OFF SCRIPT - EMILY XIE
This was part of an ongoing series of articles that was released digitally throughout July 2022. They were first published in the print edition of the Bright Moments Quarterly that was distributed in July in London.
Malte: Thanks so much for taking the time to do this interview, Emily. I would like to begin by asking how you first got involved with generative art?
Emily: I first got involved with generative art around 2015, motivated by my desire to somehow combine art and coding. My formal educational background is in art and art history, along with engineering. In terms of art, I had been studying and practicing it for my entire life; whereas for programming, I had been working professionally as a software engineer. Given my dedication to these two fields, I was certainly looking for ways to bridge them––and generative art was the best way to do so.
Those early days of discovering generative art were profoundly exciting for me. I initially came across the artform through Daniel Shiffman’s “Coding Train” educational series. The genre immediately resonated with me, and his fun, approachable teaching style kept me engaged. I watched many of his videos, and before I knew it, I had ended up learning the foundations of generative art through the series. I later on attended a programming retreat where I received a grant to further explore generative art and later did a technology-and-arts residency that allowed me to experiment with a broader range of technical possibilities.
What are the major influences and inspirations in your work as a creative coder?
In the generative art community, I’ve been following the work of Thomas Lin Pedersen, Matt DesLauriers, Zach Lieberman, and Tyler Hobbs, along with many others for a long time now. So it is of course an incredible honor to be part of the same upcoming collection as some of these folks.
Aside from these practitioners, my personal heros are Lauren McCarthy and Daniel Shiffman, who are some of the folks behind p5.js, my favorite creative coding library. Their work with and philosophy towards creative coding has taught me to embrace the medium with a sense of endless curiosity, continual learning, and playful experimentation. Not only that, but they’ve built an incredible community around the library–– one which I am continually inspired by.
My studies in art history certainly influence my artwork as well, though certainly on a more subconscious level. I primarily focused on modern art, so I’d say that these aesthetics have found their way into my work. In terms of theory, I was particularly interested in the approaches of formalism and semiotics, which have shaped how I not only interpret but create art.
How did the emergence of the NFT space shape the field of generative art in your opinion? And how has it shaped yours in particular?
The NFT space has strongly embraced generative art. This has driven the field towards certain norms of creation. Namely, it has codified the idea of “long form” work––a term penned by Tyler Hobbs in his excellent exposition describing generative algorithms in which all outputs must be accepted as part of the work itself.
For my personal practice, the embrace of these norms means that I have evolved the way I think about my programs. Instead of hard-coding parameters, I now spend more time programming flexibility into them. At the same time, it also forces me to explore the full range of outputs and either strategically constrain or develop heuristics to pare back undesirable combinations.
Limiting the range of the series to 100 outputs means that chance is a crucial factor in determining the work. How do you feel about chance and randomness in your practice?
For me, generative art often means exploring the interplay of chance and control. I love being surprised. However, I also know that if one gives too much free rein to randomness, things can quickly spiral out of control. I certainly tend to veer more towards the side of chaos, so I’m aware that I have to limit and control this tendency. The process becomes a fairly delicate balance for me.
What themes do you explore in your series for the Bright Moments exhibition in London?
I continue to explore texturality, form, and structure in the Bright Moments series. Specifically, I am leaning into my embrace of the collage aesthetic, as the London Collection foregrounds the theme of “craftwork.” So I suppose that, in a way, I’m letting the theme of the show focus my explorations as I work on the project.
How does your creative process unfold?
In terms of my creative process, I tend to start by creating mood boards where I aggregate images and materials that resonate with me. This is important to me, because it really allows me to externalize what I’m feeling at the moment in a way that words cannot. After that, I typically begin to explore different design systems. As I’ve been working on this project, I tend to continually prototype by roping in various textures and colors in Photoshop to quickly see how it affects the mood and feel of a piece or palette. Coding is a pretty time-intensive process, so this quick iteration process is important to me.
It is fascinating how you move from an analog montage to an arrangement of these elements through code. Does the fact that these works will be exhibited in physical space influence your work with the code as well?
I would say that it has not driven the coding process itself, but it has had an influence on the aesthetics that I decided to pursue. After seeing the space, I started envisioning what types of work would mesh with the atmosphere and theme of the venue.
In conclusion, I would like to ask where you see generative art ten years from now?
I think we are early in the adoption of a historically overlooked artform. Generative art has lived on the margins for so long, and the traditional art world is finally starting to embrace this genre. In 10 years, I believe that generative art will be more widely taught and recognized on an international level. I expect to increasingly see this artform in museums and in art writings. And I hope that with more awareness of the field, that we’ll see a more diverse group of people joining it. It has historically been very male-dominated, despite the fact that so many pioneering women, such as Vera Molnar, have played an important role in shaping it.
I am pretty excited about what’s in store for generative art. And I am extraordinarily happy to be part of this movement as it evolves.
