[ recap ]

Last week we looked at Ivan Illich, Ink & Switch and malleable software.

[ thoughts ]

Give two people the same instruction and you can get two different results.

You can be very clear and still leave room for interpretation.

The American artist Sol LeWitt spent decades making art this way. Before his work became known, he worked in graphic design and in the office of the architect I. M. Pei.

By the mid-1960s, LeWitt was making art from simple forms such as lines, squares and cubes, with rules for how they could repeat or combine. He could decide some things before he started instead of making every decision as he went.

In 1967, he described this method in Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.

He argued that many decisions could be made before the work itself was made. He wrote: "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."

By machine, LeWitt did not mean a computer. He meant that an idea could work like a set of instructions: decide the rules first, then let those rules guide what gets made. He no longer had to invent every part of the work from scratch.

In 1969, LeWitt opened Sentences on Conceptual Art with "Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists". A few sentences later, he argued that an irrational thought could still be followed logically.

The idea came from intuition, and the rules helped determine what happened next.

He also wrote: "The artist's will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion."

Once the process had started, he could let the rules do the deciding.

[ creativity ]

LeWitt made his first wall drawing in 1968. At first he drew them himself. Soon, other people were making them from instructions he supplied.

For Wall Drawing 273, made in 1975, LeWitt began with a few rules: a grid spread across seven walls, three colours, and particular places where each line could start.

Parts of the drawing were decided before anyone touched the wall.

Other parts were deliberately left open. LeWitt wrote: "The number of lines and their length are determined by the draftsman."

The rules narrowed the choices without deciding every line.

The drawings could also disappear. A museum might make one for an exhibition, paint over it afterwards, then recreate it years later from the same instructions. The plan survived while the physical drawing changed.

LeWitt compared his instructions to musical scores. A composer can write the notes without deciding exactly how every performance will sound.

[ making ]

In 2004, artist and programmer Casey Reas took LeWitt's ideas into software.

For a project called {Software} Structures, Reas recreated three of LeWitt's wall drawings as computer programs and then began writing his own instructions in ordinary English before turning them into code.

In LeWitt's Wall Drawing #358, the person making the drawing decides the direction and placement of a series of curved lines.

When Reas rebuilt it as software, he made the computer choose those arrangements at random.

He noticed that this "removes the decision process from the draftsperson and relies on random selection".

What had been a human decision had become a rule in the program.

Generative AI complicates this again.

A person can write an instruction and receive an image or piece of text without being able to inspect every step that produced it. The use of copyrighted material to train these systems is also still contested.

LeWitt's draftspeople could read the instructions they were following.

Reas could inspect and change his program. With generative AI, the user can see the instruction they wrote and the result, while much of what happens remains out of view.

You can borrow LeWitt's method without using software.

Take something you have been meaning to make and choose one rule before you begin. If you are taking photographs, you might keep the camera at the same height each time.

Follow the rule for one attempt and see what it changes about the work.

[ sign off ]

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See you next Sunday.