[TheOtherHobbes]

Hard disagree with your disagree. Very few procedural artists seem to have a good feel for the medium they're working in, or know much about art/music history and current trends.

They either have a very shallow understanding ("I made an image" = "I made art"; "I played some samples in a browser or trained a GAN" = "I made music") or they have an academic misunderstanding, based on a decent technical understanding of the grammars of the medium, but limited insight into how creative originators can use grammars expressively.

There are exceptions, especially in visuals, so you have a point about Sturgeon's Law. But there are still far too many people treating generative media as a technical exercise, and too few using them for impressive original creativity.

[fragmede]

They said (and say) the same thing about DJs who use automatic beat-matching and mp3s. Fascinatingly Berlin still clings onto vinyl (for now). It's fair to point out that the current users of the tools aren't seasoned/world-class producers/DJs, and don't have that level of training and practice or their musical ear though.

It's amazing that these tools exist, along with those that can operate them, so music can be generated via code, live, and it comes down to (your opinion on) whether or not these tools ever grow past the "research" phase that they're currently in right now. IMO the tools will continue to evolve until they are useful in the hands of "creative originators [that] can use grammars expressively".

There's a impassioned community building and refining the tools and tooling, and its my belief and opinion - we don't have to all agree - that the algorave tools will eventually get to a place that's useful for creatives, and into their hands. Then the music being generated becomes the attraction, instead of the coding tool being a gimmick of an attraction.

After all, what's a drum machine, but a clumsy, analog "for" loop?

[abathur]

I want to mount a small defense (softly? narrowly? I agree with most of your specifics) of the state of the art(s). Not looking for a fight. :)

Procedural art is both new, and it isn't.

There's already a reasonably rich (if still fairly new in the sweep of art history) tradition of procedural art within the broader category of conceptual art. Some simple, accessible examples are Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes, Sol LeWitt's line drawings, and Yoko Ono's Grapefruit.

These aren't quite procedural in the sense you mean, but they are instructions designed to produce art when compiled and/or executed. They (along with many other examples) shatter traditional-art assumptions more profoundly and thoroughly (well, I think so...) than the cubists, dadaists, and abstract expressionists. They fully-realize conceptual art. If a natural reaction to Duchamp's readymades or a Pollock painting is an exasperated but I/my kid could do that, these works hand art-observers the blueprint and call their bluff.

They foreground the gaps between the concept/idea of a piece, our interpretation of the idea, any given instantiation of the idea, and our experience of any instantiation. They highlight the difference between the traditional roles of the artist-as-thinker, the artist-as-craftsman/technician, and observer-as-interpreter--at the same time as they invite (or even demand) all parties to cross and blur roles. They expose the absurdity of the cults of the Author and the Original Object in a way that foreshadows what digital re-/production has forced most creative spheres to reckon with.

With this as a lens, it's possible to expand the family tree. Composed sheet music (most purely if a band/orchestra/choir interprets it from the instructions without listening to how it's "supposed" to sound) smells like procedural art to me. Screenplays and stage-plays (which are, of course, scripts) have similar features. A decent slice of performance art--even if not openly published as one--can still be distilled to a repeatable set of instructions.

Maybe it's hair-splitting, but from this perspective I see procedural art as a fairly rich tradition full of artists with a good feel for their media and the broad arc of their traditions. From here, I think it's easier to see modern-computer-aided procedural/generative art as a somewhat natural outgrowth of existing traditions--intersected with new technologies that I don't think we've caught up with yet.

I'll artificially cut myself off here; I have too many thoughts on what the hurdles are to put a bow on. In short: it seems fair to say computer-aided procedural art(s) are immature and have a skewed technician:artist ratio, but I think it feels about right given the sheer amount of work+play+interplay that it takes to establish radically new creative practices. A significant fraction of computational-creatives are still hand-rolling their own toolchains. I'm not even sure the sun has risen.

[tripzilch]

> Screenplays and stage-plays (which are, of course, scripts)

except when these scripts are interpreted, they do not lack performance ;-)

[abathur]

You can read them without performing them, no? :)