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.
“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
Melanie Lenz, freelance curator and curator of Digital Art at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London on From Noise, by Tyler Hobbs.
From Noise AP
From Noise #1
From Noise #2
From Noise #3
This work was inspired not only by the work of Mitchell and Twombly, but also by the density and chaos of urban graffiti and sticker spots in Madrid. In those locations where scores of tags or hundreds of stickers compete for the same small piece of real estate, the aesthetic can somehow transcend its early state of noise and disorder, unexpectedly reaching a state of complex harmony. The lack of overall design seems to promote a type of anarchistic equality, with all of the different visual elements similarly jostling for attention. Each mark had its color chosen independently from the rest, without consideration for potential clashes. And yet, as the clashes stack up, their individual importance eventually dissolves away. To stand out is to fit in.
Framed Print on Panel with Gloss Varnish
"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
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.
From Noise #4
From Noise #5
From Noise #6
"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.
From Noise #8
From Noise #9
From Noise #10
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.