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Abstract

Aesthetics, in general usage, lays an emphasis on subjective sense
perception associated with the broad field of art and human creativity.
Drawing particularly on Jonathan REe's I See a Voice: A Philosophical
History (1999), this paper suggests that it might be useful to revisit
the troubled relationship between art and aesthetics for the purpose of
discussing the value of generative code. Our argument is that, like
poetry, the aesthetic value of code lies in its execution, not simply
its written form. However, to appreciate generative code fully we need
to 'sense' the code to fully grasp what it is we are experiencing and to
build an understanding of the code's actions.

To separate the code and the resultant actions would simply limit the
aesthetic experience, and ultimately limit the study of these forms - as
a form of criticism - and what in this context might better be called a
'poetics' of generative code.

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Aesthetics

'The taste of the apple… lies in the contact of the fruit with the
palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way… poetry lies in the
meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the
pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act…' [1]

From the Greek 'aisthesis', aesthetics is broadly defined as pertaining
to material things perceptible by the senses, and is more precisely
defined by Baumgarten in Aesthetica (1750) defining beauty as
'phenomenal perfection' as perceived through the senses; with aesthetics
'pertaining to the beautiful or to the theory of taste' [2]. Thereafter
in general usage, there remains an emphasis on subjective sense
perception, but with particular reference to aesthetics and beauty
generally associated with the broad field of art and human creativity.
This applies despite Kant's attempt to distinguish beauty as an
exclusively sensuous phenomenon and aesthetics as a broader science of
the conditions of sense perception [3]. For the purposes of our
argument, we will retain this broader use of the term 'aesthetics', and
add the proviso that there is an ideology to aesthetics that lies
relatively hidden and difficult to perceive critically. This ideological
aspect lies outside the scope of our paper but it is worth noting Slavoj
Zizek's evocative description of ideology - the 'generative matrix' [4] -
that analogously expresses the generative code beneath the action. The
suggestion, in keeping with this paper, would be that this requires a
certain transparency to open it to criticism. We hope that revisiting
the idea of the limits of aesthetic experience might serve to resolve
some of the oppositions between theory and practice, and
intellectual/physical division of labour involved in the production of
generative art works. These issues are all too easily overlooked in an
over-concentration on aesthetic outcomes that are all often reduced to
subjective judgement and taste.

Limits

In discussions of aesthetics, the predominant philosophical legacy has
been that any theory of art is predicated on the 'specific
characterisation of the senses' [5]. It is now generally accepted that
sense perception alone is simply not enough unless contextualised within
the world of ideas [6]. Similarly, the world of multimedia is all too
easily conflated with a multi-sensory experience (of combining still and
moving image, sound, interaction and so on [7]) as if without a priori
understanding of the integrated system (the body-machine) and its
underlying code - that would include social and discursive frameworks.

Aesthetic theory has tended to collapse experience into what is
perceived through the five senses, whilst privileging sight and hearing
over touch and taste, leaving smell 'at the bottom of the heap'
(Laporte's History of Shit comes to mind) [8]. Subsequently there has
been a recognition that this separation of sensual experience is
inadequate and that a more systematic approach is called for that
recognises the body as a whole as an integrated system. However, the
legacy of the overall (able-bodied) reductive approach is felt in the
field of arts where the five senses are reflected in the classifications
themselves. It was in Diderot's Encyclop