01: Timeline Ch 1—Pre-Modern Era with Marius Watz

Hello everyone, welcome to our second spaces. Maybe we can start with a quick introduction from everyone on the random steam. Myself, the funny guys, I'm one of the founders of Loranda, and I'm here with Conruts, who is hosting from the Loranda MacGuard. Conruts, can you give a quick introduction to yourself? Yeah, I'll keep it a bit short since we kind of had some of these in our last spaces, but Conrad, otherwise known as Nemocake in the digital space, kind of work as the analyst for Loranda with helping build out the collection, and which artworks and artists we bring into our collection alongside the funny guys. I'll hand it off to Peter or Monk Anthony to talk a bit more about himself. Hey Conrad, thanks. Yeah, so my name is Peter Bauman and Monk Anthony at Loranda. I am responsible for the editorial content, a writer there. And I've also been writing this generative art timeline for the last many months at Loranda. That's exactly what this space will be about, to be in the introduction of our generative art timeline to the community. This timeline will have 10 different chapters, and the first chapter being focused on the pre-modern era. And for every chapter, the goal is to have a Twitter space, just to discuss the chapter in a bit more depth. And we hope to invite a guest for every chapter to discuss the specific material. And for this first one, we have the pleasure to have Maria Swats as a guest for those who don't know Maria Swats. Maria is an artist who works with visual abstraction through generative software processes. He has been doing this for the last 25 years. He has exhibited around the world at institutions like the Victorian Albert Museum in London. He has also taught at the NYU ITP Interactive Media Arts program, as well as at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. And he was also the creator of the Generator.x project about generative arts and computational design back in 2005 to 2010. But hey, Marius, great to have you. Feel free to add any more information about yourself. Yeah, great to be here. Well, I'm a Scandinavian. So I come from way up north. I'm used to cold. When I got started, there was basically no one that I knew who did anything like this. There was no GitHub. There were FTP sites. There was a comp graphics FAQ you could download. It was a pretty different world, but at the same time, it was also a very exciting time in the graphic design world, which I was immersed in at the time, because I actually dropped out of computer science, computer science was the worst thing I could imagine doing with a computer in the mid 90s. And I started working with designers instead. So a lot of my work has been informed by the 90s moment in graphic design, which was all about postmodernism, killing modernism. And a very subjective idea of design and also like a genuine excitement about like the world is completely open now that we have these digital tools. And then conveniently later on, there was dot com. So that was a job as well. And then when dot com crashed, I moved to Berlin and when full time as an artist. Thanks for the background, Marius. I actually see that we also have one of your contemporaries in the audience. Joshua Davis. Hey, Joshua, great to have you on. I'm just here for Marius. I got so much love for that guy. I don't want to steal any of his thunder. Listen, one of the coolest things I have to tell story. I wanted to learn like I had reached a ceiling and I wanted to learn so much from Marius that I was following him on what was then social media. It was mostly his generator X website, which you guys should totally talk to him about. And he was like, Hey, I'm hosting a workshop. And I was like, Hell yes. I definitely want to take a workshop with Marius only to find out like it was in his apartment, like in his kitchen. Yes. And I was probably like the happiest guy on earth because I wasn't really doing like a lot of 3D and I really wanted to absorb much as I could. And I got a chance to take this workshop with like I think two other people and we just sat in Marius's kitchen. He showed us how to fold and unfold the universe. No, that's cool. Josh, I think that's like an excellent anecdote as well because just give some explanations. I was actually a side hustle and fine at the time, like in 2013 around like genuinely paying my rent by doing processing workshops. It also just meeting awesome people and of course having Joshua come by, who I've known like on and off throughout the 2010s was amazing because he's fucking sorry. But but I also remember you pulled up in on like a hot red Harley that you parked outside. And I was like, I'm not sure that's safe, dude. It's Brooklyn. That was an amazing time. Thank you so much for that background, Marius and the little story, Joshua. That's great. I think we just started out with we kind of already had that short introduction to the timeline. This is the first of 10 chapters that we introduce. And arguably one of the shortest chapters, the next ones are going to be a lot more kind of compact full of moments throughout the next kind of decades to come. I just wanted to ask Peter, what kind of inspired you to begin this large endeavor of creating this comprehensive timeline and maybe what were the most kind of influential or helpful resources that you came across during