GMU:From generative to living image

From generative to living image

Questions: What are the similarities and differences between generative and moving images? Which qualities define living images? What is the process of production of these generative and living images and in how far does it differ from traditional art practices?

The synthetic, generative image does not fit the category of moving image nor the one of still image it, but it is in between them. Although it shows properties of both, it constitutes a category of its own. The synthetic, generative image is generally based on a process. One could say even, it is a process. Different than the moving image, it is not pre-recorded, but generated in the very moment of its presentation, even if parts of it were produced earlier. Hence it is always live and performative. It develops in a system that is predefined and constructed by the artist, in which the process of generation and synthesis evolves over time. This system can be an apparatus, a machine such as a computer or any other kind of system able to produce or possessing a ‘surface.’ The generative, synthetic image can be a totally autonomous process designed for and executed in a closed, isolated system. In its other form of existence, it is conceived for a more open system or environment, thus not isolated from its own exterior, but integrating its conditions and actions in the process.

Moving images are basically still images in fast acceleration, so that the human eye perceives them as one moving image, i.e. the recorded objects in it as moving. “Movement expresses a change of the whole, an aspect of change, a duration or an articulation of duration,” states Gilles Deleuze about the dimension of captured time in the moving image. Like the moving image, the generative image expresses change and duration, and ‘flows’. But while the moving image is finite as soon as it is recorded and can only perform in reproduction, the generative image is – at least in theory – infinite and continuous. As much as the generative image shares with the moving image, as much it is related to the still image. Vilém Flusser notes that “It is wrong to look for ‘frozen events’ in images. Rather they replace events by states of things and translate them into scenes.” Processual images are all at once: events, that unfold in front of the viewer’s eye, but - depending on the velocity of the process - they also emphasise the state of things translated into scenes.

That the generative image is not confined to the computer, but can be produced with other processual media, for instance living, organic media. Maybe these unique, local, temporal, image generating processes also embody resistance to the ubiquity, repetitiveness and banality of broadcasted images restructuring our reality and turning it into a global image scenario.