Tyler Hobbs and the Random Power of Generative Art
Tyler Hobbs goes deep on how artists should use code to represent the digital world that envelops us all.
In 2014 computer scientist and developer Tyler Hobbs wondered if he could write a program to create a painting. The most recent answer to that question came last week as Hobbs presented his new work Incomplete Control over four days at the Bright Moments gallery in New York City.
The collection of Hobbs’ 100 non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, had already sold out in October for about $7 million. The NFTs were sight unseen to both artist and buyer and were unveiled one by one. The Dec. 9 minting and unveiling ceremony was an eclectic affair with a live band, passed sushi and a giddiness that felt part wonderment and part disbelief. Seven years ago, Hobbs most certainly wouldn’t have imagined being before the SoHo audience giving his opening remarks.
“I had a little bit of a rough start, but I could tell right away that it was much more interesting than any of the drawings and paintings I had been doing.” Up to that point he’d been concentrating on figure drawing and improving his composition and design. Then code-generative art led him to entire new ways of thinking about his craft.
“It wasn't as polished, but I could tell that fundamentally there was something there that was a lot more exciting,” he said. Hobbs is slightly built with dark brown hair and an easy smile. I spoke to him as he prepared for the second night of unveilings at the gallery.
Incomplete Control #21
He’s among a handful of the most influential digital artists to emerge this year as the crypto world has exploded with NFT everything. I was reminded of Cy Twombly’s pencil drawings when the first Incomplete Control NFTs began to be revealed last week. Works in his previous collection Fidenza have a minimum price of 84 Ether, or about $320,000, according to NFT bazaar OpenSea. The 999 pieces in the collection have traded over 40,000 times, according to OpenSea.
Hobbs grew up in and around Austin, Texas on a skateboard. He got his love of computers from his brother who was a hacker. “I thought it was super cool,” he said. His brother ended up getting expelled from his high school “for allegedly hacking the system,” Hobbs said. “It’s still not a hundred percent clear what he was responsible for.” We agreed that it sounded like a War Games-type situation and left it at that.
In his opening comments, Hobbs off handedly mentioned that he’d left some of the bugs he’d found in the code that creates the Incomplete Control pieces, so I asked him more about that.
“I rely a lot on the randomness,” he said. “As I was developing the Incomplete Control program there were elements of it that were buggy under certain circumstances. And the way that the bugs behaved was really interesting to me. It's this really bizarre layout. It looks chaotic and maybe broken, but in a very like particular characteristic way that I thought was really interesting.”
The idea that a flaw in the code could be seen as the computer’s contribution to the artwork was the kind of question that had swirled around my head as I left the gallery the night before.
“That imprint of the computer on the work is not only inevitable, I try to embrace it in a certain way,” Hobbs said. “That's what I find really interesting. That almost no matter what I do it's going to be strongly shaped by these inherent characteristics of the computer hardware, of the software that I'm using. You can't escape it.”
“It’s a little challenging to the ego, to release that control over the final works because whatever comes out has my name on it.”
— Tyler Hobbs
This is the heart of what Hobbs is about. He’s written extensively on his idea that in our software immersed lives, as we interact so pervasively with the digital world, it’s incumbent upon artists to embrace and use code as a means of creating art.
In his essay “The Importance of Generative Art” he put it this way, “If wood, concrete, glass, and steel were the core materials of important new construction in the 20th century, coding has easily supplanted these in the 21st. Art must keep up with evolutions in the fabric of society.”
He’s touching on themes first articulated more than 50 years ago by Marshall McLuhan in The Medium Is the Massage, where McLuhan made the point that the media was so ever present that it had to be understood to be the basis for any social or cultural change. Here, Hobbs is saying the same but with code as the evolving force.
The fact that neither Hobbs nor the buyer had seen the Incomplete Control artworks prior to the unveiling stood out as one of the more entertaining facets of the event. It’s the first time Hobbs had ever been in that situation.
“Somebody already owns it by the time I see it,” he told me. “It's a little challenging to the ego, to release that control over the final works because whatever comes out has my name on it.” He went on, “It's interesting to already have your name attached to something that maybe I wouldn't approve of.”
To avoid that, Hobbs ran through 1,500 practice mints of the Incomplete Control program to adjust and tweak the algorithm to get it to a place he liked.
Fidenza #921
“I do not consider the code itself to be the artwork,” he said. “For me, the artistry is about conceiving and crafting the output space of the program, the potential things that it can generate and making things as refined as I can while still leaving space for the program to surprise me. To generate something that I could not have anticipated.”
I thought of my wife as I watched the NFTs keep coming at the Bright Moments opening (she passed away last year after a long illness). She was a wonderful artist and designer who nonetheless never answered to her own satisfaction why she was making paintings, drawings or watercolors in the first place. A lack of conviction, I guess, hampered her confidence. What would she have thought of giving up so much artistic control to some lines of computer code? It’s a dichotomy that Hobbs captured brilliantly with his title for the show – are you in complete control or in the throes of incomplete control?
It also occurred to me that unlike artists of the past, Hobbs can keep his art near and dear to him. These are not oils on canvas that once sold are hung on the walls of someone’s private home, never to be seen again. I remember when my wife had a show in an Oakland café where she sold a gorgeous painting for around $1,000 (a lot of money for us in our young lives). I loved that painting and it made me sad that I’d never see it again.
But the nature of NFTs allow artists like Hobbs right click that jpeg so they can continue to enjoy it while still earning a very decent living as an artist.
“A lot of our digital landscape has been built in a very corporate, financially driven, predictable way” that’s “almost joyless,” Hobbs said. “I would love for that to not always be the default.”
The success he’s found this year still doesn’t fee quite real. “I'm still amazed that this is an event in my life,” he said about the Bright Moments opening. “It seems almost preposterous for this kind of thing to happen.”
It’s hard for almost anyone in crypto to not have those zeitgeist qualms at the moment, everything seems rather preposterous and yet it keeps happening.
“If art can play any social good, it is to help us to reexamine our constructions, our materials, our environments,” Hobbs said. “Art can help to inject joy and wonder and discovery into environments that otherwise wouldn’t have it.”