A Century of Conversations: Where My Work Stands

byLuana Bagnasco

“To know where you are going, you must know where you come from.” — Anonymous

Every practice exists in relation to what came before it. This is not a limitation — it is the condition that makes dialogue possible. These are the conversations my work is part of, and the specific contributions I am trying to make to each of them.

Algorithmic Art: The Code as Choice

The pioneers of algorithmic art — Vera Molnár, Manfred Mohr, Frieder Nake — established a conviction that has not lost its force: the artist is the designer of the system, not the executor of the gesture. For them, the code was not a tool for producing images. It was the constitutive law of a universe. Beauty emerged as a consequence of internal logical coherence.

My practice inherits this directly. The algorithm I write for Genesi is not borrowed software — it is a designed system, transparent and documented, whose rules I am responsible for. The aesthetic outcome is a consequence of the architecture, not a goal pursued independently.

The contribution I am trying to make: integrating the generative tradition with a thermodynamic awareness that the pioneers did not have. The system tends toward entropy. The artist intervenes not only as designer but as the external force that prevents the system from collapsing into its own noise. The Compass of Light is the navigational instrument for this intervention — something the historical tradition did not need to theorize, because it did not yet have infinite generative abundance to contend with.

Art and Science: The Phenomenology of Data

In dialogue with artists like Olafur Eliasson and James Turrell, who investigated physical light and perception, and Trevor Paglen, who treats data as critical material, I work with scientific datasets as sensitive raw material.

In future projects like Cosmogonia and The Fever, spectral or climatic data will not be the subject of a representation. They will be the parameters that drive the algorithm. Science provides the structure. The aesthetic documents the interaction between the precision of the data and the unpredictability of the generative process.

The specific position: the data is not illustration. It is the generative seed — the low-entropy starting point from which the system evolves. The artistic gesture occurs entirely in the selection of what that evolution produces.

The Philosophy of Entropy: An Operational Taxonomy

Robert Smithson saw entropy as a material condition of art — disorder as monument, dissolution as subject. My practice takes this recognition and asks what comes after it: if entropy is the condition, what is the method?

The Compass of Light is my answer. Through the four archetypes — Oracle, Alchemist, Demiurge, Eschaton — I transform the awareness of entropy into a working methodology, capable of describing different degrees of resistance or surrender to informational chaos. Smithson named the condition. The Architecture of a Choice attempts to operationalize it.

Conceptual Photography: Light as Trace

The photographic tradition I feel closest to is the one that treats the camera as a philosophical instrument — Hiroshi Sugimoto’s long exposures that accumulate time, Wolfgang Tillmans’s investigation of light as physical phenomenon rather than pictorial tool.

In my practice, photography functions as the point zero of the research — the biological substrate from which everything else grows. Integrated into an ecosystem that includes cyanotype, thermography, and algorithmic reworking, it documents how a physical trace can survive and mutate through different states: from analog signal to digital bit, from light on paper to parameter in an algorithm.

Neo-Computational Formalism: A Position in Formation

Across these conversations, a specific coordinate emerges — one I am calling Neo-Computational Formalism.

The term names a practice that values transparency of process and coherence between idea and form, that treats the algorithm as constitutive law rather than production tool, and that integrates the thermodynamic variable into the formal tradition of algorithmic art. The beauty that emerges from this practice is a consequence of rigour, not a goal pursued directly.

This is where my work stands in relation to the history it inherits: inside the formal tradition, extended into thermodynamic territory, grounded in the conviction that selection is the primary creative act and that the system exists to make selection possible.

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