Code is a set of rules, predetermined by artists, that define the system in which the aesthetic objects are created. Algorithms, the aggregation of these rules, dictate how the system operate without artists’ additional intervention, thus “generating” results on its own. Although Generative seems like a random and organic mechanism like metabolism, its process can be “verified and rationally understood” (Candy, Edmonds and Poltronieri, 2018). Generative also means that artists focus more on the system they built to create visual results, instead of the results per se. 

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The fact that the recent iPhone 14’s press conference, 15 years after its first invented version, still attracted the widespread publicity affirms our nature is increasingly replaced by an “intermedia network”(Buckminster and Youngblood, 2020). Growing up immersing ourselves in the digital world, we tend to  take this system for granted while in fact it is a recent technological revolution in the history of humanity. One of the tensions arose is thus the prevalence of technological tools and users’ unawareness of their imbedded ideology. During BEING MATERIAL’s panel discussion, Casey Reas shared his Processing project that teaches visual artists to create digital tools for their artistic practice. He shared different computer languages of drawing a triangle and pointed out different thinking modes underlying it. Since the distinctive “sketching” tools affect the process of idealizing artworks, it’s essential to teach artists how to create these tools and liberate them from market-driven tools like Photoshop. 

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In this way, the exhibition The Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018 provided a good example of showing two intertwined stories of the technology that raised that tension. The first part of the show “examines the program as instructions, rules, and algorithms with a focus on conceptual art practices and their emphasis on ideas as the driving force behind the art”, and I understand it as a story showing how early experimentalists harness the power of automated program and produce interesting visual results. The second strand “engages with the use of instructions and algorithms to manipulate the TV program, its apparatus, and signals or image sequences,” which could be seen as a critique on how algorithm, apart from being a neutral and productive tool, can powerfully change ideas.