Tyler Hobbs
From Noise
Tyler Hobbs’ From Noise explores the meeting point between human and machine creativity, translating intuitive human gesture into generative art to determine what is lost or gained in the process. He describes this as the ‘translated gesture’, the reconstruction of organic marks from gestural painters via the medium of creative coding, thinking about how gesture operates across mediums. He systematises innate human impulse and imperfection in a continuation of the centuries-old question of how order and chaos, control and freedom, can coexist within a single creative act.
Tyler Hobbs, From Noise , Art Basel Miami Beach, Installation view, 2025.
“The bulk of our lives [is] moving into digital environments, which are of course constructed with algorithms. Should artists strain to avoid these algorithms? No, we’re better off claiming them for ourselves.”
Tyler Hobbs
Tyler Hobbs, From Noise , Art Basel Miami Beach, Installation view, 2025.
The Translated Gesture
From Noise is an algorithmic response to the notion of the gesture, and gestural abstraction as practiced in the 20th century. When our hands no longer manually control the tools of artistic creation, what becomes of the gesture? Is there still a way in which the gesture evolves, continuing to represent the vitality of the creator?
This work explores the concept of the “translated gesture”, as contrasted with the “native gesture”. The native gesture is that which comes naturally to the medium, and to the method of mark making. When painting by hand, it may be the dashes and dabs we find in the work of Joan Mitchell or Cy Twombly. On the computer, and executed with code, the native gesture surely consists of straight lines, rectangles, and pixels. This is the path of least resistance.
The translated gesture, on the other hand, extracts the essence of a mark-making style from one medium or context and applies it in an entirely different domain. For example, consider Roy Lichtenstein’s famous translation of the brushstroke into a format suitable for newspaper comics. The essence of the original brushstroke remains, but the new form has been carefully constructed by the artist in order to allow it to exist in a world where it cannot naturally exist.
Tyler Hobbs, From Noise , Art Basel Miami Beach, Installation view, 2025.
In From Noise, similar work has been done to translate the free, spontaneous gestures of artists like Twombly and Mitchell into the algorithmic realm. This process of translation into code invites questioning. How spontaneous were these original marks, really? What does it mean to be spontaneous? Is it necessary for the body to take part in this spontaneous creative act, or can the mind alone do the important part of the work? Is “spontaneity” just the presence of randomness that the artist has allowed to be injected into the creative process at chosen moments, in chosen ways? Perhaps crafted chaotic moments can be just as meaningful to the artist and to the viewer.
by Tyler Hobbs
"I like to use this term, the 'translated gesture', to talk about it. It's about the freedom of, say the gestural painters, Cy Twombly, Joan Mitchell... I think it's interesting what happens when you start from a human place and you end up in an algorithmic place."
Tyler Hobbs
Melanie Lenz, freelance curator and curator of Digital Art at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London on From Noise, by Tyler Hobbs.
Much of the history of painting can be viewed as an attempt to translate an interior state into physical form. Part of why we go to museums is to stand before a painting to feel the pulse of the artist’s hand: their rhythm, their hesitation, their confidence, the residue of a moment that once burned with urgency. It’s a way of living through someone else’s intensity. In the blur of daily life – errands, messages, appointments, obligations – we lose touch with our own emotional register. Artists bring us back to it. They remind us what it is like to feel.
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"From Noise is a maximalist deployment of algorithmic gesture."
Tyler Hobbs
That pursuit - to make emotion visible - has always existed on a thin line between control and release, discipline and abandon. Painters have long tested how far the gesture can stretch before it breaks, how intention can give way to intuition. However, in his new work From Noise, Tyler Hobbs removes the brush entirely. His work asks what happens to gesture when the hand is replaced by code. Hobbs isn’t interested in simulating paint, or in proving that computers can imitate humans. His aim is to find out how far expression can stretch when it moves into the language of computation – how code might carry the energy, even the vulnerability, of the hand.
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With From Noise, Hobbs brings that age-old painterly struggle into the digital realm. The works investigate how an algorithm can simulate gesture – how lines of instruction can produce marks that feel instinctive, unplanned, alive. Gesture, after all, isn’t merely movement; it’s a kind of surrender, a release, a moment when control loosens.Hobbs asks: what happens when that moment of letting go is mediated by a system of rules?
Tyler Hobbs, From Noise #7 (detail), 2025.
There are echoes of Joan Mitchell and Cy Twombly in these works – the same combustible energy, the same sense of something barely contained – but translated into code. Each piece becomes a double gesture: one that acknowledges the lineage of expressive painting, and another that reimagines it through software. Emotion doesn’t vanish in the system; it passes through it, altered but intact.
“Seeing digital concepts in analogue form can make them more accessible and human. It also prompts us to consider that while we have physical bodies, we spend a lot of time in digital worlds, and in order to explore this reality, art needs to span both.”
Melanie Lenz
The works in From Noise are the result of long, iterative conversations with the algorithm. Hobbs tweaks, tests, reruns, layers, and selects each piece. Each canvas contains more than 4,000 marks, forming dense fields that oscillate between chaos and cohesion – a maximalist counterpoint to the meditative restraint of his Day Gardens series. He refers to this as the “pendulum effect”: a natural rhythm between quiet order and overflowing complexity.
“In contrast to early examples of generative art, which are mostly based on clearly ordered structures, straight lines, and rectangles, From Noise captivates with its algorithmic gesture, which combines the (seemingly) spontaneous, chaotic, and intuitively subjective with the analytical, logical, and rational character of the computer.”
Clara Runge, curator at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Kalsruhe (ZKM)
“Coding is a different site of gesture, but when the two come together they create a new and meaningful moment.”
Melanie Lenz
At its core, From Noise charts Hobbs’ evolving relationship with code. His algorithms behave less like tools and more like living systems: unpredictable, adaptable, constantly shifting. Each work becomes a record of a brief alignment – when emotion, gesture, and computation move in sync before diverging again.
by Leyla Fakhr
Tyler Hobbs, Order/Disorder, 2024. Artist monogaph published by Hurtwood Press.
Bio
Tyler Hobbs (b. 1987) is a visual artist known for generative works that bridge painting traditions and computational systems. Working primarily with algorithms, plotters, and paint, Hobbs investigates how code can extend or translate the human gesture, often exploring ideas of spontaneity, structure, and chaos.