LeWitt Hills

Who was Sol LeWitt?

Sol LeWitt (1928 to 2007) was an American artist and one of the founders of both Minimalism and Conceptual Art. In 1967 he published a short manifesto, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," and two years later a longer list, "Sentences on Conceptual Art." Together they propose something close to heresy: the artist's job is not to make the art, it is to write the idea. Anyone, anywhere, any time can execute it. The idea is the thing.

He is best known for his Wall Drawings. Over 1,200 of them. None drawn by him. Each is a set of written instructions, drafted in plain language and given to a team of draftsmen, who execute the drawing directly on a gallery wall. When the show ends, the wall is repainted. The drawing is gone. The instruction lives on, and can be executed again, anywhere, by anyone.

LeWitt moved authorship upstream, from the hand to the idea. That single move is the foundation of most generative and computational art that followed.

His principles

Selected from "Sentences on Conceptual Art" (1969) and "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" (1967).

1. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
2. Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.
3. Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist's mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly.
4. The artist's will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion.
5. If the artist carries through his idea and makes it into visible form, then all the steps in the process are of importance.
6. Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
7. For each work of art that becomes physical there are many variations that do not.
8. When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations.

Watch

Sol LeWitt and his wall drawings, on film.

The other half: digital matter

Neil Gershenfeld and his collaborators at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms argue that matter itself can be programmable. Their voxel self-replicators are small, identical units that physically click together into larger structures, the way bits assemble into programs. LeWitt Hills sits at the intersection of his instructions and their voxels.

Why this exists

LeWitt said the idea is the machine that makes the art. Gershenfeld says matter is the machine that builds itself. LeWitt Hills is the literal collision of those two reductions in a browser. You compose a wall drawing recipe. A rule engine emits voxels. A lightweight physics layer lets them fall, stack, and settle like real matter. Switch on Autonomous Growth and the system keeps proposing voxels on its own. The drawing becomes a machine that draws itself.

Every parameter sits in the URL. Share a link, and you are sharing an instruction. The same rule, executed with a different seed, yields a different hill. Just like Wall Drawing #122 in Hartford did not look identical to Wall Drawing #122 in Bern.

Keys