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William Latham’s Human Mutator2 is an artistic exercise in evolution (Image: William Latham, Human Mutator2 Reflector image in time, 2014, multimedia)

A new exhibition, Automatic Art, explores how art that was built on logical and mathematical rules ended up giving science new ways of seeing the world

The story begins in 1917, when the Bolshevik party seizes power and drags Russia into the 20th century: an exhilarating, terrifying world of , bureaucracy and surveillance. Young artists turn this mechanised world into a new kind of art. Their , , , and even are assembled according to arbitrarily imposed logical or mathematical rules. is born.

The old art was about flattery. It picked a subject and worked it up in a variety of media. It aped how its audience saw, categorised and thought about the world. But the new art fooled and exhausted eye and mind, playing tricks, and unpicking where it could. It marched under many banners – Dada, surrealism, op-art – becoming hard to categorise.

So was it Has it now become something else? A new exhibition, Automatic Art at , tries to answer these questions with a 50-year retrospective of art built according to formal rules. It is curated by interactive-art pioneer , friend of the late psychologist , who specialised in and whose work resonates here.

The possibilities of this art still feel limitless, but there is no room for nostalgia. Work by veterans such as and rubs up against drawings, sculptures and screen-based work by artists too young to remember , the UK Arts Council’s exhibition that gave automatic art a public face in the early 1970s.

Highlights include a beautiful “kinetic painting” by , optical oddities packed into eight monochrome squares by , and a melancholy digital deconstruction of a human face in Julie Freeman and Simon Emberton’s sardonically titled .

The artist as gardener

But the most important piece is not art at all. Pinned under glass, it is entitled “The Creative Process Where the Artist is Amplified or Superseded by the Computer”, in which Edmonds and his co-author Stroud Cornock conjured a vision of how this art might develop once harnessed to computers.

They argued that the artist would become a sort of gardener, setting the initial conditions for a work’s growth, then pruning and tending it. Meanwhile, the audience would interact with the art, exploring, choosing or discarding possibilities at will. This vision is realised by at least one screen-based piece, , which evolves as spectators move.

In the 1980s, at IBM’s Scientific Research Centre in Winchester, UK, Latham worked with mathematician and graphics expert Stephen Todd to develop using a genetic algorithm that draws on Darwin’s natural selection.

The art evolved, finding its way on to before later being used to visualise the interactions of cells, proteins and genes. Its poster child is , protein-visualisation software that is being developed at Goldsmiths, University of London, by a team including Todd and .

Art becomes science

At first, scientists considered digital visualisations as useful teaching aids that were otherwise distractions from their work. Now, graphical models, particularly in the life sciences, are essential tools. The ability to synthesise and sequence genomes has generated quantities of data so huge that they need new kinds of visualisation to discover what lies within. A good computer model is more useful to the researcher than the protein in its raw state.

Enter Peter Todd, with based on protein visualisation and allowing users to explore the mathematical quirks of their tablet cameras. For this generation of “process artists”, visualisations, artworks and games share platforms and procedures. Distinctions can still be made, but are not interesting.

The story of automatic art cannot be easily embraced by one small show. But visitors are offered a look at the origins and potential of an art that contributes, in spades, to our scientific understanding of the world.

is at until 10 September 2014

This article appeared in print under the headline “Changing the rules”