Some years ago, in an old Studio International magazine, I came across an article by contemporary composer Brian Eno, called Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts.

In it he talks about examining and questioning the organizational structures inherent in much of Western Music. Things we take for granted such as an Orchestra following a Score (a very precise set of instructions) written by a Composer, Conducted (Marshalled), from the peak of a pyramidal hierarchy that extends down through section leaders and on down through the ranks, all doing their jobs to comply with the intentions of the Composer, who, ideally, had absolute power over the whole structure and its behaviour.

Eno employs concepts and terms such as variety, variety-reducer, selection and heuristics, taken from Cybernetics (the science of organization) and evolution theory, "The environment in this case is a variety-reducer because it "selects" certain strains by allowing them to survive and reproduce, and filters out others."

Eno contends that [...] a primary focus of experimental music has been toward its own organization, and toward its own capacity to produce and control variety, and to assimilate "natural variety" – the "interference value" of the environment. [...] experimental composition aims to set in motion a system or organism that will generate unique (that is, not necessarily repeatable) outputs, but that, at the same time, seeks to limit the range of these outputs. This is a tendency toward a "class of goals" rather than a particular goal [...]

Extraordinarily rich, complex pieces of music (or visual art) can be generated by following a few simple instructions. Jasper Johns was on to this when he wrote in his notebook these instructions for making a piece:

Take something. Do something to it. Do something else to it.

Art by heuristic.

This can lead to very interesting places, but will not lead "just anywhere". An important variety-reducer in this case is personal preference. As with other strategies for making art, aspects of the work the artist doesn't like can always be filtered out.

When I got my first Macintosh, in 1994, I began to experiment with this process, turning my mac into a little Darwinian drawing environment, where selection was aesthetic or guided by curiosity and where there was always the Undo option, to steer the course of events.

Series of shapes emerged -- no two alike, but each bore a family resemblance to the rest. These shapes were not "designed" in the usual sense of the word... it would be more accurate to say that they were "grown". Each began with a set of "seed" shapes, which might look something like this:

Download a pdf of
Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts
(right-click and download file)

to which were applied simple rules such as "outline each black pixel in turquoise". These were reiterated and/or alternated with additional simple rules, causing growth and mutation, often resulting in crystal-like structures. I've illustrated the process in the little animation above.

It was an absolutely mesmerizing process. I would immerse myself in the work for hours, often working all night, as one image grew into the next, and into the next. I never knew exactly where it was going -- and that was a big part of the excitement as these images revealed themselves.

When I recently came across an archive of these old digital files I felt some of the excitement I'd felt back then, and decided to post them here.   Many of the images are unavoidably large – they don't scale well – the delicate structures "clog up" when they're reduced, so apologies for the slow downloads.

I'd be very interested in any thoughts you might have about this series.

–Thomas Ziorjen, 2006