your research period. Yeah, it's a good question. I think I started and I didn't intend for it to be as big as it kind of got. And eventually I just as I kind of kept researching and researching it just kind of grew and grew. And I mean, even now I'm finding it difficult to stop and kind of and stop adding things kind of constantly. And like I've even talked with Marius about, we also just felt like there wasn't there was a lot of history written about this movement, but it was kind of focused on certain areas. And we wanted to shine a little light on some of those other aspects of the history that haven't been as well documented. And then in terms of resources, I really enjoyed art of the electronic age by Frank Popper, Win the Machine made art, Frank Taylor, then computer graphics, computer art, digital art, Christian Paul's digital art, and then a companion to digital art. Those are those were some of the big, some of the main sources I used, but countless websites and other smaller sources, but those are some of the larger ones. Thank you so much. And then Marius kind of have a short question for you, but is there any ways that you think that we can help to like ensure that the timeline elevates and helps contextualize the genitive art movement? Yeah, I think what you're the kind of framework that I've set out with Lerandom already to me, like as someone who's kind of been moaning about this a little bit in the last couple of years, like watching that if he's seen completely blossom and come up with amazing artists, et cetera, but at the same time, showing again and again that it doesn't mean that people know the history and like a lot of people are like, oh, it's started now. No, like where do you think these tools that people are using came from and who built them like they didn't you know, they didn't find them in a burning bush in the desert. So I've been concerned with kind of the storytelling of that and also because of the generate rights project that I did in 2005 was like a leap of faith. And so it was not very popular in the media or scene in Europe at the time because it was seen as kind of that's for the evening entertainment that the eye candy you can show it with DJs and like electronic music, it was not considered a serious artistic endeavor in its own right and we kind of had to fight to be taken seriously. Generator X was trying to put down the flag for this is a serious endeavor it is you can see it in art you can see it in architecture you can see it in design these ideas of computation as a material software as material is very impactful and significant and now of course that was you know, 20 years ago and now all those things are just taken for granted which is great that's actually the goal but the irony is some of that history gets lost in the process so I've been wanting to shine a light on both the people who are there at the beginning because not everybody makes you know follows a trend all the way through people you know lives change people move on or they take all the jobs or families etc and it's not that's just natural but it also means that for the people that I remember you look I want them I want other people to also remember them and to understand what was the significance of their contribution that's been one of my big motivations of course selfishly nobody wants to be forgotten. So it's partly like an emotional sentimental, accidental thing partly a purely academic thing of like no I think we need to understand how these threads pull together and see how the people who are working in the 60s were doing their own thing amazing work but it was also a completely different cultural context and I was thinking that people like me who started around the 2000s like Joshua and me and Casey Ries and go on and etc versus the people the was talking to Martin in Ignat of a variable earlier today and he's the creative coding generation which kind of came 10 years later and they had their own concerns they were they were missing some of the kind of constraints and things to fight against that we had, but then they had a completely different interest. And I was like, why is everybody generating these artificial landscapes all of a sudden? What is this kind of newvo naturalism coming out of turn into art? So I think storytelling is very important and also, but also to take each moment on its own merits and understand what was motivating the people who are working at that time. Thank you, Marius. Yeah, or go with time, is also to make sure that every single generation in the journey towards history is very well represented. But what I think makes this timeline also stand out is that it goes back way before the 20th century, as this first chapter shows, it's a pre-modern era and it starts literally tens of thousands of years before the day of the day. And I was wondering, Peter, what motivated you to go back thousands of years? Yeah, I think for me what was important or it was difficult to really find a date that everything, quote unquote, began. And so you could go back to 1850 or 1860 with the start of modern art, but then you miss this entire first chapter that we're about to cover. I felt that a lot of those moments were too important to pass up and that kind of the history of mathematics and computational thinking and logical and algorithmic thinking, like that part of the story of Generator