Keith Tyson • The Generative Universe

"British artist Keith Tyson has long used wide-ranging techniques and materials to explore the permeable boundary between human creativity and the wider forces that give rise to patterns and possibilities across the cosmos. With ‘The Generative Universe,’ his first exhibition in Los Angeles since 2009, Tyson brings together paintings, sculptures, drawings and mixed media works spanning the past three decades—and makes a powerful case for the universe as a single generative system: a constantly shifting, causal network in which forms arise, transform and dissolve. Tyson, who originally trained as an engineer, was an early practitioner of generative art, often approaching artmaking as the act of setting parameters within a set of systems he set in motion. At art school in Brighton in the early 1990s, he began to see paint as a programmable material—one shaped by codes of action, chemical reactions and conceptual constraints. Recognizing that he could both paint and code, he created the Artmachine, a programmable device that generates prompts—specifying size, material, subject matter and other parameters—for him to interpret and physically execute. Each work Tyson makes using an Artmachine prompt therefore produces a distinctly unique outcome, resulting in works of radical stylistic diversity." via ‪@HauserWirth‬