Exposing the underlying algorithm of canonical 20th-century artworks reveals shared generative logic across art history

Reas’s Century project reconstructs 100 canonical 20th-century visual artworks as interactive generative algorithms, revealing that diverse art-historical movements share underlying computational structures. Ellsworth Kelly’s color grids, Vera Molnar’s diagonal-fill works, and Bridget Riley’s op-art patterns all resolve to bounded random selection within structured grids. The project’s premise is that understanding the algorithm behind a canonical work demystifies artistic innovation and makes it generative material. For live-coders, this approach — reverse-engineering canonical aesthetic moves into parameterizable code — is a design research method: read art history as a library of generative primitives.

Examples

Century’s Mondrian module: grid cells filled by rule-based color assignment. Vera Molnar’s module: ‘almost identical to 10-PRINT, it just uses two different characters.‘

Assessment

Choose one canonical geometric or abstract artwork and write a pseudocode algorithm that could generate it. Identify which parameters you would expose as interactive controls.