Part has these kind of ancient roots and it's going to be fun to kind of dig into these today. I think the first moment ever in the timeline is also a really good example. It's called Blombos Cave Drawing. And just to make sure, by the way, before we dig in, if you go to timeline dot, lorandum dot parts, like this is where you can follow along, like this is where the entire timeline will be uploaded. At the moment, it's just the first chapter, but over the next few weeks, months will be introducing the subsequent chapters. But yeah, so the first moment is the Blombos Cave Drawing. This dates back 70,000 years before Christ. Could you share a bit more about this moment, Peter? Yeah, so for me, this moment was brought to my attention by Philip Gallanter. And you know, Gallanter talks about how, you know, this is an example of piling. And it's also one of the first known works of art created by a human, but it is similar to kind of other prehistoric art that's been found in caves that also uses a lot of geometric patterns and symmetrical designs. So this is something that is maybe representative of a sort of larger cultural era than just this piece itself. And it's something that is maybe not everybody would consider this a work of generative art, but Gallanter did believe that they did qualify as generative because of the marks that were made by the artist back then use this kind of manual symmetry-based algorithm. I'm curious, Maria, would you consider this generative art? I find it a little bit of a stretch. I find the items that you've pulled together on the timeline are really interesting, I thought, probably working. And I think they do point towards, you know, humanity is kind of awkward coexistence with machines. And then realizing we can augment our abilities through machines, but all they're also learning to look like a machine, you know, look at the world like a machine. And so I think, of course, I do believe that there is an innate human interest in systems, and we've, you know, many of the points you have on the timeline do show that. The cave drawings is kind of arbitrary, but what it shows is, okay, so one of the reasons why artists work with generative systems is also often to kind of free themselves of the need to like be the author of every mark, you know, if a system is controlling the marks, then you also have a certain amount of freedom you are liberated as an artist, and also you can, you know, explore the system into new directions that you might not have originally imagined. So of course, in that sense, sure, maybe the the person, you know, the human who made this had an artistic intent or was fascinated by, oh, what happens if I make multitude of these marks? Because of course, you know, you have to remember that the human eye is a line detector and a pattern recognition machine, you know, paredoia, the idea that the human eye will try to find patterns where there are none. You will try to find faces in, you know, urinals or bushes or whatever have you. So the human eye is strongly drawn towards, you know, if it was a machine learning system, you would say that it was like overtrained, and it gives false positives, which of course is a very interesting thing in itself. But so I think there is a tension between do we really intend to make the, you know, that we set out to make these patterns, or did we discover them and then kind of follow them, you know, the the Lmonte Young poem about like draw a line and follow it. I think that's a really great, a kind of conversational point how like some of these moments can be seen as like arbitrary and kind of how you evaluate them and see how they may fit in like the long history of generative art. And like moving on to I think the second highlight moment that we have from 1000 BCE is I Ching. Peter, if you maybe want to expand more on like this moment significance and and maybe like the overall significance of the binary system within the digital world would be great. Yeah, so this is a another moment that was was recommended by somebody and that was Georg Bach. I think that it's another kind of crucial point about the timeline is that we're very open to feedback, we're open to many different kinds of experts offering their feedback and making the timeline better and more interesting and more complete. So with with I Ching, I mean it's something that would have its effect on generative art a bit later like you know John Cage and Manfred Moore were quite directly influenced by it in the 60s but you know it's something that goes back 1300 years ago it was this ancient Chinese text and it's what really introduced the world to the binary system and this the concept of Yin and Yang and kind of on and off and it was one of the you know the first text to kind of introduce the world to that mathematics but also a you know philosophical concept that you know has been so crucial to the development of modern computing but also generative art. One thing that's funny is actually I was very much influenced by the I Ching in the 90s it was one the first forms that I kind of tried to develop as a system because you know realizing that it was binary and that you could kind of count through the iterations and then later creating variations of it. So not only did I have it on my website in like 1995 and I will post pictures I also have a tattoo with a pattern that's based