John Gerrard uses game engines to create real-time simulations that draw attention to the impact of human industry on the natural world. Petro National is a series of 196 simulations of an oil slick polluting the rippling surface of water. Each takes the shape of a UN member nation, and aspects of the simulation are affected by real-world data.

The density and sheen of color, ranging from muted greens to shimmering rainbows, are determined by the given nation’s oil usage, and the light changes depending on the time of day in that country. Game designers meet the challenge games of effectively simulating water’s movement to create a believably immersive virtual environment, but Gerrard turns simulation into data visualization, using the stuff of gaming to point back to this world.

Games are like generative art: emergent behavior unfolds in a set field in response to rules. Martin Grasser’s Love treats tennis as an engine for generative art, with the court’s straight lines and the round ball serving as formal elements for aesthetic play. But the outputs of his system aren’t random. Rather, they record significant moments from the 2022 Nitto ATP Finals in Turin, Italy. The proximity of the ball to the court’s edge carries dramatic weight, as the record of a winning shot. Grasser bends generative art’s toolbox of geometric abstraction toward documentary, and the game of tennis provides him with an apt subject.

Among crypto traders the “lambo” symbolizes a pinnacle of success— win enough magic internet money to convert into a luxury sportscar, and you’ve really made it. Shl0ms, a self-described “crypto dadaist,” literalized the lambo’s value and reverse-engineered it. He bought a Lamborghini, drove it to the desert, and blew it up. He then collected the parts from the smoking wreckage, beautifully videographed each one, and attached them to crypto tokens. The resulting collection was dubbed $CAR, its name styled like a shitcoin. Does the value of these parts equal that of the whole? Can the randomized deformation of the explosion—a combustive analog of a generative algorithm—make $CAR worth even more than lambo?

The unwieldy construction “time-based media” is often invoked in the art world to encompass a range of mediums—performance, film, video—where duration is a meaningful dimension. Sarah Zucker’s Temporale is a series of still images, but the process behind it incorporated several time-based mediums. Zucker shot video of moving fabric in her studio and generated similar visuals with Stable Diffusion, then ran them through an analog video rig and performed a series of “time displacements” that warped and folded the visuals. The staticky swirls of the resulting images capture this transfer and disruption of signals, distilling a series of transformations over time.

Jonathan Chomko filled the grids of Proof of Work one pixel at a time by tapping at a keyboard. Over the course of the series the dimensions of the grids increase exponentially; it took him over thirteen hours of mind-numbingly minimal labor to complete the largest one. Proof of Work literalizes the concept that labor performed creates the value of crypto, through the artist’s physical performance of a task that a computer could do instantly. The varying saturation of hues across each grid reflects the force of Chomko’s fingers hitting the keys—a record of the body’s fallibility, and the only random variation within the rigid framework set by the project’s concept.

In the late nineteenth century, inventors built mechanical computers to perform the complex calculations that predict tides. The title of LoVid’s Tide Predictor alludes to this history, which also informs the origins of the metaphor of “waves” to describe electronic signals. LoVid’s work bridges signal-based analog video and synthesizers and digital media. The digitally generated layers of RGB color in Tide Predictor emulate analog visual effects, while metaphorically evoking the natural movement of water and its measurement by science.

Each piece of software has its own logic, and moving data between them can result in corruptions, or “artifacts”—a term that gestures to the materiality of digital media. The works in Sky Goodman’s “Accidental Pixels” series begin as landscapes made in Gravity Sketch, a VR art program, then ported to the 3D graphics editor Blender. The transfer creates pixelation and flat planes of color that cut through the juicy volumes of the artist’s virtual environments, signs of the program erupting through the image.

Trained as a painter, Matt Kane builds digital textures by accruing hash marks and fine lines, using shapes, colors, and techniques native to the digital environment rather than the tools from software programs that emulate the textures of physical paint. Gazers applies generative processes to produce the colors and textures in each depiction of the moon. These orbs are animated, their movement adhering not only to the lunar calendar but also to a frame rate that increases over time, so that the project can evolve to keep up with the capabilities of future displays. Gazers records cycles of the moon while anticipated the cycles of technological advancement.

On-chain generative art has limited possibilities for audiovisual compositions. Amon Tobin took those restrictions as a creative challenge. The outputs of montreal friend scale isolate tones and harmonics from white noise, a sound that includes all possible pitches. Each token depicts a sinuous sine wave emerging from the static, revealing the shape of tones isolated by the algorithm.