WHEN THE ARTISTS MET THE ALGORIST
After a pioneer of generative art reached out to RCS, the community jumped at the chance to talk to Roman Verostko
Interview with Roman Verostko by the community on RightClickSave.com, November 11, 2022
Credit: Roman Verostko, The Magic Hand of Chance — In Praise of Petrus Ramus (detail), 1982-85. Image: RightClickSave.com
Roman Verostko’s importance to the history of generative art is unquestionable. A recipient of SIGGRAPH’s Distinguished Artist Award for Digital Art back in 2009, his legacy is evident from the artist’s online archive, which elaborates his remarkable journey from Benedictine monk to a leading figure among The Algorists. Historical TV footage like this from 1989 is a reminder of Verostko’s vital importance in bringing the conversation around art and technology to a mass public audience.
At a moment when generative artists are renewing painting, Verostko’s brush plottings prove that the physical and the digital have always been in dialogue. His work also unites Western and Chinese traditions in a way that foreshadows the global conversation that has become a hallmark of digital art since the NFT. Today, RCS is pleased to bring together two generations of artists in a conversation for the ages.
Alex Estorick: What distinguishes The Algorists from other artists working with computation?
Roman Verostko: The term “Algorist” applies to those artists who write code to generate art. I was a professional artist, exhibiting a retrospective in 1965, and brought certain mature ideas with me in my approach to writing code. My goal was to bring my art-generating ideas into software itself, so that it becomes a kind of artificial intelligence with the knowledge to execute visuals and concepts that I had in mind.
From the very beginning, my entire process was a confrontation with personal experiences that I translated into visuals. I always worked with visual oppositions and came to understand interactive color from studying Josef Albers. For example, why is it that if I place a red and a green of the same value and density of hue side by side, they produce a vibration and complement? In philosophy and theology there are extremes and experiences that are in conflict with each other that I have tried to resolve. In my art, I created contradicting structures in the same field, trying to bring them to a resolution. I even gave my code the name, Hodos, meaning “way” or “passage” in Greek.
When Jean-Pierre Hébert [who wrote the Algorist Manifesto] and I spoke, one of the things that was clear to us was that the coded procedures that embody an artist’s concept of art-making are unique. An artist like Manfred Mohr writes all his own software, and the code itself embodies a generative concept that is unique. That is an Algorist. I looked to artists like Harold Cohen and Vera Molnar, who understood that.
Browse Roman Verostko, Vera Molnar, Mandred Mohr and Harold Cohen’s work here.