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Matt DesLauriers on a Generative World

Matt DesLauriers created the generative art project, Bitframes, which serves as a crowdfund for the production of a feature-length documentary film, Generative, providing historical context to generative art. DesLauriers spoke to Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) about both projects. They also cover the co-creative possibilities of generativity that the projects reveal, as well as how to bridge public understanding and institutional recognition of the art form.
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Peter Bauman: You're involved with a documentary feature film, Generative, that provides historical context to the generative art movement. Can you tell us more about it? What do you hope to achieve with the project and how do you see your role in shaping the narrative?‍

‍Matt DesLauriers: For the last year or more, I've been working with filmmakers in London on a documentary film titled Generative—for now. The idea is a film that really embodies the history of generative art back from the 1950s and 1960s all the way to today. It highlights some of the pioneers and processes involved, talking to both artists and curators. It's been this massive project and very exciting.
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I want to share my own passions for generative art with a wider audience. 

A film is a really nice way of doing that, where potentially it can get streamed to massive platforms with huge viewership. Suddenly, many more people could start to understand, at least why I'm super interested in generative art. So I've been trying to help this film progress in many ways, whether it's connecting the filmmakers with artists or giving my anecdotes and stories—helping them understand all the interesting things that are happening in this field.

‍Peter Bauman: You mentioned sharing your passion to reach a wider audience, which is a continuous challenge in this space—and probably just art and new media art in general. So how do we actually go about connecting with that audience even if they see us unexpectedly on a streaming service?‍

‍Matt DesLauriers: Especially today, we're more and more faced with generative technologies, including AI and algorithms. They’re becoming essential parts of all media, whether it's written text, images, videos or 3D animations.
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Soon we're going to be living in this generative world where a lot of content is procedurally created with AI or some form of programming logic. The more we enter this world, the more we all have to be aware of how it works and its limitations and biases. 

There's also this interesting history that’s often been overlooked, especially this art history of computer art. It's something that curators and art appreciators have mostly neglected. Sometimes the neglect has been more explicit. In the sixties, it would have been tied to the fact that the early machines were often repurposed from military use. So the original artists using those machines were seen as having ties to the military industrial complex. There was enormous backlash for that.

Today, many artists are using technologies like AI or blockchain, and they're getting similar pushback. So it's come full circle. Artists are always trying to push these boundaries and experiment with these new technologies, but all these technologies have negative sides to them as well. So there's always this challenging push and pull.

Generativity is a timely subject right now; it's something a lot of audiences would really appreciate. But the reality is that a lot of audiences have no idea what generative art is. They don't really know what it means to make art with code or with computers.
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‍Peter Bauman: You mentioned how those early military and government ties to computers or the Internet impacted how people viewed the art made with them—usually in a negative way. It does feel similar to today, when we have these new technologies—be it NFTs or AI—that are experiencing similar backlash. But in some ways, it also feels different from some of those other backlashes. This film Generative presents NFTs as part of a larger continuum of technological interventions and art that Le Random certainly celebrates.‍

‍Given the polarizing nature of NFTs, how do we move past these negative associations and engage with these technologies more thoughtfully? How might the film help with that?‍

‍Matt DesLauriers: There are many extreme reactions against NFTs, and there have been since their big boom. Some of those negative reactions were tied to environmental issues with proof of work. Some were tied to speculation or just the lack of sense of security when using crypto, which is definitely a valid concern.

As the technology improves and progresses, it will continue to become something that finds its way into modern life, whether it's as the backbone of certain transactions or something the average user might not even really be aware of. It’s the same way that many users of banking apps are not really aware of how the underlying infrastructures work.

At the same time, those underlying infrastructures power many different technologies. That might be something where the blockchain eventually comes in: certain institutions, users or industries using these technologies in the lowest level ways possible. There may also be higher-level solutions on top that cater to a more mainstream audience. I also think they really are an important part of the history of computer art and generative art.
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It wouldn’t be doing it justice to do a film about computer and generative art while omitting NFTs or skipping that part of the history. It is part of the history, whether or not you like NFTs.