on the I Ching although a kind of Batman-like symbol that comes from it. I figured a lot of it from Blade Runner the author Phil K. Dick and it's the the one that set it in San Francisco with the Nazis having taken over the world and you know when the characters is consulting the the I Ching for wisdom or insights on his current predicament and I looked it up and I was totally fascinated by the form of course because I mean at that point I was quite early in my own formal kind of explorations and if they're paying a reference to this idea that you can have a single form that has a parametric you know range so you can take on many different forms and I did a couple of treatments of it. So I think the E Ching even though I don't think it was created to be for first and foremost the formal system it definitely has those properties and it's a parametric form you know it can be it's deterministic and it can be explored from 0 to 63. Thank you so much for that response. I think we'll talk even a bit more on other binary systems later on in this kind of highlight but to move on to our next moment we are going to talk about Euclid's elements which kind of appeared 300 BCE kind of a monumental work Peter can probably give a bit more insight on this moment. Euclid's elements was another textbook and it's probably the most influential and longest used textbook of all time and it's still a key work in geometry and still studied even today so you know it's 13 books about you know making logical proofs and attempting to ascertain certain tea by starting off with really basic principles and using logical proofs to investigate the unknown. It was critical to this again this concept of sort of algorithmic thinking and also something really crucial to generative art and coded art and just about visualizing the beauty of mathematics and Conrad and defining guys you know just earlier today we were talking to Zach Liberbin and Zach was telling us about how he calls himself a wildlife photographer of math and that what he was really trying to do was search for the beauty of the subject and I really think that Euclid's elements are kind of the roots of thinking about logic which led to you know the algorithms that make this kind of art, but also just visualizing art and this concept of geometry. So that's why this was in the chapter. So how about you, Marius? What do you do think about this, the role of kind of geometry in your work or in your creative process? Or how do you feel about it on the timeline here? So as someone who nearly flunked like my third year of college or like high school math because it was like, you know, science math or calculus. And I was just terrible at it. It wasn't something that I took too easily, but yet I have spent the last 25 years of my life like calculating vectors in both 2D and 3D and you know, implementing with algorithm. As though I was just breeding. So you know, math is something that I am not innately drawn to. Like I don't explore mathematical proofs, etc. Like I have a friend who would read Russian math papers translated into French. And I'm like, yeah, that's a commitment that I've just never had. But I'm fascinated of course by what becomes possible once you imagine space. You know, like a lot of my work is about imagining motion through two dimensional, three dimensional space and thinking of like how can you create new forms by just navigating space. So of course, without the classics, you clear, etc. Those things would not be possible. So I have an ambivalent relationship to it. There's also a really interesting movement of math art where they have art exhibitions that are all dedicated to kind of, you know, sacred geometry, you know, things that take the Platonic solids and, you know, tiling and all this stuff. And I find it very interesting. But as an artist, I wonder like, what are you bringing to it? Like are you just finding the most interesting tiling of this form, but it's a known form. So what are you bringing to it? And I think that is also a point of tension for generative artists, you know, because we can all find algorithms that are extremely powerful. Like the Voronoy diagram, an extremely good form that the human eye finds immensely interesting. But like if you're a coder, you know, that's kind of just the demo. Like that's anybody can do that as soon as you implement it. So I have an ambivalent relationship to math as a kind of pure thing in itself. But of course, people like Zach or Goal 11, who are just absolute geniuses, algorithms and math. Like I've done things that I just could not follow. Like they were just casually talking about like, implementing finger video tracking when everybody else was trying to like, oh yeah, I'm into particle like systems right now. So it's a different level of kind of literacy with math, I guess. That's interesting. This also reminds me of Mat Arts, the collection by Herbert Franca. We actually collected two of these pieces for L'Orandeau from 1980 to 1995. Like he created many, many works like in this Mat Arts category. And this was like his first NFT mince, like 100 pieces that he created from this Mat Arts collection. And I do also resonate that Mat Arts shouldn't be the end. It should be like a means 2D the end, I guess. And operator, maybe you're aware of like this artistic duo. Like recently, this is Charity of Choreography, a collection