"Find some old-fashioned national art manifesto about how grand and noble some nation's national art is. Pass that text through a chain-letter of online translation devices, French, Korean, German, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, Hindi, Xhosa, what-have-you. The resulting manifesto will reflect the inherently globalized generative art scene."

Bruce Sterling
for Written Images

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Digital technologies are successful tools in contemporary design. Their ascent, however, is a continuation of well-tried and reliable analog processes. No matter whether paper or digital approach — the designer organizes elements by hand. She devises aesthetic rules for her work and plays around with them until she achieves a final product.
At this point, generative design comes in and sets out to generate products through digital tools programmed by the designer. The individual impulse triggers a chain reaction of processes depending on a set of mathematical rules. This is a useful feature for designers since it serves as a conceptional pathfinder towards the final product.

Code is the computer-internal binary system brought into a form humans are capable of understanding. Code becomes more and more accessible and can be used without specialist training. Ever-faster processors facilitate sets of rules that could not be rendered in any analog way. These rules establish the visual and conceptual independence of the medium.

A generative book that presents programmed images by various artists. Each print in process will be calculated individually – which makes every single book unique.

Artists, designers and developers are encouraged to program image creating applications, which will be published as four-page spreads in the book.

These programs visualize internet data-streams or display self-generated content. They are able to save continuously changing images on demand.

Every application will run through an auto-generative printing program which generates and compiles all images and metatexts into a printable book.

The printing will be done digitally due to continuously changing data.

The final result will be an unique art book; a fusion of various digital artworks in printed form.

A jury has selected 42 artworks out of 70 submitted applications:

Artists:
386dx25, Antoni Kaniowski, Ariel Malka, Carl-Johan Rosén, Casey Reas, clone, David Bollinger, David Bouchard, e m o c, flight404, Golan Levin, Jonathan McCabe, Jörg Piringer, Julien Deswaef, Kim Asendorf, kraftner, Leonardo Solaas, Lia, Luke Sturgeon, Marcin Ignac, Marius Watz, Michael Zick Doherty, Mitchell Whitelaw, Moka, Nervous System, Oliver Smith, paolon, Perceptor, rhymeandreason, Ricard Marxer, Roberto Christen, Rui Madeira, Ryan Alexander, Ryland Wharton, Sansumbrella, sojamo, Stefano Maccarelli, Szymon Kaliski, Victor Martins, W:Blut, William Lindmeier, zenbullets

Jury:
Annette Schindler [PlugIn, Basel]
Christiane Paul [Whitney Museum, New York]
Filip Visnjic [CAN, London]
Gill and Diego Stampa [Stampa, Basel]
Heinz Widmer [BuroDestruct, Bern]
Ludovic Balland [Graphic Designer, Basel]
Stefan Gandl [Neubau, Berlin]
T.Tissot and N.Bourquin [Onlab, Berlin]
Wolf Lieser [DAM, Berlin/Cologne]

Contact:
mail@writtenimages.net

Supported:
Gray Area Foundation for the Arts
Druckerei Dietrich
Thanks To:
Processing, openFrameworks, Cinder, vvvv, Golan Levin, Bruce Sterling, HyperWerk 01010101, André Sier, Andy, Andy Clymer, Andy Doro, Brad Borevitz, Brendan Oliver, Dean McNamee, Dylan Collins, ellala, Ethan Miller, Evsc, Generative Gestaltung, Guido Corallo, Jan Vantomme, Ken Huxley, Luke Noonan, Maff, makc, Matthias Zauner, mb09, mentalX, Monokai, Neil Banas, Paul Prudence, Pierre Proske, Rui P.G. Pereira, Sergio Albiac, Philip Whitfield, Catherine Walthard, Frank Fietzek, Ralf Neubauer, Luca Vicente, Leander Herzog, David Bollinger, Lukas Gross, Konrad Sigl, Christine Gmür, Marina Siedl, Fabian Frei, Marion Zoë Ramirez, Sairah Rizvi, Amit Bapat, Leslie Marticke, Josette Melchor, Timon Christen
Project by Martin Fuchs and Peter Bichsel
This website and contents are licensed under Creative Commons [Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5]
Basel, 23.05.2011