The digital artworks now on view at the Toledo Museum of Art in “Infinite Image: The Art of Algorithms” occupy the bleeding edge of new technologies that underpin recent developments in video gaming, animation, cryptocurrency generation, and artificial intelligence. As a museumgoer with only average knowledge of things digital, I wondered whether I would be overwhelmed by this newly sprouted and unfamiliar branch of the art historical tree. The answer to that question was both yes and no.

One can only imagine the amount of invisible electronic and digital infrastructure required to present the seamless elegance of the collection now gathered in the museum’s Canaday Gallery, with nary a wire in sight and not a single pixel out of place.  Most of the artworks, grouped in four sections, are arranged in a circle around the outside edge of the gallery, with a few room-size video displays at the periphery and another central structure housing several impressively monumental installations. The artists, designers, and curators of this up-to-date survey of technically complex and conceptually ambitious work tell a compelling tale of how we have arrived here, at the inflection point where visual art meets digital engineering.

The exhibition was organized by the Toledo Museum, with work chosen by Guest Curator Julia Kaganskiiy and exhibition design led by Richard The of Studio GreenEyl. I found the complexity and density of the exhibition formidable but not impossible to grasp, and I especially appreciated the informative wall text that accompanied each section. The ample supporting material offered on the museum’s website, including essays, images, and artists’ biographies, contributed greatly to my admittedly basic knowledge of the subject. A helpful little paper glossary of terms, available at the exhibition’s entrance,  also provided much-needed context.

Vera Molnar, Hungarian, 1924-2023, (Des)orders, 1974, Computer drawing in multicolored ink on Benson plotter paper.

The first section,  “The Imaginary Machine,”  is devoted to the work of forward-thinking artists of the twentieth century who rejected the cliché of the singular romantic genius in favor of a more rationalistic way of thinking about and making art. Sol Lewitt and Josef and Anni Albers, already well-known for their explorations in pre-digital rules-based art, are joined by lesser-known (at least to me) pioneers  Max Bill and Vera Molnar. Born in 1924, Hungarian media artist Molnar was an early adopter of the computer as a creative tool. Throughout the more than seven decades of her career, she explored the promise and limitations of human and machine collaboration.

Larva Labs, Matt Hall (b. 1974, Canada) John Watkinson (b. 1975, Canada), CryptoPunk #6649, 2017, custom software, still image, NFT, and Ethereum blockchain.

The next section, “Chance and Control,” introduces and explores algorithm-based art that incorporates randomness as a component of the creative process. Inputs introduced by chance determine elements of the image, resulting in outputs that vary, yet remain consistent with the overall design and concept. Dmitri Cherniak’s Ringers provides a particularly clear, and to my mind, pleasing demonstration of the game-like nature of algorithmically derived images on view.

Dmitri Cherniak, (b. 1988, Canada) Ringers #1090, 2021, on-chain algorithm, NFT, and Ethereum blockchain.

Also created by algorithm, CryptoPunks, (2017), was among the first works linked to blockchain and one of the first prototypes for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The features of the 10,000 unique digital characters–hair, skin color, facial expressions—are determined by an algorithm with visual parameters established by Matt Hall and John Watkinson of Larva Labs.

Sarah Meyohas, (b. 1991, U.S.) Infinite Petals, 2019, custom generative software.

By the time I arrive at the third section of the exhibition, “Digital Materiality,” I have the queasy feeling that the complexity of digital design, the variety of coding systems and the sheer quantity of data have outrun my ability to comprehend and describe what I am seeing. Images of innumerable rose petals, some real and others created by a generative adversarial network (GAN) in the installation Infinite Petals by Sarah Meyohas, leave me dizzy and disoriented. In another darkened room, I encounter the constantly moving, stylized and choreographed figures of Human Unreadable by Operator (Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti.) As I watch, the artists endeavor to “dissolve the boundary between flesh and data,” a process I find mesmerizing and, at least in that moment, persuasive.

Emily Xie (b. 1989, China), Memories of Qilin #7130, 2022, on-chain algorithm, NFT, and Ethereum blockchain.

The three medium-sized works by Emily Xie ( 2025 Digital Artist-in-Residence at the museum) are more intuitively digestible. Memories of Qilin 345, 676 and 713 are three in a series of 1024 unique images generated entirely by code and influenced by Xie’s Chinese heritage.

Sam Spratt, The Masquerade, 2025, digital painting made with custom generative software.

In a side gallery that he has to himself, poet and painter Sam Spratt blends analog technique with digital process. He has created The Masquerade, a baroque wall-size digital painting of writhing figures acting out a mysterious, crowd-sourced narrative.

I finally arrive in the fourth and last section of the exhibition, elated to have more or less survived the avalanche of new information and sensation.

Jared Tarbell, (b. 1973, U.S.) Entity #14, 2022, custom generative software, digital video (edition of 100), sound (Tonepoet,” Infinity Machine”) NFT, and Ethereum blockchain.

“Coded Nature” is devoted to artworks created by generative software, a new frontier in digital art that mimics systems found in nature. Generative artists compose the instructions for an artwork and a machine learning model then extrapolates from the provided data set to create new content, independent of human intervention. Or, as the curatorial statement puts it, “what generative artists create are not just representations of nature but systems that simulate biological and physical processes.”

During my last minutes in the exhibition, I am captivated by Jared Tarbell’s Entity #14, a video animation created with custom generative software. Artificial creatures resembling microorganisms proliferate, ambulate and subside in an imaginary environment. They are born, respire, decline and die, then the sequence repeats–with variations ad infinitum.  The generative system, based on simple, predictable rules, produces unpredictable and complex results. You can watch this exhilarating dance of the microbes here

As I leave the museum, I wonder what audiences of the future will make of increasingly complex digital artworks like the ones in “Infinite Images.” No doubt technologies of the future will make even more demanding creations possible.  Possibly our powers of comprehension will grow to meet the cognitive demands of the art, or perhaps our cyborg descendants will be better equipped to fully appreciate these future masterpieces.

No matter what, it looks like we are committed to heading down this challenging path to an unforeseeable destination. But as the science fiction novelist and visionary Arthur C. Clarke observed in his novel Childhood’s End, “No one of intelligence resents the inevitable.”

Infinite Images artists: Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Max Bill, Dmitri Cherniak, Sofia Crespo, Deafbeef, Entangled Others, Tyler Hobbs, Larva Labs, Sol LeWitt, Zach Lieberman, LoVid, William Mapan, Sarah Meyohas, Vera Molnar, Operator, Quayola, Sam Spratt, Snowfro, Casey Reas, Anna Ridler, Monica Rizzolli, Jared Tarbell, and Emily Xie.

Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms  Toledo Museum of Art – July 12-November 30, 2025

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