Arbitrio Sistémico

The work presents three virtual sliders that allow the user to interact with a system. This is made up of text, a looped ambient sound and two images, one acting in the background and the other, masked, decorating the knobs.

The three sliders decorated with the image interact directly by changing certain values ​​such as transparency and position, among other things, of the different elements. Meanwhile the additional slider changes the combination of functions adopted by the other three. In this way, although in each initialization the combinations are decided randomly, they are set to a certain value on the scale of the additional slider, allowing creation or recreation without forcing noise or destruction in the user’s process.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

Generative art today is much disdained; We move through the paradigm of “content” and in this context we tend to understand generation as the whim of an algorithm, minimally inspired by a rarely descriptive guideline that we call prompt. Without pretending that everything in the past was better, perhaps it is worth reconsidering what we understand as generative art and not waste what the pioneers of the discipline taught us a few decades ago.

“Systemic Arbitration” is understood, rather than as a concise piece, as a system. It uses different more traditional resources that do fall into that category, but it also uses typical characteristics of an “experience.” Beyond the use, some would say abuse, of poorly controlled alliatorship, the work does not become a final product until the other decides whether it is satisfied or boring. But in the process, the system “lives” while allowing modification through an almost analog interface.

Galantier describes generative art at its most complex stage as what is between the author and the reader. “Systematic Arbitrariness” may offer more to certain individuals than others, perhaps some will get an author’s experience and another will get their own product; What is certain is that without a reader, it is nothingness itself.

Literature

GALANTER, Philip. (2011). “Entre dos fuegos: el arte-ciencia y la guerra entre ciencia y humanidades”. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya: Artnodes.