of artworks. They have these rules for art and technology. And one of them is that it should never be a tech demo. It never should be about the mathematics or technology itself. But also always about something more, something beyond that. Yeah, there was, I think a really good addition. Yeah, there is also Jim Campbell, but he did a, he made a diagram of media art, which is basically just a scrolling list on the left side of possible input devices, you know, mechanisms and detectors and sensors. And then on the right hand side, the outputs, which would be screens or machines. What he was implying was that like a lot of media art, particularly in the 90s and 2000s, had a basic formula. Like you take an interesting input and you transform an interesting, interesting output. And then the question is, what are you adding to it? So I think this is also like always a critical issue in art. What are you adding to it? But then I have also seen so many artworks where you're just, you are just dumbfounded by the simplicity of the thing, you know, like Andreas Geisen and CD Vanette's piece at the materialized exhibition, just last week, which is flipping through four letter words. And it's as simple as it can be, but it's also enormously poetic. Of course, if everybody had access to, you know, a flipping, a letter is machine, then it would probably be less interesting. So there is always some tension between not looks rare as in NFT terms, but something which confronts the viewer with an experience that they did not anticipate. There's always great power in that, even if the idea underlying it is extremely simple. So I'm not trying to say that like you have to be complicated or fun new things, because it's always about the quality of the experience that you have in the encounter with the art. I agree. Then the next two moments they take us to the Islamic world. So 700s, a year 700s, like we mark the emergence of Islamic geometric arts and 820. I might budge the pronunciation of this name. I'll cryrism rights on the calculation with Hindu numerals. Peter, maybe you can expand like why are these two moments like so significant? Yeah, so this is moment four out of 10 that we're talking about now. And this emergence of of Islamic art and these geometric patterns like around this, you know, 700 is definitely not meant to be a specific date. It's more of a general time period around here. But this was an example of a generative process that predates the computer, a generative system. It's a highly-ordered system and a system with flow, complexity. And it's another kind of tiling and symmetry-based system that much of this Islamic art is based off of. Mostly it was decorative, which also reminds me a lot of something we'll talk about next chapter, which is the kind of arts and crafts movement and art nouveau and called even William Morris started using some of these, you know, he was using natural forms, but he was also using them in a grid, like Islamic geometric art. So in addition to tiling, like we were just talking about with math to Islamic world at this time, was also this cradle of mathematics, civilization, and innovation. And I think that was an important reason why geometric and tiling math arts appeared in this region. And then, of course, the word algorithm actually gets its roots from the Latin word for I will also butcher his name, al-Qua'ra-jimi. So that Latin term, Al-Ghawari-Timi, Lino, is what actually led to the word algorithm. So two hugely kind of important moments of the timeline that we sort of combined into this moment number four in this 10 moment list. I think you also need to mention the, you know, one of the impetus for Islamic geometric art is also the prohibition against the depiction of human form, etc, like in the Islamic faith. I'm not sure about those sort of exact religious technical details, but you can imagine if European artists had been just forbidden by the Pope to depict natural scenes or humans, where would they go with their creativity? Well, they would go into patterns and, you know, tiling, etc. And of course, the influence of the Arabic world and their advanced idea of math at that time. Like, I actually think the calculation with Hindu numerals, I think actually the number zero came from India and was like taking over into this field of mathematics. And it's, I think it's something that you see constantly with, you know, the idea that human brains are pretty much the same throughout the entire timeline you're talking about here. Like, we have not evolved, we are not bacteria, we don't evolve in the scope of months or years, it would take really a very long time. So fundamentally humans have the same brain now as we did then. The difference is the kind of the tools that we've evolved, partly technical tools, but also the knowledge that we have, you know, so the the sci-fi kind of post-apocalyptic nightmare of humans without knowledge, like would we go back to being cavemen? It's a really interesting thing to consider. But I see this as like as soon as you have a system of writing, what becomes possible that wasn't possible before then, you know, like, okay, so I'm from Scandinavia, like the Viking culture, etc. They were more tradesmen than like the violent warriors that you see in movies, etc. But they did not have very good mathematics and it was a problem. They didn't have