Overcoming Manual Inadequacy: An Interview With Marius Watz

Earlier this week we brought you a primer on Generative Art with help from artist and curator Marius Watz. Now, we dive deeper into Watz’s own career and artistic practice.

Like many new media artists, Watz discovered the computer at a young age and was instantly transfixed by the machine and its possibilities. Growing up during the age of the micro-computer, the Norway-native learned to program by default (back then, the programming language was the same as the operating system) and soon started writing and copying simple programs. In particular, he found himself fascinated by programs that could produce random drawings.

“The main reason is simple,” says Watz, “I can't draw. When I was a kid I was totally uncomfortable with doing anything with my hands, so I was terrible at drawing, terrible at woodshop, and had no interest in them as a result.” Programming drawing mechanisms via the computer eliminated this physical barrier and enabled Watz to unleash his visual creativity. “I realized that I could actually create images without ever drawing, without ever having to be frustrated by my own sort of manual inadequacy.”

Watz planned to go to school for computer science to develop his interest and skill but got sidetracked by the emerging rave and techno scene in Europe. By then, at college age, his visual style had grown more sophisticated, graphically interesting, and complex. It occurred to Watz that this particular form of geometric visual expression he was engaged in was perfectly suited to the electronic music he was interested in at the time. He began collaborating on rave posters with several graphic designers and eventually moved on to creating visuals for live performance. Looking back, he says that it was during this time that his visual aesthetic matured.

Rishaug vs. Watz live at The Villa, Oct 2009 from watz on Vimeo.

Watz dropped out of his computer science program and ended up spending several years as a graphic designer, and it shows. His style is typically bold, bright, colorful, and energetic. His hard-edged abstract geometric shapes are eye-catching and expressive, literally popping off the screen. “I always want to confront the viewer with the image as though it's almost invading your space,” says Watz. “I think that the work is most powerful when it provokes a reaction before you have a chance to form an intellectual idea about the piece. It sort of tries to meet the viewer before they have a chance to contextualize it.”

Since Watz works with generative strategies, his method might best be described as controlled randomness. Everything is carefully calculated, coded and pre-defined, yet with any generative work there’s always an element of uncertainty—and that’s what makes it exciting. The ability to relinquish control to an autonomous computational system (even if it is of your own design) and then nurture and guide that system into arriving at a visually compelling output is an interesting exercise in collaboration, but one that’s proved fruitful for Watz.

His exploration of generative drawing machines has taken many forms over the years—from real-time software on a screen to live performances to large-scale projections to prints, and most recently, 3D objects. “I tend to have a very formalist approach,” says Marius. “I tend to think of what is the output? What is the format? What can I do within that format that's going to be successful? Once I've thought about that, I think about what would be an interesting gesture…But it's always down to, ‘How can I grow or synthesize a form in an interesting way?’”

Illuminations A from watz on Vimeo.

Watz recently returned from Norway where he faced one of his biggest challenges yet—a major commission by Bergen Kommune to create an installation for the Bybanen light rail system in Bergen, Norway. The task was to create a work of art that could feel at home in such an awkward, transient space and be visually interesting from a variety of vantage points…not to mention withstand the elements for five years. But Watz rose to the occasion with flair, creating a modular light grid where each element switches on and off according to an individual prime number, creating unpredictable patterns.

“That's really one of the best moments for an artist working with software processes,” says Watz. “When your piece starts producing results that you really did not anticipate.”