Museums and institutions also realize this, grappling with: how do they present that? How do they collect that? How do they display these works? That's just like with the film. NFTs are one facet of this long history, obviously not the only facet and not the main focus. They are being presented as part of a larger piece. I actually think NFTs and blockchain can be quite a transformative tool. I'm hoping that with the crowdfund that I’m putting out for this film that it'll actually prove that—many people can use this crowdfund method with very different fee structures than traditional finance using payment processors like Stripe or Visa. Interestingly to me, this crowdfund presents a different technology that's based on open source and decentralization.
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‍Peter Bauman: We will talk much more about the crowdfund art project, Bitframes, but you mentioned the institutional art world and its ambivalence to blockchain-based work. That seems like it may be changing recently with LACMA’s show Coded and subsequent acquisition of NFTs. MoMA did their blockchain-based Postcard project with Feral File. The Pompidou had their Vera Molnár retrospective. Buffalo AKG opened Electric Op with several artists that embraced blockchains. Tate has Electric Dreams opening November 2024, which is a digital art historical show. The V&A has long collected digital art but it recently released a full book, Digital Art: 1960s to Now.‍

‍It seems like museums are coming around but there's still this gap in public understanding. What are some of the challenges of bridging that gap?‍

‍Matt DesLauriers: Digital work has been under the radar for a lot of mainstream audiences. A lot of people, when I talk about the kind of work that I do, don't really understand what it entails—how sometimes an image can come from logic, code and programming. Shows like the upcoming Tate show or LACMA’s Coded give the audience a bit of a deeper understanding. They can walk through and see that sometimes things like punch cards, code, rules and logic come together to form different outputs.

They can also see certain works as they’re meant to be displayed, like in real time, which is a big difference. When you see something that's being generated in real time, as you stand there, you begin to realize that every time it generates, it's producing a different output. It's never going to produce the same output twice.

‍Real-time animation is something where audiences begin to realize that this is a bit of a different beast. I find that the more that audiences understand what's going on, the more appreciation they often have for the work. 

Part of it is just a matter of having these shows at major institutions and getting audiences to understand it, because there already is this appetite for something technologically inclined—our curiosity for computer-based work. There's also something powerful in tying in the history, especially the early history and pioneers, which many of these shows highlight well. It's amazing to go to these shows and see these artists and artworks that have been neglected—sometimes in a garage for decades collecting dust, mold or damp—and suddenly they've been unearthed. People are beginning to realize that these are fantastic works of art and very significant pieces. In some ways, it's a very slow, gradual revelation of how we're perceiving this work. This focus on history and pioneers is one of the things I hope the film contributes to as well.
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‍Peter Bauman: It’s like a pinwheel effect where institutions were initially capitalizing on renewed public interest and now we need the institutions to further that education with the public, which can lead to greater interest and even more shows. We had also mentioned before that there’s been this historical uncertainty around emerging technologies. It seems that with each new advancement—we talked about AI and blockchain—anxiety levels are increasing.‍

‍What do you see as the role of art in this, especially generative and digital art? How does art help us navigate this uncertainty?‍

‍Matt DesLauriers: AI is a really good example where it's been around for several decades—also since the 1950s or even earlier. It's gone through multiple winters, booms and busts. But it's only in the last couple of years that it hit this apex. Everyone knows about AI now and everyone's talking about ChatGPT or image generators. There's also this real fear and anxiety, especially in the creative and artistic communities, because in some sense we imagined that robots would be taking the jobs that we didn't want to do, like loading the dishwasher or something.

Now they're taking our creative jobs; they're taking our creativity. In a sense, it’s like they’re taking our creativity away from us. What’s happening with AI is not really all that different from what's happened with many other forms of technology—whether it's the printing press, computers or the Internet—where we suddenly have this influx of new ways of doing things. How we used to do things maybe doesn't make sense or doesn't quite work. Maybe it still works fine, like vinyl records, but it becomes something that you appreciate in some sense because of its analog components. If we want to play music, we're not only limited to vinyl records.

Vinyl is probably a cumbersome way to play music now but it is still something great that a lot of people love. I think the same is going to be true of any art form that AI touches. In some ways, the more we surround ourselves with these technologies, the more we become comfortable with them, the more this anxiety will start to dissipate and the more it'll become very common to use AI for certain things, like tweaking an image, a video or editing some text. It'll become like using a calculator. Even with that, I don't think it's going to necessarily destroy artists in any way. I think artists will find creative uses for it, and some artists will just choose not to use it—to stick with analog components, just as people do today with many analog components from the past that are still around.
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‍Peter Bauman: That's a good transition to discuss more about Bitframes, your art project that's serving to crowdfund the film. Can you tell us more about the connection between this generative, systems-based project and the film Generative?‍

‍Matt DesLauriers: Bitframes is a system that is completely encoded in 32 bytes of data. I really started thinking about it as I went down this rabbit hole of punch cards and computer art history. There's this beauty in the constraint of something like a punch card, where you have eighty columns, a very limited number of bytes of data that can fit. That single card acts as an input to the computer. You literally feed it into the computer and the computer takes that card, processes it, and turns it into something.