currency. This was also a problem. They would carry a hack silver, which was literally like chunky pieces of silver bracelets, etc. that you could pay for things just by cutting off a decent chunk. And when you have numbers and then money, I remember I figured like, I was maybe like 15, 16 and I finally understood the real meaning of currency that it's an, you know, a consensus about value translated into something that is absolutely meaningless, a piece of paper. But we all agree that it has the equivalent value to physical goods. And so we can trade with them. And the power that that abstraction produces is really the core of kind of all technological, you know, devices like, okay, before the internet, you couldn't imagine a world where you connected with everyone at the same time. And then suddenly that was possible. And then suddenly you had the web and suddenly you had social media. So, but. these kind of evolutionary leaps, if they're not evolution, their technical evolution is kind of what creates the possibility space for human experience. And now we even have magic in term nut money. We actually collect digital pieces of art sort of taking into the extreme. The next moment in the timeline that we would want to highlight is a moment in 1514. Albert Durer creates the engraving melancholia one. And what's particularly interesting about this moment in my opinion is that Vera Moller, like one of the pioneers of our charity varts, was highly influenced by this engraving. And more specifically, also by the magic square that's featured in this engraving. And I was wondering, first of all, Marys, like you mentioned your inspired by Beeching. Is this also something that inspires you, like this magic square by Albert Durer? Or do you know some other creative quarters are inspired by this moment? Yeah, I think again, there's a lot of people. I'm not familiar with this piece at all, actually, and I have never heard of the magic square. Of course, I know Durer. But to me, I think the equivalent would be, I don't know, my interest in architecture, which particularly in the 90s was a huge influence on my thinking and the forms that I was interested in, whether it was kind of Japanese, Poemoe architecture or Donnie Leibskind, etc. Which of course, have a lot of these ideas in them. And also reference these ideas quite a lot. But I am honestly not so familiar with the magic square. I tend to be a little, as an auto-diadact, like I dropped out of university at 20, and I never studied art history. I have a kind of eclectic collection of the things that I really feel like I know, because there are gaps in the knowledge. I didn't learn the whole continuity. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, definitely. I was actually, I was visiting the studio of Hans Dellinger in Berlin a few months ago. And he was actually also inspired. I think most people know Hans Dellinger, like his plodder drawings. But he also showed me some works on his Mac. There were visualizations of the magic square. And that was for me. That was actually my introduction to the magic square. I didn't notice concepts before Hans Dellinger showed it to me. Just to get such a fascinating piece to explore and take the time to look at all the different elements going on. I mean, there's the magic square and the kind of top right, which, you know, means that the numbers in each row call them a diagonal. They add up to the same. So this painting is also from the year 1514. And then if you look in the middle of the magic square, it has those two numbers together. So there's a lot of symbolism. This was also really important for the, in the development of perspective and proportion and how it's still impacted, you know, even computer art and Durham on R who really did talk about how important this was to her when she was young. What she said was looking for a foundation and something that she could hold onto and making non-figure to painting. So it definitely, I think, would have been on the list regardless of more than talking about it, but that only kind of highlights its importance, I think. I think the idea of perspective and, you know, the idea that there's a lot of art from the middle ages, that is kind of pre-perspective where you have a different understanding or acceptance of kind of vanishing points or how an image is laid out. And then when perspective gets introduced, things have to behave in a kind of naturalistic manner. It's super interesting. I remember, again, like, having been done away by the realization that, of course, perspective is an algorithm. And I got my start working with ray tracing, which of course, you know, like, mirror balls and checkered boards, like, you know, like, planes until, you know, as far as I can see. And then being fascinated by the precise mathematical modeling of reflections, etc, etc. Which, of course, is all kind of coming from this. And the idea that you could model a scene as a collection of objects and then simply shoot ions or kind of simulated particles through it and detect what is it that they hit by modeling, you know, the properties of light. Which is super, super interesting. And we take it now kind of for granted. And like, now I can render a 20,000 by 20,000 pixel image in blender doing all of this, you know, it'll take a while, but it's amazing. To me, so that is maybe my relationship to perspective, particularly