I’m standing in front of Bridget Riley’s Polarity, 1964, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. My vision is haywire, lines on the canvas vibrate with energy, nothing is stable. It’s the strongest sense of visual interruption I’ve ever experienced standing in front of a painting. It’s intense. When I’m across the room, this image vibrates, but when I’m a few feet away, my entire visual system glitches and I’m completely disoriented. It feels great. 

I’m sitting in the theater at REDCAT in Los Angeles. My vision is under assault as new frames from Lillian F. Schwartz’s UFOs, 1971, hit my eyes twenty-four times each second. Three circles orbit the center of the frame. They change color so quickly they vibrate in and out, and I can’t tell the difference between what I’m seeing and the ghosts of what I was seeing a moment ago. The space between then and now has collapsed. Each image is minimal, but the complexity in time is outside of the threshold of perception. This is a vibrant and overwhelming experience. It’s wonderful.

I’m at the Palm Spring Art Museum focused on Cuatro Modulaciones, 1969, by Jesús Rafael Soto. The surface of the sculpture is divided into a three by three grid. Each grid unit has four squares raised off the surface a few inches. The background of the central grid units is a dense field of vertical lines. As I move a little left and right naturally as I stand, the edges of the squares intersect with the lines underneath to create a buzzing in my brain. It’s so minimal and so satisfying. 

These three artworks—a painting, a film, and a sculpture—activate my vision (and my entire self) in unexpected ways. They engage me completely, with a focus on my eyes, in a way I have never experienced. In the 1960s, artists working within this emerging space were thrust into the curatorial box of “Op art.” The groups of artists included in the many Op art exhibitions in the 1960s were born from 1900 through the 1930s. 

There are two general approaches to defining generative art. The first is grounded in materials. Was the artwork created with computer code? The second is more conceptual: was the artist working with ideas related to systems, rules, instructions, and algorithms? Artists can choose to work with computers to create systems, or they can work with any media. The most minimal definition of generative art is, “The artist creates a system; the system creates the art.” Following this definition, computers and code are not needed to create generative art. Generative art is a way of thinking; it’s not tied to any material or technology. This is the definition that I prefer, as it allows art created with code to be in dialogue with thousands of years of art history, rather than only reaching back to the first artworks created with digital computers in the 1960s. As the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt wrote in 1967, “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”  

With this more expansive definition of generative art, much of the history of Op art connects to what artists are creating with code today. In my opinion, many Op artists (and painters from that era in general) were operating as generative artists prior to and concurrently with artists working with computers. As one example, the French painter François Morellet created Random Distribution of 40,000 Squares Using the Odd and Even Numbers of a Telephone Directory, 50% Blue, 50% Red. As the title of the painting informs the viewer, there’s a grid of 200 × 200 units on the painting and each is colored red or blue based on the last digit of sequential phone numbers in a telephone book. A number ending in an odd digit is colored red and an even digit is colored blue. This clearly programmed artwork is representative of the strategy of working with chance operations that surrender elements of creation to actions and other things—including databases of numbers—outside of the artist’s own biases.  

For over a decade, I’ve researched Op artists and other artists of that generation as examples of pre-computational generative artists. This work was inspired by Jean Tinguely’s Méta-Malevitch kinetic sculpture from 1954. By attaching a motor to a set of shapes, Tinguely created an artwork that echoed the work of Kazimir Malevich but was generating new compositions through its constant motion. Influenced by this idea, in 2004 I created Software Structures, a commission from the Whitney Museum of American Art to explore the work of Sol LeWitt through the lens of code. My CENTURY exhibition at [DAM] Berlin in 2012 debuted work I created in homage to Bridget Riley, François Morellet (I have my favorites!), and many others. I began to create subjective software homages to iconic work to understand these artists, to look closer, and to explore deeper. I consider this active research into art history—writing new code to decipher artworks from the past.  

Most recently, I worked from Bois-tiges de fer by Jesús Rafael Soto (a work in the AKG’s collection). In this artwork, delicate, curved steel rods hang by thin threads; they move gently in front of a painted field of vertical lines. As the rods move, they create a vibration as the silhouette of the rod intersects with the lines. For this new work, METASOTO, 2022, I pushed further than my past homages; the work departs significantly from the original kinetic sculpture. METASOTO is a series of sixty-four artworks, each with different speeds and densities of lines determined by generating random numbers within the code. Through working in this way, I’m creating conversations between the past and present.