In the ‘60s, artists like Manfred Mohr would have used punch cards—writing in Fortran or something similar—and feeding them into a massive mainframe computer. The computer job would take hours or even days. They might have needed to schedule a slot for when they could put their punch cards into the machine. Then the next day they’d come back and would see their work, whether it was pen-plotted, printed, or displayed in some way. They would then tweak from there. They might see, “Okay, it's not very nice,” or there might be a bug or other issue.
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There’s beauty in working with an incredibly limited number of bytes and having it where each of those bytes represents some part of the system. That's where I started thinking about Bitframes.

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Each of these 32 bytes, if you change even one bit, has drastic implications for the visual output [Note: in the two images directly above, only the colors were changed]. The idea is that this is an open project. For a long time now, since I've been interested in blockchain, I've been wanting to create an open project where potentially thousands of people could interact with the system, creating a distributed gallery or database full of different encodings and different media. Because this project is so constrained, each of those inputs into the system can actually fit very neatly on the blockchain—in a single integer. In the blockchain, a single integer can be up to 256 bits, which is 32 bytes. So each integer represents a different input into the system, a different composition or somebody's creation.

Like we mentioned earlier, it becomes another interesting use case for the blockchain as well, where it's being used as a storage mechanism for this artwork. So that’s where it all started. As I developed this project, I realized it's a perfect opportunity to donate the project’s proceeds towards the production of the film. That's how this crowdfund came about—to generate some of the funds to start doing some of these international interviews with artists while they're still in good health. There are many pioneering artists getting on in age and it's really important to record, capture and tell their stories well. They're still around. Some of them have been here since the beginning of the history of computer art. Despite that, they might not be really well recorded. There might not be a lot of photography or video documentation of their work. So it's a wonderful opportunity to actually capture that.
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100% of the net proceeds of the Bitframes sale are going towards the production of the film. I’m donating this artwork towards the production of this documentary and the history of generative art. 

That's something that I wanted to highlight. This film has become a bit of a passion project for me—really wanting this film to live and be out there and reach a wider mainstream audience. I'm hoping that Bitframes and this crowdfund will be one way of helping to make that happen. I'm really excited to see how it goes, especially how the community runs with the code and the open-source nature of the project.

‍Peter Bauman: We're certainly aligned with trying to bring more attention to these pioneers or document their work and lives more. I want to cover several things you just brought up but maybe we can begin with the co-creative, parametric element of the project.‍

‍Can you tell us more about that parametric visual space you created? What does it reveal about your point of view as an artist?‍

‍Matt DesLauriers: Because it’s constrained to 32 bytes, each of these little numbers, just by changing them, you produce a different output. A similar analogy is to actually look at a punch card and the little punches. If you moved one punched hole to another place, or if you punched an extra hole, or if you took a punch away, you're suddenly going to end up with a different artwork. One way of experimenting and exploring this parametric space is just by randomly punching different holes—basically randomly hitting the generator, which randomizes the 32 bytes so you end up with a different output.

Another way of exploring this parametric space is that I set up a user interface for each of these controls, whether it's changing colors, density of the grid or other aspects. In some ways, the more you get into this user interface, the more it feels like you're actually able to paint something unique. I've noticed you're really able to craft something that might be very hard to find with just randomization.

More generally around generative art, and as generative artists, we're often looking at just one slice of outputs of some algorithm or some parametric space. We usually tune it to how we like it, and then we hit the randomizer a lot and see different outputs.
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If you give the system to somebody else, they might have a unique way of looking at it. They might have a different way of using it and end up with something that's very different than anything you would have seen in thousands and thousands of iterations. 

When you give the system not just to one other person but to thousands of people, you have the potential to create a lot of interesting, distinct variations on something where if it's just me doing it on my own, I'm a bit more limited. That's one thing I really like about the openness of the parametric space.

In terms of the visual inspiration, a lot of that comes from a combination between early computer art, specifically, computer art focused on algorithms, like elementary cellular automata, which is one of the algorithms that drives the Bitframes system. There's also inspiration from textiles and the colors that you get from a very limited set of threads, a limited set of palettes and colors. But when they overlap and intersect, you end up with a composition—a textile of sorts—that’s very colorful and, at the same time, somewhat constrained and grid-based.
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‍Peter Bauman: I love that reference to textiles because that’s another layer to the punch-card element and highlights the history of punch cards and textiles, as well as early computation.‍

‍I also appreciate that emphasis on community and co-creation. You mentioned how giving up that control or autonomy allows viewers to take the work in directions that you might not have expected. Why else might relinquishing that control be important to you? What does it reveal about your approach to art?‍

‍Matt DesLauriers: With my approach to art and specifically generative art, a lot of what I'm interested in is setting up some system and then letting the system run in some ways on its own—without my control over every aspect of it. There's something to this that I find much more captivating than a single image or artwork. When I’m painting, I sometimes end up with something I might be happy with, but at the end of it, it’s just one output. It feels like I could have so much more. I could have chosen small differences. I could have used slightly different color, missed a line here or added a line there.
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With generative art, I actually am able to make something with all these variations and the artwork is no longer static. That's something I wanted to focus on with Bitframes—how dynamic the artwork can be. 

