- Artist
- Claudia Hart and Andrew Blanton · madness.systems ↗
- Based
- Born 1955, New York. Lives and works in New York and Chicago.
- Practice
- Virtual and generative artist Claudia Hart partners with media artist, composer, and programmer Andrew Blanton to create code based systems that translate literary and cultural themes into responsive visual experiences.
- Raster
- raster.art/artist/claudia-hart ↗
- In the set
- Systems Madness ↗ · 42 editions
- Links
- Full bibliography ↗
Claudia Hart emerged as part of a generation of 1990s intermedia artists who employed digital media to investigate issues of identity and representation.78 Her practice has long centered on the virtual body and the ways technology shapes perception and cultural memory. Andrew Blanton, working as composer, media artist, and programmer, supplies the technical foundation for real time generative systems in their collaborations. Through this partnership Hart and Blanton examine how algorithmic processes can embody conflicts between imposed rationality and the unruly forces of creativity and the unconscious.
Systems Madness
Systems Madness comprises 42 unique editions released on the Art Blocks platform on April 14, 2023.1 The project takes its conceptual core from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 short story The Yellow Wallpaper, in which a woman confined under a medical rest cure becomes fixated on the patterns of her wallpaper and experiences a profound psychological breakdown.2 Hart employed DALL E to translate passages and motifs from the story into a series of AI generated wallpaper designs. These designs serve as source material that Blanton then translated into executable code using the p5.js library, producing infinite variations through layered procedural effects.3
Five poisonous flowers provide the thematic and visual anchors for the system: chrysanthemum, foxglove, hydrangea, poet's narcissus, and poppy. Each motif generates families of patterns rendered in warm, off primary hues accented by procedural noise, soft gradients, blurs, and transparencies. Fractal formations repeat at irregular intervals, creating self similar structures that pulse and evolve over time.2 The animations suggest ornamental excess tipping into visual overload, a digital analogue to the hallucinatory unraveling described in Gilman's text. Viewer interaction, triggered by subtle mouse movements, resets the temporal state of the pattern, introducing contingency and preventing the system from settling into fixed repetition.3
The project also exists as a physical installation proposition. Collectors can follow provided instructions to project the live animation onto architectural surfaces, creating responsive, room sized wallpapers that react to presence and movement in real space.4 This dual existence on chain and off chain extends the work's commentary on the domestic sphere as both site of confinement and potential liberation through imaginative projection.
The grid displays six distinct outputs from the system. They demonstrate the range of visual outcomes possible within the constrained yet flexible parameter space, from tightly organized floral lattices to more chaotic, atmospheric dispersions of color and form.
2023, generative animation
2023, generative animation
2023, generative animation
2023, generative animation
2023, generative animation
2023, generative animation
Live on Art Blocks: systems-madness-by-claudia-hart-and-andrew-blanton ↗
Context and Legacy
The work received its initial public presentation in April 2023 at Betaworks in New York as part of Experiments in Art and Technology and Art Blocks Presents programming.6 There it was experienced both digitally and as a projected environmental piece, affirming its status as conceptual art that operates across media and contexts. Hart's engagement with feminist literary sources and ornamental traditions continues in later projects developed with Blanton, indicating a sustained inquiry into how code can model states of sensory and psychological intensity.5
By framing AI generation as a contemporary counterpart to the 19th century wallpaper's oppressive yet generative pattern language, Systems Madness contributes to ongoing discussions about technology, gender, and the aesthetics of control and release in digital art. The choice of poisonous plants introduces an implicit critique of beauty's undercurrents of danger, while the interactive reset grants the participant a form of agency denied to the protagonist of the source story. In this way the artists transform a narrative of patriarchal constraint into a participatory system that invites playful disruption of ordered patterns.
Bibliography
The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Claudia Hart and Andrew Blanton links page ↗.