After years at Art Blocks, one pattern keeps surfacing: the artists who make the most compelling work think like systems designers, not painters.
They’re not choosing colors. They’re defining constraint spaces — the boundaries within which randomness and algorithm interact to produce something neither fully controlled nor fully chaotic.
Why this matters beyond art
This is exactly the same mental model needed for:
- Agent orchestration — define the guardrails, let the system operate within them
- Protocol design — constrain the space of valid actions, let participants fill it
- Product architecture — build the affordances, let users surprise you
Generative art isn’t a niche. It’s a design philosophy that happens to produce images. The real output is a way of thinking about systems, constraints, and emergence.