Jared Tarbell — Substrate (complexification.net)

2003

Artists: Jared Tarbell · Year: 2003 · Medium: Generative Flash/ActionScript piece — algorithmically generated urban-grid pattern · Substrate: Adobe Flash, ActionScript; algorithm: perpendicular line-growth with collision-based spawning · Place: Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA · Institution: Independent practice; complexification.net Jared Tarbell's Substrate, released on his personal site complexification.net in 2003, is a generative-art piece that draws a city-like pattern of lines branching and growing across the canvas. The algorithm is simple in description: lines extend at 90 degrees, when a growing line collides with another it stops and spawns two new perpendicular lines, the whole system is left to run for a few minutes. The resulting image looks like a top-down view of an organically-grown city grid — streets dividing blocks dividing blocks, to arbitrary depth. Substrate was one of perhaps two dozen pieces on complexification.net, each one a focused study of a single generative algorithm with the ActionScript source code published on the site for other artists to study. In the early 2000s, complexification.net was the single most-visited generative-art website on the internet. Tarbell's pieces were studied, reimplemented, and remixed by a generation of creative coders who would later populate the Art Blocks generation of 2020-21. Tyler Hobbs, in his 2021 essay The Importance of Generative Art, specifically names Tarbell's work as a foundational influence. Fidenza's flow-field logic has direct conceptual ancestry in Substrate. Every 2020s generative artist who grew up watching complexification.net pieces is, in some measure, a descendant of Tarbell's practice. Tarbell remains active. He runs a studio in Albuquerque and has released NFT collections on Art Blocks including 183 Random Squares. His historical importance is larger than his NFT-era profile suggests. Lore Tarbell graduated from the University of New Mexico and spent the early 2000s working as a Flash developer while maintaining complexification.net as a side project. The site's 133 lines of code aesthetic — each piece presented as a short, readable algorithm — set editorial conventions that Art Blocks and generative platforms would later adopt. Tarbell's later Art Blocks releases have been modest in scope, consistent with his long-held preference for quietly-released work. Sources • Tarbell, Jared — complexification.net archive • Hobbs, Tyler — The Importance of Generative Art (tylerxhobbs.com, 2021) • Generator.x conference archives