Abstraction and Generative Systems in Alexandre Estrela’s Exhibition: Interval

Abstraction and Generative Systems in Alexandre Estrela’s Exhibition: Interval
2025
Communication presented at Urgencies: A Conference on Sound and New Media Art at Escola das Artes Universidade Católica Portuguesa

Abstract
Starting from Alexandre Estrela’s most recent exhibition ‘Interval’, this paper aims to explore its relation to generative systems, noise and abstraction. In this sense, we will start from trying to understand what defines a generative system and how its incorporation in an artwork allows to disrupt a common-sense view in which an artwork reflects a total technical control by an artist. For this, Inigo Wilkins’ analysis of noise will also be crucial to understand how he refuses to see noise neither as an error to be avoided or an absolute exteriority to be romanticized, but as an always on-going reminder of the process of trying to make sense of what has not yet been made sense of. From this theoretical context, we will then look at Estrela’s work and how it envolves short computer-generated animations and a global generative system that rules the entire exhibition and how his work exemplifies our theoretical starting points. We will, then, get, at the end, to Reza Negarestani’s concept of abstraction as this process of generating rules and constrictions in an artwork.

Keywords:
Alexandre Estrela; generative art; abstraction; Inigo Wilkins; noise