Abstract
Glass resists stable categorization. Neither fully solid nor liquid, it is an amorphous material whose apparent stillness masks molecular disorder. This project employs glass as a medium for exploring emergence: the process by which complex properties arise from simple constituents in ways that cannot be predicted from those constituents alone.
The work begins in code. Computational systems — reaction-diffusion patterns, flocking simulations, self-organizing geometries — generate forms according to simple rules, what Mark Bedau calls weak emergence: the result can only be reached by running the process itself. These forms are rendered as three-dimensional concepts that serve not as blueprints but as scores: open to interpretation, incomplete without performance.
The performance is glass. Through blowing, etching, and mosaic, generative forms are translated into a physical medium whose behavior exceeds any plan. Jane Bennett argues that matter is not passive stuff awaiting human intention but an active force with its own tendencies and resistances. Molten glass exemplifies this. It flows, sags, cools, and hardens according to dynamics no algorithm encodes and no novice glassblower fully controls. The distance between computational form and physical result is not a failure of execution but the point of the work: a space where two emergent systems — one digital and one material — meet and produce something neither could alone.
Generative art has a long tradition of relinquishing control to process. Eno designed systems and accepted what followed; LeWitt argued that the side effects an artist cannot imagine become ideas for new work. The algorithm produces forms that transcend its rules. The glass produces objects that transcend the algorithm. The conversation between them, mediated by the limits of the craft, produces something that could not have been designed.
