Tyler Hobbs
From Noise
Art Basel Miami, 2025
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.
"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
"From Noise is a maximalist deployment of algorithmic gesture."
Tyler Hobbs
Tyler Hobbs, From Noise #6 (detail), 2025.
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.
“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
“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
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.