On the practice
Endless Algorithmic Painting
written with AI
Vitalii Samolovskikh paints without touching paint. The works in this room are made by a technique
the artist calls endless algorithmic painting, written with AI: each canvas begins as a
conversation with an artificial intelligence, is set down as an algorithm, and is then left to paint
itself — live, in the browser, for as long as anyone cares to watch. Endless is meant literally: no
two visits show the same picture, and no picture is ever finished.
The method deserves to be described precisely, because it is where the art lies. The artist does not
prompt a machine for an image; that would be to ask for a result. Instead, artist and AI work as a
studio once did: they study a painter’s gesture — the swing of Pollock’s stick, the patient stacking
of Albers’ squares, the slow creep of poured enamel — and argue it down into rules. How fast does a
hand travel when it pours? When does a line, starved of paint, break into beads? What makes three
colours belong together? Every answer becomes a line of code, and the code, not the brush, is the
work’s true medium. The AI is a collaborator in the oldest sense of the studio assistant: tireless,
exacting, and never the author.
What emerges is painting as a process rather than an object. In
Pollock Dreams a simulated hand pours with the many-layered
tremor of a real wrist, its strokes sized by a power law — the same fractal statistics physicists have
measured in Pollock’s own canvases. Its colours are not chosen but inherited: the Pollock paintings whose
palettes best explain the colours already on the canvas vote for the next one, so the work drifts
through his oeuvre without ever stepping outside it.
Rectangle Dreams answers Colour Field painting with a
fractal grammar — fields split as if from a single Mondrian cut, edges roughened like torn paper at
every scale, glazes laid on in thin sweeping coats while the key hue walks the whole circle of the
colour wheel in measured harmony. Pour Dreams goes furthest
from the brush: here the paint is a physical film governed by the equation of thin-film flow, thick
paint running more freely than thin, each new pour shouldering the old aside without ever mixing
with it. The Wall turns the gesture round: nothing is added
to it, everything is taken away. An old wall, painted over and over without end, cracks in long
branching lines; its paint curls up along every crack and edge, and the wind tears it off flake by
flake, so that each coat gives way to the one beneath — though a coat begins to crack only once a
broad enough patch of it has lost the shelter of the coat above.
Each painting has its own music, composed by the same means and played live rather than recorded:
chords walked by 1/f noise, notes falling on three time scales in the same proportions as the strokes
of the brush. Pollock’s drips are answered by bells with falling trails; the rectangles by a choir and
a felt electric piano in E♭ lydian; the poured film by glassy clusters after the Soviet ANS synthesizer
and a theremin gliding between notes. The wall is mourned by a slow lament, far off in a glen, on a
great low horn and a muffled barrel drum, its rhythm the same shape on every scale, as a coastline is;
and the wind heard is the very wind that carries its flakes away. Image and sound keep one pulse — the 1/f rhythm found in
heartbeats, coastlines and the flow of rivers.
The work belongs to a lineage that runs from the Abstract Expressionists’ faith in process, through
the instruction drawings of Sol LeWitt and the plotter works of Vera Molnár, to the generative practice
of today. But where those artists wrote rules for others to carry out, Samolovskikh writes them
together with a machine and hands them to another machine to perform in real time. The painter’s hand
is not abolished here; it is distilled — into a tremor, a probability, a law of flow. These are
paintings to sit with rather than to glance at: meditations that never repeat, and never end.
