Marius Watz — Systemaesthetics and Generator.x

2002

Artists: Marius Watz · Year: 2002 · Medium: Generative practice — plotter, print, screen, installation · Substrate: Processing, openFrameworks, custom JavaScript; plotters, printers, digital displays · Place: Oslo, Norway / New York, USA · Institution: Independent (unlekker.net); Generator.x conference series (co-founded) Marius Watz, a Norwegian generative artist based in Oslo and New York, launched the Generator.x project in 2002 as a blog, conference series, and research platform specifically for the discipline he was helping to institutionalize: generative art understood as a formal artistic tradition with its own history, its own reference works, and its own critical apparatus. The project ran a major international conference at the Atelier Nord in Oslo in 2005 and several subsequent events through the late 2000s, bringing together the then-small generative-art community (Casey Reas, Jared Tarbell, Karl Sims, Erik Natzke, LIA, and many others) for extended in-person discussion and exhibition. Watz's argument across the Generator.x project was specific and consequential. He insisted that generative art had a lineage that preceded the Processing era by forty years — that the 1960s Stuttgart school's computer-art work, Sol LeWitt's instruction-based drawings, the procedural music of Steve Reich and Terry Riley, and the recent software-art generation were continuous, and that the field's historical self-understanding required treating them as a single tradition. At a moment (2002–07) when the emerging Processing-era generative-art community was still largely operating in a post-historical "this is new" mode, Watz was making the opposite argument: this is old, you are the latest in a long line, and the work is richer if you know the line. Watz has, since 2002, consistently produced generative work (plotter drawings, 3D-printed sculptures, interactive installations) that reflect the historical consciousness he argued for. His own practice is legible as a serious continuation of the Stuttgart school's algorithmic-plotter tradition, rendered in 2000s-2010s vocabulary. He has lectured and published widely on the field's history. Generator.x's influence was larger than its size. The 2005 Oslo conference brought many of the artists who would define the subsequent decade's generative-art boom into formal acquaintance with each other; many subsequent collaborations trace back to conversations at that conference. Lore Watz had been making digital work since the mid-1990s — he was part of the small Scandinavian net-art scene of that period — but had felt increasingly isolated as the generative-art community fragmented into online clusters in the early 2000s. The Generator.x blog was, in his own telling, partly an attempt to convene a community that was not convening itself. The 2005 Oslo conference ran for three days with roughly eighty participants; Watz organized it essentially solo with Atelier Nord's staff support. Several of the subsequent major figures in generative art first encountered each other at that conference, and several ongoing collaborations trace back to hotel-bar conversations during those three days. Watz has said that organizing the field was as much his artistic contribution as any specific work he made. Sources • Watz, Marius — Generator.x (generatorx.no blog archive, 2002–). • Watz, Marius — mariuswatz.com (artist archive). • Atelier Nord — Generator.x conference documentation (2005).