like perspective allows the calculation of a 3D scene as though it was seen by the human eye. I think there's ways that that art piece can lead to a bunch of different kind of avenues of creative coding. And then moving on to like moment number six of the timeline or the highlight of our timeline, kind of further expanding on the importance of kind of foundational binary systems. We talk about God-freeed liveness in this publication of kind of on the covenantorial art from 1666, is there a specific significance at this piece holds Peter that you want to expand a bit more on? With lead nets, yeah, I think we really see this continuation of Euclid and the use of logic because this particular paper, you know, would be influential kind of in the history of computing and algorithms, you know, it really laid the foundation for things like symbolic logic and computation and formal logic. And you know, it would influence, you know, some other moments on our list, like the analytical engine of Charles Babbage that Ada Lovelace used, which we might be able to talk about a bit later. So yeah, I mean, I think this is just another example, especially by by lead nets, who was, you know, somebody who was one of the most brilliant people in human history, who kind of co-founded calculus and had this career as a mathematician, that also, you know, impacted many other fields as well. So really fascinating moment. And then of course, lead nets would go on a few decades later after this and basically invent binary or is considered the person that is credited for the invention of binary. So this moment is meant to kind of encapsulate almost the entirety of lead nets is kind of impact. I'm very interested in this moment in time when the sort of the rational era kind of begins when humans starts looking at the world around us and seeing it described in terms of laws that can be described and calculated and being able to describe the world around you according to these laws and then being able to use these laws to create further abstractions and predicting kind of phenomena that you haven't even seen yet. And being able to see that like, yes, I was correct in these assumptions. The Greek mathematicians calculated machines of war, etc. We've of course seen with computers later, the first computers being bonside calculators and you know, calculators for parabolic arcs, and to see how humans evolve in lockstep with our understanding of the world and technology. And what we do with it, both, you know, beautiful things but also awful things, is a constant source of fascination for me. We have I think four moments left that we would like to discuss, but we can we can still add down to just two moments, makes more sense to discuss, two of them in depth, then just rush through four of them. And the first moment we would like to make sure we discuss is 1757, the Gernberger musical dice game, which Mozart also engaged in. And I believe this is the first moment in the timeline that touches on music and the randomness that is present in the creation of music. Will this be a recurring team Peter? We are definitely going to start seeing more more music involved. And I mean, and this is actually one of the first, you know, if you really think of Jenner Dvar in terms of, you know, the broad history, you know, this we kind of looked at the ancient roots. And that was a lot about, you know, symmetry, entiling, and patterns, and math, and logic. And now we're kind of getting to the era of, you know, stochastic systems when they started being added. And this musical dice game by Cernberger, I mean, Cernberger was the first to do it, you know, in the middle of the 18th century around, but we have 1757. And then Mozart was clearly the, you know, the most famous, you know, he did it around the end of the 18th century and, you know, around 1793. So what they would actually do is, if they wanted to create a waltz, you know, a waltz is 16 bars. And, you know, they have these 176 bars arranged on tables and they roll a dice 16 times. And each time they roll the dice, you know, that was one of the bars of the waltz. And, you know, then it could be performed. So, you know, it was really, really kind of impactful and important moment and kind of finally, this kind of introduction of stochastic systems into generative art history. It's interesting because this was also one of my references for kind of pre-modern era generative techniques. As we get kind of further down the timeline, we'll talk more about people like Max Matthews and kind of the introduction of like generative music and generative compositions have kind of played a very vital role, even until like some of today's artists like Death Beaf were heavily inspired by their work. And then kind of to touch on this last moment that we really want to highlight and arguably I think one of the most important ones from this pre-modern era is Ada Loveways and kind of the first computer program that she ever created. And I think as we kind of learn more about computer art history or just computing history, you will learn a lot about kind of the women's vital role. And like, there's significant contributions. There's others like Grace Hopper and like her first compiler system and Annie Easily and her work at NASA Peter. maybe you want to expand more on Ada Lovelace and maybe some other significant women in the