This changed worldview is what is reflected in generativity’s
obsession with randomness. Randomness is a way of choosing things as
surely as linear progression is, but it is a way that now seems more
naturalistic. Randomness is generativity’s perspective: if you’re
going to do it a different way you’re departing from the norm.
But randomness is a mid-20th-century reflection, one that very soon
may look as mannered as the output of a “Spirograph”. It was a
reaction to a set of social conditions that have not held for some
time. And imposing order on randmoness, finding patterns in the noise,
is a connoseurish and distracting activity to impose on the
viewer. More contemporary choice and noise functions are needed, ones
that give the viewer something more interesting to see and to do.
http://shop.lomography.com/colorsplashcamera/
This sort of aesthetic intervention seems somehow generative, in that the technology processes the input to create something new, but it’s a real-world generativity, a generativity before the fact. I want a camera that projects halftones…
Post-Industrialism has led to the rise of contemporary reform
movements, similarly concerned with rejecting or embracing the
aesthetic and mode of production of the day.
Anti-globalisation seeks to return the first world to a romanticised
pre-branding past with an aesthetic of genuine, unmediated
first-order experience and social exchange and space whilst bringing
the third world out of poverty. But as offshoring gains pace the
anti-globalisation dream of removing the intrusion of branding into
everyday life and levelling living conditions around the world may be
realised only ironically.
The Open Source movement seeks to alter the ownership and rewards of
technological production and distribution, with anything beyond a
rough and ready functionalist aesthetic undetermined outside of
software development. Open Source is a flexible model that can be
applied to areas outside of software engineering and the media. Anything
that can be designed or distributed can be open sourced, with
competition based on quality of manufacture, delivery or support.
Open Source, then is a model that can and must be applied to the
production of social and aesthetic forms as well as technological
ones. Open Source is a redistribution of capital (or at least value), but
distributed and voluntary rather than centralised and
imposed. How this will look has yet to be decided. Hopefully without a
centralised bureaucracy to impose a “Socialist Realism” or yBA-style kitsch
aesthetic the results will be vital.