Generative processes
by Daniele Torcellini | Histoires Naturelles

I will use beautifully the opportunity that was kindly offered to me, to contribute to the catalog of the CaCO₃ exhibition, a collective of artists that I follow for a long time and I appreciate them beyond measure, to write something that apparently has nothing to do with their work.

The change of pace will be sudden and may appear out of place. However, also the less observant reader will have the possibility to adopt, similar strategies of realty analisys.
Strategies that will only reveal all their explosive power in their appearance as they really are, self-generated. Therefore, after an initial disorientation can follow an involvement that I hope will be interesting.

If art critic means, strictly, the discretion to compare the work that is going to be analyzed with other known works, through processes of comparison which might shine a light of interpretation on the work being analyzed, but also indirectly and retroactively on the works by comparing, in order to frame historically, culturally and artistically a non known object, the search engine for images Google Images can be considered one of the highest forms of art criticism, self- generated.

The search engine Google Images allows you to upload an image through its web page.
The uploaded image, is then searched in order to retrieve URLs where it is already present. By searching with known images, the predominance of results in which the uploaded image is multiplied through the network will not allow, in a first glance, to access the option of visually similar images.

This one will be, on the contrary, the first to appear in case of uploading non known images. Of course, not known to the web, not present at the web, that today is like to say non-existing.

The unknown immage will create as a result a list of immages that are similar to it. Self-generation.

The concept of similar-to-an-image-x is part of the similarity concept that the search engine has by itself. An algorithm that analyzes the forms, the colors, the spatial structuring of the images in order to classify them. An algorithm that can learn from its attempts and its errors, an algorithm whose knowledge expands allowing new and better forms of analysis.

This process appears to be a critical self-generated process. Taken the algorithm, the obtained results in the research, in any research, are generated independently by the algorithm itself, like a plant that can only have leaves of a particular form. Like the tesserae of the CaCO₃’s works, that can only have a certain inclination and a certain orientation in relation to the generative processes that submit each work.

The works of CaCO₃ appear, in the same way, self-generated. Indeed, the works of CaCO₃ are self-generated.

The activity of the work into the matter that the collective operates has only and exclusively the function to reveal what woud have been in the way it is. Undisputed virtue to hide the the presence of the author.

Much more today, an era of art stars of millionair worthing works, much more working with mosaic, a technique that has been considered for a long time deprived of the opportunity to express the ideas of an author.

The interest in seeing two self-generated processes interact between them is the maximum. Uploading the immages of CaCO₃ on Google Images reveals inedited interpretive possibilities, quick-witted, finely wicked, in which, admirably, the key elements of the collectives style are recognized and highlighted. The insistence on the andamenti, the hyperbolic inclinations of the tesserae, the delicate aspects of chiaroscuro, the rational autoptic analyticity, the oscillations between organic and inorganic imaginary, between order and disorder, are characteristics that seem to emerge naturally towards the visual that the search engine offers . The self-generation isn’t it perhaps an early form of artificial intelligence? The critic self-generated of Google Images on the works of CaCO₃ it is. And it is certainly smarter than me.