About
Majores is a gallery in Munich for algorithmic art, and the work is made by a collective.
Each series comes out of a pairing: an artist who sets the question and judges the result, and a technologist who builds the system that produces it. Neither half finishes the work alone. The systems are written for the series rather than taken off the shelf, and the decisions that matter — what to keep, what to discard, when a state is final — stay with the people who made them.
That is why works are issued under the collective’s name, with both contributors recorded on the datasheet. The distinction is not a nicety: it is the difference between an image and a work, and it determines what a buyer is actually acquiring.
The gallery sells online and by appointment, in limited and numbered editions where the output is printed, and as unique works where it is drawn, each one released by the artist and documented before it leaves the gallery.
The field is sixty years old
From 5 to 19 February 1965, Georg Nees showed drawings made by a computer running a program he had written himself, at the Studiengalerie of the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart. It is generally taken as the first exhibition of its kind, although a one-day presentation at San José State College in 1963 has since been advanced as earlier and remains thinly documented. Max Bense, who introduced the work and wrote the essay that accompanied it, gave the practice its name — generative aesthetics. That November Nees showed again in Stuttgart, this time with Frieder Nake, at Wendelin Niedlich's gallery.
Vera Molnár, Manfred Mohr and Harold Cohen were working along the same lines within the decade, and by 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity had brought the field to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. None of it required a market in order to exist, which is part of why the work has held up.
Sixty years on, the instruments have changed and the questions have not: what is fixed and what is left to the process, who is answerable for the result, and what precisely is acquired when the work is bought. Majores treats computational work with the apparatus the rest of the trade takes for granted — limited editions, numbered impressions, a datasheet, and a plain account of how the work was made.
Georg Nees shows computer-generated drawings at the Studiengalerie of the TH Stuttgart. Max Bense introduces the work and names the practice generative aesthetics.
Nees and Frieder Nake exhibit together in Stuttgart, recorded as the third public showing of programmed work anywhere.
The ICA in London, 2 August to 20 October, gives the field its first large international audience.
The same questions, asked of systems that are larger and less legible.
How the gallery works
An artist and a technologist are put together around one question, and develop the series over successive passes until both are prepared to release it.
Edition size, format, substrate and sequence are set before anything is printed, and are not extended afterwards.
Archival pigment print or pen plotter, numbered and signed, with a condition report where a work is unique.
Process, output, edition and release, recorded for every work. It stays with the work.