Ars Ingenero Undecim

In Latin, 'ars ingenero' means 'generative art.' Here, the title refers to art produced from mathematical formulae. Each of the following twenty-six pictures derives from a program I call Alena (Artificial Life Emerging from Natural Affinities). The complex systems used to produce it develop self-organizing behavior in the digital realm in many ways like the life we experience in the biological realm; beginning simple and developing over quadrillions of generations producing a kind of...
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In Latin, 'ars ingenero' means 'generative art.' Here, the title refers to art produced from mathematical formulae. Each of the following twenty-six pictures derives from a program I call Alena (Artificial Life Emerging from Natural Affinities). The complex systems used to produce it develop self-organizing behavior in the digital realm in many ways like the life we experience in the biological realm; beginning simple and developing over quadrillions of generations producing a kind of evolution. Thus, these pictures do not represent CGI (computer-generated images) as the term is usually meant. CGI uses algorithms to achieve particular end results that could not be produced by non-computational methods. Generative art involves the emergence of unpredictable outcomes. In other words, outcomes over which I have little or no control except in choosing the starting conditions for their creation and picking the output I prefer to exhibit. In essence, this art originates from a computer rather than a computer acting as a tool to produce to a particular result. Like any art, visual or otherwise, the images here are meant to evoke responses from viewers. Like any art, there exists no one-to-one correlation between intended and actual responses. Some viewers, of course, will react predictably by predetermining them as senseless simply by knowing their process of creation. They will decide that what they see results from random behavior, even when the opposite is true. Every color, line, and shape is completely determined. - David Cope