Alexander Reben: GENERATE YOUR OWN ART - A NEW WAY OF COLLECTING AND EXPERIENCING DIGITAL ART
February marks as the last month of our current online exhibition ‘The Game of Life - Emergence in Generative Art’ in which we pay tribute to mathematician John Horton Conway. As a special finissage month we are dedicating these last weeks to one of the four participating generative artists - Alexander Reben. We would like to direct your attention to the conceptually unique way of experiencing and collecting art that he has introduced: Generate Your Own Art (GYOA). Alex has created a dedicated gallery which we invite you to explore here.
Curator’s Forward:
"If an artist creates an algorithm that can generate endless variations of an image at the push of a button, are the resulting images the artwork or is it the algorithm itself? What if it is not the artist pushing the button? What does it even mean to own a digital art work?
In CiAo Alexander Reben has designed a system that celebrates the near unlimited potential of digital art, along with its uncertainties of authorship and ownership. He invites you to “roll the dice” generating unlimited variations of images based on his algorithms until you have arrived at one that is just right for you. In addition to this act of collaboration, Reben has made the code freely available to you, or anyone else, to recreate the image by pasting the code into any popular modern web browser's address bar, and in so doing makes the code an integral part of the artwork itself. From issues of exclusivity to dealing with the impermanence technology, CiAo makes us rethink what it means to own something digital at a time when property is increasingly moving in that direction. But worry not, should you need something official, tangible and permanent to feel ownership, Alex has you covered. Certificates of authenticity and prints are available for sale at the push of a button." Jason Bailey, Artnome
Preview of the new GYOA gallery by Alex Reben
https://www.qr2a.xyz/gallery/
Each artwork can be accessed in a web browser and the whole experience is interactive: by clicking on the dice button the viewer keeps getting different variations of the work until the preferred one linked to a specific seed number. In this way you can Generate Your Own Art and have control over it. The final artwork can then be acquired via the cart button.
While generative and AI art is not new and many artists have open sourced the code to their creations, one may ask how is this sort of work collectable? Traditional art collectors tend to prefer unique physical artworks, while a new type of collector, such as those in the crypto NFT space, collect non-tangible and shareable works. This new breed of collector enjoys digital assets, mass online sharing of files, and new way of acquiring and authenticating art. Nevertheless, both still enjoy the uniqueness and exclusiveness of the concept of provable ownership of the artworks that they wish to add to their collection. Alexander Reben is the first artist bridging the gap between the digital and tangible art experience which is easy to access, archive, display and collect.
The certificate of authenticity (COA) is an integral part of the physical artwork itself - as an aesthetic object, and contains the code needed to generate the artwork, stored as both a QR code and text as an archival print. The innovation is in how the generative works are written in a specific type of code which is supported by major web browsers. Currently, the code can be copied from the QR code or plain text contained on the paper COA into a browser address bar and run by hitting enter, this can be done with or without an internet connection since the entirety of the code needed to generate the artwork is contained in that text. The code text can also be saved as a .htm file and run by opening that file. In this way, the collector has control over the work and nothing else is needed, but the code itself and a web browser. Since the paper COA acts as the storage medium, the work does not need to be stored on systems such as IPFS, USB thumb drives, DVDs, hard drives or other mediums which may be gone or obsolete in the future. In comparison to blockchain art available to collectors through various platforms, the risk of losing the token, IPFS failure or bankruptcy of the platform or blockchain change in the future, the collector has the most secure way of having the digital work accessible and stored the physical COA, which certifies both the digital and physical ownership and has more probability to last 100 years in comparison to a the token minted on one of the NFT platforms. Furthermore, even though others can see the code, generate the artwork and save or print the results, the physical COA confers ownership of the work.
The COA which comes with the work will be delivered as an archival paper print with a QR code and plaintext code to access the work, which is signed by the artist. A United States bank note is attached with its serial number notated, making counterfeiting the COA nearly impossible. The COA also contains a cryptographic hash so that the authenticity of the artwork can be verified by a unique password known by the artist. While someone can change the code to create a different output, they would not be able to claim it as a new artwork by the artist because they would not be able to generate a valid cryptographic hash. The bank note plus the cryptographic hash ensure that the COA can be verified as authentic and unique. A blockchain contract of the transaction can be made upon request (on a platform such as Verisart), however the paper COA takes priority in determining ownership of the artwork in the case of any conflicts.
If we consider art history and conceptual art since the ‘60s, the idea of art or the concept of it can be as important, if not more important than the physical aesthetic object itself. CiAO explores this idea further by considering computer-code-as-idea, questioning where the nexus of the artwork itself is located. Alexander Reben is an artist and roboticist who explores humanity through the lens of art and technology. Using “art as experiment” his work allows for the viewer to experience the future within metaphorical contexts.
“With a new generation of technology comes a new generation of scientists, scholars, engineers and artists exploring the relationship between people and machines. At the heart of this nexus is Alexander Reben, an MIT-trained roboticist and artist whose work forces us to confront and question our expectations when it comes to ourselves and our creations” - NPR’s Tania Lombrozo.
CiAo as explained by the artist:
High-level computer code is a representational language of mathematical logic from which seemingly infinite complexity can arise. Stemming from the most basic logic of 1 and 0, on and off, true and false, code’s purpose is to abstract fundamental digital operations into a human-readable and understandable form by leveraging the conventions of language and mathematics. The complexity which arises out of simple rules weaved together creates beauty from this conceptual yet constrained instruction set, much as how nature makes grand structures from numerous discrete units within the bounds of physics.
CiAo (code in, art out) is a series of artworks which explore the magnificent complexity of code arising from simple rules, by not only exhibiting the resultant rendering, but also by including the usually concealed generative code itself as part of the artwork itself. In this role it functions as a part of the concept, as an aesthetic object, a durable analog archival medium and in the role of certificate of authenticity as proof of ownership. These works also explore questions surrounding digital artworks such as: ownership, the embedded computing power in the world, modern copyright and authorship, sharing and cryptographic authenticness, the archival (or conversely, disposable) nature of digital and intangible works, editions within generations of outputs and artistic control of aesthetic output.
View new GYOA gallery HERE.
