Note: If you see this text you use a browser which does not support usual Web-standards. Therefore the design of Media Art Net will not display correctly. Contents are nevertheless provided. For greatest possible comfort and full functionality you should use one of the recommended browsers.

Themesicon: navigation pathGenerative Toolsicon: navigation pathGenerative Art
 
Cubic Limit (Mohr, Manfred), 1972
 
 
 

icon: previous page

and through which aesthetic conditions (distributions or arrangements) can be produced deliberately and methodically [9]. By using the laws of statistics, Bense hoped to achieve a rational basis for creating images. He subdivided picture surfaces into tiny squares and investigated the individual colour values, looking for internal connections in order to be able to create new images according to predetermined criteria. But he was unsuccessful in this endeavour and gave up this method. From then on, Bense dedicated himself to semiotic examination, thereby pursuing the artistic goal of "[ &] a rational production of art […]"[10] through a rational production of symbols. The target of his investigations therefore remained the aesthetic process. "Actually, such aesthetic systems, just like information, are expressions of a distribution and selection process, and both the relative frequency of a symbol as well as the relative freedom that one has to choose it from among other available possibilities, are generally, at the beginning of the aesthetic process, in no way statistically preferable with respect to frequency or choices of other symbols (which are in general set in advance). On the whole, the

 

probabilities of being chosen and of appearing are, at first, equal for all the symbols in the available group"[11] .The aesthetic act of formation however belongs to "that class of processes that start with purely stochastic equal probabilities in the course of which, however, the probability with which certain symbols can be chosen and appear becomes greater and greater while the probability for certain others […] becomes smaller and smaller, and finally disappears" [12]. Manfred Mohr[13] worked under the theoretical influence of Bense. He attempted to respond to calls for the creation of a rational art, also known as artificial art , through the realisation of logical and unemotional concepts, organized in such a way that all aesthetic decisions were taken over by a computer programme. In the series Cubic Limit (1973-1977) a normal twelve-edged cube is systematically dismantled in order to produce the pictures. The cube remained the form in Mohr's work, later being extended into the four-dimensional, so-called, hypercube with 32 edges. Through the systematic application of operations such as rotation, addition/subtraction etc., an inexhaustible number of aesthetic signs was

icon: next page