The other aspect of Bitframes that is a bit more technical is that I'm trying to treat it as an open source codec. Just like if we open a file, like a PNG, on our computers, all the computers, browsers and everything around the world have agreed on a single way to read these PNG files. Depending on the number of bytes and what the byte data is, it turns those into pixels in a deterministic, specific way.

I think it'd be interesting if we had 32 bytes on a punch card—or a blockchain—and everyone just agreed that if you take those 32 bytes and you transform them in a specific way, you end up with a Bitframes composition. So another aspect of this is that it becomes this open source encoding project, where it might have different lives, outputs and ways of being used. As an MIT licensed open-source artwork, some people might, for example, use it as a way of testing different color palettes—color palettes that I haven't set up in this. It becomes a way of saying, “Okay, I have sixteen colors and how does it look with a generative artwork?” Instead of having to rewrite a whole generative artwork, you could actually just use Bitframes as a base for that.

Outputs could also be rendered as an actual textile, SVG, E ink or something else. There are many ways of approaching this project that I hope the community can get interested in.

‍Peter Bauman: That’s a fascinating emphasis on autonomy or how much control to share with the community. I’m also interested in the open edition choice. Many art world institutions critique this space for its focus on financialization by adding a layer of artificial scarcity to the digital. But early blockchain theorists, like Rhea Myers, talk about the real revolution of the blockchain not being artificial scarcity but digital ownership, whether financialized or not. How do you see open editions as challenging this idea of artificial scarcity?‍

‍Matt DesLauriers: I really like this idea that with the blockchain, you have a nearly unlimited range of data rows, different compositions, outputs or users. There's just such a vastness to the blockchain, where the largest integer you can store is 256 bits. It’s hard to fathom how big this number is but that's how many different encodings we could potentially have with Bitframes.

It’s nearly infinite and there's something really amazing there. It does feel quite limiting to use just a hundred or fifty different outputs—even a thousand outputs. That's where an open edition makes the most sense. It feels like it aligns the most with the blockchain. There's no limit to how many encodings can be stored in this distributed way. It could be millions, billions or trillions because the blockchain just has such a large capacity to store these integers.

My intent was to make it as open as possible, but in terms of the reality of the situation—because it is a crowdfund going towards actually making Generative, the interviews and expenses—there has to be an endpoint. We thought four weeks was a good endpoint and a classic crowdfund format. After the crowdfund finishes, I really still wanted a way for users to interact with this on-chain system.
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That's why we created a second collection that's titled the 32 Bit Edition. The idea is that it's 32 limited-edition NFTs distributed over the course of the four weeks to collectors and users of the system. Each week of the auction, four limited tokens will be randomly allocated to users of the crowdfund for a total of 16. After the crowdfund ends, the remaining 16 will be distributed to the top contributors by ETH. This way, half is allocated to the community and the other half is allocated to the top supporters.

The idea is that when you hold one of these 32 Bit Editions, even years or decades later, you could still update the encodings and update the data that lies behind the work to change the output and change the composition. In some sense that becomes the unlimited aspect of the project, where after the financial aspects of this project close and after the crowdfund and transactional component is finished, then the 32 Bit Edition that remains on chain can still take on a life of its own and have its own evolution.

You're not going to be able to mint new works; you're only going to be able to update the seed or the encoding to change the artwork. It becomes a gallery of 32 distinct visual outputs but over time those 32 might change and evolve. Somebody might find an encoding that they really like and they'll say, “Okay, I want this to be the current encoding,” or maybe they'll just stick with what they have forever. There's this open possibility and only the holder of the work can actually change it.

‍Peter Bauman: That’s another fascinating layer to the autonomy aspect of the project. Finally, will this be Ethereum Layer 1? Is it a bespoke contract? Will you be releasing it with a platform partner?‍

‍Matt DesLauriers: It's going to run on Ethereum Layer 1, allowing everything to be on-chain and fully decentralized. The project is being supported by Highlight.xyz, who are building custom Solidity contracts for the novel crowdfunding mechanics and minting flow.
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Bitframes is an open edition sale and film crowdfund starting Friday, November 22, 2024, and running until December 20, 2024. Links and more details will be announced on @mattdesl and @Highlight_xyz's social channels.
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Matt DesLauriers is an artist whose practice primarily focuses on code, software and generative processes. He is also an active contributor to open source software, building tools and libraries to support creative coding and generative art workflows.
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Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) is Le Random's Editor-in-Chief.