Uncomputer

Unit London and GrailersDAO, a renowned community of generative art collectors and artists, join forces to present Uncomputer.

Inspired by Alexander Galloway’s eponymous essay and the pioneering work of Marcel Duchamp, Uncomputer celebrates the creative potential of error, indeterminacy and randomness, and demonstrates the centrality of these qualities to our understanding of code-based systems, both within and beyond the art world.

Situated at the boundary between technology and philosophy, Alexander Galloway’s essay, Uncomputer offers a radical reinterpretation of the traditional computing paradigm.

Contrary to historical understandings of computers as rational and predictable entities, operating according to discrete symbols and digital binaries, the ‘uncomputer’ reveals – and embraces – the indeterminate and unpredictable qualities that exist within the very structures of computation. This thinking emerged in the mid-20th century, and has since become integral to our understanding of new technologies. As professor Luciana Parisi asserts, “error, indeterminacy, randomness, and unknowns in general have become part of technoscientific knowledge and the reasoning of machines.”

According to Galloway, these ‘uncountable’ digital elements lie at the very heart of modern computing and offer a holistic understanding of our information age that is more closely aligned with the multifaceted nuances of human experience.

In the 20th century, error, indeterminacy and randomness became radical avant-garde gestures within the contemporary art landscape. Epitomised by the work of Marcel Duchamp, these qualities were celebrated as novel ways to disrupt prevailing hierarchies, in both art and life. In 3 Standard Stoppages, Duchamp embraced chance operations as a means to question standard modes of measurement and break away from logical reality. In a similar vein to the ‘uncomputer’, it opened the door to new ways of thinking about the structures that govern our lives. 

Jan Robert Leegte’s Ghost is a meditation on the random number generation process inherent, yet hidden, within generative systems. As a string of numbers change faster than the viewer can contemplate, we are reminded of the entropy and unpredictable emergence that breathes life into generative art. Like Leegte, Kim Asendorf balances the chaos of unexpected, emergent complexity with clear structure. Fixed Pixel is a fully on-chain, real time animation that explores – and transforms – the ‘random walk algorithm’, a mathematical process whereby an object moves steps alternately in random directions. Here, rather than the object moving, the canvas is shifted below it so that the painting pixel always remains at the centre of the screen, providing consistency within a sea of instability.

We are honoured to exhibit Mathcastles’ zero-knowledge artwork, crafted using a system for drawings that can never be known, but proved to exist through verifiable claims about their abstract features. Built with zk-SNARKs – cryptographic systems that allow statements about secret information to be proved and verified – this artwork gives form to the unknowable, and collides knowledge asymmetry with traditions of mark-making and abstraction in painting.

Please note that this Mathcastles piece is not for sale. We are thrilled to present the studio’s work and consider what it could mean for the Computing Arts.

Rudxane’s Hextory is a rumination on the hexadecimal value system through a fully on-chain, dynamic series of works. The activity of five tokens, based on a bespoke contract, directly influences the visual outputs of the tokens themselves. Each transaction hash is a source of randomness, used to translate the hexadecimal into a binary value, assigning a 4 pixel variation to each token. Through five specific colour palettes – determined by the on-chain history and ownership of each respective token – Hextory provides a vivid visual interpretation of the language of hexadecimal values. 

Yazid and Stevie P both present real-time interactive artworks. When activated, Yazid’s Abstraction takes a snapshot of the viewer’s face. The unique expression it captures becomes its source of chance and randomness. By interpolating affect, emotion and experience into the mainframe – qualities thought to be ‘uncomputable’ – Yazid exposes the imperfections inherent in the system’s underlying logic. Stevie P’s Have You Tried Turning It Off and On Again? is a complex, on-chain animated SVG that incorporates two smart contract functions: turnOff and turnOn. While turnOff will destroy the art, turnOn will generate a new output. Spontaneity and surprise lie at the core of this work as a different layout and animation speed is offered with every reload.

Mia Forrest, Roope Rainisto and Entangled Others all explore the symbiosis of time, nature and technology.

Spring is the first of four mints within Mia Forrest’s season series. For this work, Forrest measured the fluctuations in electrical conductivity coming from a series of plants, including delphinium, ranunculus, anemones, iris, and wisteria. This biodata was then materialised as pigment on paper through aerodynamic vibrations, demonstrating how technologies can enhance our experience, understanding and appreciation of the most intricate processes found in nature. Spring is accompanied by a unique 1/1 physical print: Dry Pigment on Hahnemühle Etching 350gsm Paper, 80cm x 120cm. The digital NFT takes the form of a unique high resolution photograph. Roope Rainisto’s vast digital landscape, Pixelforest exists at the intersection of the real and the imagined. Combining the visual language of traditional photography with the dreamlike potential of AI, his uncanny landscape is at once familiar and futuristic. Through this work, Rainisto invites us to reconsider, not only our perception of reality, but our place in a world increasingly governed by new technologies. Entangled Others’ self-contained 003, images from a dataset are randomly spliced into a main, target image and then decoding techniques are used to render the image recogniseable to the human eye. Here, generative code and neural networks are used to echo the evolutionary, mutating process of both natural and artificial life.

In Metaverse, Thomas Lin Pedersen explores the notion of deterministic infinite evolution through a durational piece that – for as long as the computer is operating – will continue to evolve. As the name suggests, Metaverse is a commentary on the community culture present in Web3, how connections are made and broken up, and the fluid nature of the groups and cultures that arises. The artwork is global in nature and reveals itself in the same way regardless of an individual’s location, reflecting the nature of virtual communities that change, survive, and thrive over time.

Jorge Ledezema’s Attraction Paradox destabilises traditional understandings of computational determinism. As intricate algorithmic patterns create ever-changing forms before the viewer’s eye, the messiness and unpredictability of human emotion is related to the mechanics of the machine.

In A Captive Parrot, Iskra Velitchkova seeks to reveal the hidden features of coded systems. Through this abstract work she questions how code can alter, and indeed enhance, our perspective of objective reality.

Emily Xie presents a work from her acclaimed Interwoven series. This fully on-chain, longform project weaves together the past and present, as traditional quilting patterns are rendered on screen. As tradition and modernity, human and machine coalesce in a single composition, we are reminded of our rapidly changing world and the potential of technology to not only forge our future, but preserve our past. 

In Blurred Boundaries, Melissa Wiederrecht questions if discrete systems, when imbued with sufficient complexity and depth, can become indistinguishable from human chaos. Through blurs, texture and dynamic movement, she seeks to conceal the rule-based framework that underlies generative systems, inviting us to consider why such frameworks were constructed in the first place. 

For Battito, Stefano Contiero trained a machine learning model on six years of his own heartbeat data to predict his heart rate at any given time. The predictions are visualised on a digital canvas through mesmerising colour gradients and meticulous detail, where each dot is a beat, each horizontal line a minute, and each layer an hour. As every refresh produces a new output, one is reminded of the unceasing passage of time, but also its cyclical nature in an ever-changing and imperfect form.