Metropop Denim, With Tom Carden

The Denim Issue of Metropop is now on newsstands. I shot the cover, and the eighteen-page feature fashion spread inside. For the shoot, I collaborated with innovative UK generative artist Tom Carden, who adapted an applet specifically for the shoot.

See the whole shoot here.

Processing, the developers of the software platform that Carden used for the piece, has a little behind-the-scenes in the making of the cover, and some of the variations of the applet used. You can see that here.

After we collaborated on the shoot I asked Carden some questions about his work, and about generative art:

CJC: Tell me a little about your background, and how you got into generative art.

TC: The short answer is that I went from an art/sciences background at school, to studying artificial intelligence with maths and philosophy at university, to working in an architectural practice, to studying architecture and computer science today. On the way, I've been inspired by David Hockney's use of technology, experimented with digital photographic manipulation, played with software audio synthesis, written a simple 2D robotic behaviour simulator, read a pile of stuff on bio-inspired computing (emergence, evolution, flocking) and written a simulation of people walking through airports.

I've always been interested in geometric and mathematical forms - op-art, optical illusions, fractals, chaos, and so on - but never really experimented with any of them using computers until I started my course in Virtual Environments and at the same time discovered Processing. The VE course gave me the excuse I needed to take the time to experiment with generative systems for creating geometry, and Processing gave me the platform, community and inspiration I needed to start exploring my ideas more fully. The work of Casey Reas, Jared Tarbel, Karsten Schmidt, Robert Hodgin and Marius Watz in particular was a constant source of inspiration. Before I found Processing, I was inspired by people like Hugo Elias, Paul Bourke and Ryan Geiss who put a lot of their work online for people to look at and understand. The title of Hugo's site, "The good-looking textured light-sourced bouncy fun smart and stretchy page," pretty much sums up the appeal of computers graphics for me.

What exactly is "generative art", and what's its history?

I've not really considered it before, but I think generative art could be defined as art which involves the creation of an autonomous system and a set of rules or behaviours for that system. Characteristically, the result tends to be more than the sum of the parts, perhaps creating a higher order form Ð this is often referred to as emergence. The art is in the creation of the process, though there is scope for intervention. Personally, I think that the result of the process should stand alone if it is to be called art Ð otherwise a different way of presenting the ideas should be found.

I'm not best placed to give a history of generative art, but for as long as there have been programmable things people have been making art with them. Before mass access to computers, people used other hardware, tools, toys and rule-sets to make algorithmic and process-driven art - pendulums, spirographs, Indian rangolis, Celtic knots, mandalas and so on Ð and a lot of the methods people use in computer generated art were investigated by mathematicians by hand before computers were available, such as Fibonacci series and the Golden Ratio. Casey Reas has looked into Kinetic Sculpture in some depth, and that's something I keep intending to read up on. I'm sure that before computers were around the same things that people like about generative art were satisfied by fireworks, fountains, may poles, crop circles, wax lamps and oscilloscopes. Grid-based games such as Go and Othello are very reminiscent of the patterns created by certain types of Cellular Automata, too. The main advantage with using a computer is speed, such that there is now scope for using any of these systems over long periods of time and with minute variations.

Of course, it's not all just experimenting with existing systems. Designers and artists are using computers to create completely new things too. I think that John Maeda's writing and teaching provides an enormous amount of grounding around where design meets programming. His body of work is certainly the closest thing to a "school of thought" around computer graphics for art and design, and he's laid the foundations for many of his students to go on to great things, both theoretical and practical. Processing is just one of the products form his students that exemplify a lot of what he inspires in people. In a passage from Maeda's recent book, Creative Code, John Simon, Jr. considers why artists and designers should program:

"Why should an artist program? Are commercial software tools not sufficient? First, consider the models for popular programs. Word processors are based on typewriters and graphics programs mimic paper, pencils and brushes. However, what program is inspired by a flowing stream? The obvious reason, therefore, for an artist or designer to program is to break the boundaries of commercial tools."

When I first got onto the internet, I had an interest in what's known as the Demo Scene - a loose collective of coders, artists, musicians and designers trying to squeeze every last drop of potential out of whatever technology they can get their hands on. The programmers in the Demo Scene had Ð and still have Ð an obsessive attitude to file sizes, which means they look at ways to transmit descriptions of media rather than the finished product. For graphics, this means storing the instructions to create an image, rather than the image itself. With the realisation that lots of natural phenomena such as trees and plants can be described in this way, and the development of procedural techniques for textures (e.g. Perlin Noise) and procedural techniques for animation (e.g. Boids) you have the makings of an entirely new discipline. The boundaries are still being pushed back today, with the GPUs on modern graphics cards presenting a whole new outlet for generated graphics.

So I guess what we now call "generative art" comes from all of those areas I've mentioned, and doubtless many more.

Do ever you show it in conventional gallery forums, or is it primarily web-based?

I haven't shown anything in a gallery so far, but I'd certainly like to if the opportunity arises. A piece produced by my architectural simulation software was accepted into the 2004 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London, which was hugely gratifying.

What do you think of the creative ramifications of art being literally computer-generated? At what point is the work more the computer's than yours? Are there any copyright ramifications?

I don't think there are copyright ramifications any more than there are when a photographer uses Photoshop. The interesting ramifications in terms of "is it art" are in many respects the same as for photographic and print work, or maybe even for digital music and video Ð there is a theoretically limitless supply of "original" copies of the work. I don't think the work ever belongs to the computer, any more than a photograph belongs to a camera. The computer is a tool Ð there wouldn't be any artwork if I didn't tell the computer exactly what to do Ð it just works a hell of a lot faster than I do!

What are your thoughts behind this particular piece of yours? (the BW one I based this story on) What were you hoping to achieve?

I was experimenting with a simulation of particles affected by a simple gravitational force. I wanted the simplest possible thing that would work Ð from a scientific perspective the code is very na•ve, and this is intentional. In my job, and in my studies, the code I write has to demonstrate a correspondence with reality, and a certain scientific rigour is invested in achieving that. Though the art software is similar in construction (it's all just code, after all) the process is entirely different Ð explorative, experimental and inspired rather than targeted, accountable and representative.

There was a certain look I was aiming for, since around the time the work was created I was experimenting with a "sketch" rendering engine for a project in non-photo-realistic rendering. The black and white images were an attempt to get a pencil-shaded look, though as the piece progressed I grew more interested in the process along the way. I like the "blink and you'll miss it" aspect the most, I think.

Since it was so out of your hands, where you worried that the final images I created around your pieces would suck?

There was that worry, yes. I honestly had no idea how much or how little my work would feature in the finished pieces, or in what way. I'm pleased they were a key component of the process for you.

How do you like the final result? How did you like the nude version I sent you as a test image?

It's not very British of me to say so (we're supposedly a modest folk), but I honestly think the final results are stunning. I'm particularly impressed with how complementary your work and mine actually are. It's exactly the kind of work I aspire to when it's done by others, and if I wasn't already involved I'd be sending the link to all my friends saying "look at this".

The nude shot was definitely interesting, and subtly different to the finished pieces (but if they'd all been like that it wouldn't have been so easy to share with my mum!). I like the effect of the plain background, much as you used for the Metropop cover, with my artwork laid over the model's skin. Maybe we should launch an underwear range?

That's funny, I actually had a fashion editor call me to inquire about where she could get the stockings I had used for that shot. I told her only in London. Maybe we should open a virtual boutique?