field. When we made the 10 moments in all of generative art history, we included this moment with Ada Lovelace and how she became the first computer programmer. I think it's just so important on a lot of levels. What I thought was so interesting is that she understood very intuitively and almost seems almost instantly the potential for computers to perform artistic tasks. She was really inspired by combining science and art. She was one of the first people to understand that computers had the ability to extend human creativity and that we could use the logic and the rules of computers to create works of art. She's one of the first people to, on top of just being arguably the first computer programmer, the first person to understand then the power that that would have even in terms of creativity. This was just a monumental moment and also works pretty well as kind of this transition. Chapter two is when we will really start to see the beginning of modernism and art and then history. This is a nice way to kind of in this chapter with a theoretical programmer but one of the most important moments in art and generative art history. I remember being introduced to the story of Ada Lovelace as a kind of quaint obscure fact that like did you know. But then later I was kind of dismayed when I realized wait the whole history of early programming and computers is just full of these women who got very little credit at the time and certainly in my early exposure to computers science and programming they were never mentioned. And I think so that there is a there's this orian called Mar Hicks who has written some wonderful books about that history and how you know originally women were allowed to program computers because it was seen as a kind of low value scale. The computer was just originally a human who did calculations and it was you know in the extension of the phone ladies of the Second World War etc. you know the early early entry of women into modern industrial jobs etc. And of course that's a it might be a little bit of a distraction but I find it super interesting because it's the idea that that I very much grew up with which is that you know men are just somehow naturally gifted towards technology it's complete bogus. I have taught so many kind of random students where you kind of learn to detect how able is this person to grasp innate concepts about technology and systems and to understand that if you exploit one system you are able to express you know other ideas and it's been completely equally distributed. But in the classroom of course the dominance of male students often means that the female students don't take the center stage. So I'm I mean feminism is something that I care about and I realize that is not the topic here but I think the serial value of laser that's almost presented as a kind of quaint one-of-a-kind moment when actually the whole history of technology is littered with women who were never recognized at the time. It's quite a point in thing that we need to keep in mind and that also goes to the current scene. Okay so I wish there were a lot of kind of forgotten women in the early generative arts scene of the 2000s. There aren't there are some I knew some women who were active then. For example Leah there are only so many women that I knew who really pursued it as an art firm for like more than a couple of years. So I'm really delighted to see the the space that we're in now have a lot more presence of wonderful female programmers you know like Melissa we direct like I have no idea how our algorithms work and I think it's wonderful. Before we wrap it up I would like to give Peter like quickly the mic to introduce the next chapter chapter two which will be added to our websites. Thanks yeah so the next chapter is really exciting. This first chapter chapter one was about 24 moments. Chapter two you know jumps up to around 120 and it covers the 100 year period from basically 1850 to 1950. Essentially covers the modern art movement and of course that was so instrumental to the development of generative art with the abstraction of modern art. So we'll look at that we'll look at the art history side and the abstraction of art but also look at you in technological developments and further mathematics and information and technological developments and computing that led to the development of computer art. So very excited for this chapter two which will be on timeline.larandum.art. Only thing that is left for us to do is to thank our amazing guests Marius Watts to free up some time and yet discuss the history of generative art with us like it was a real honor thank you Marius. I'm delighted to be here and I'm honestly impressed that you guys are going so deep on this and considering things that are not just the spectacular one-liners but you know the deeper history of how we ended up at this peculiar moment in time so I'm delighted to be invited thank you very much. Thank you Marius thank you so much for joining us really appreciate it. Yeah of course it's great to hear your thoughts and little stories that you have along the way. Thank you everyone in the audience thanks for opportunity and I hope you found this interesting and please follow us as we will be sharing like more chapters in the timeline that Peter has been compiling over the last month and yeah hope to see you all soon bye bye. Bye bye. you