And again, thank you.