SketchMaker (2007–2014)
SketchMaker is the genesis of Klingemann’s journey, an early generative art project built in Adobe Flash around 2007 that marked his first foray into machine creativity. In this work, Klingemann asked a radical question: Can a computer autonomously create images that “look like art”? His answer took the form of a procedural sketch generator driven by evolutionary logic. The system randomly assembled simple drawing and image-processing actions, “atomic” operations like drawing shapes, inverting colors, blurring, and rotating, into complex sequences, essentially coding a digital ape at a typewriter, blindly throwing paint onto a canvas. Each press of the spacebar yielded a new, unpredictable composition, a visual “DNA” strand of layered operations.
Crucially, SketchMaker did not rely solely on random generation; it featured a feedback loop to refine its output. Klingemann devised a “judgement module”, a custom classifier trained on examples of art versus non-art, that would analyze each new image and score its aesthetic resemblance to known artworks. This evolutionary process allowed the software to iterate toward compositions that possessed an uncanny art-like quality, effectively enabling the program to learn a rudimentary sense of taste long before deep learning became commonplace.
Conceptually, SketchMaker introduced motifs that would define Klingemann’s practice: glitch aesthetics, chance-driven creativity, and the transfer of agency from artist to algorithm. The visuals often emerged as jagged, abstract collages of color and form - sometimes chaotic, sometimes eerily harmonious - embodying the unpredictable nature of generative processes. By intentionally embracing the imperfections and “errors” of the system, Klingemann explored the beauty of machine misbehavior as an aesthetic frontier, posing the provocative question: “Who’s the artist now?”
Though created with pre-neural techniques, SketchMaker foreshadows the AI art movement to come. It stands as a historical keystone, a self-contained generative artist system that anticipated many of the questions and possibilities later realized through deep learning. In its glitchy, evolutionary sketches, one can already see the seeds of Klingemann’s later works, where algorithmic intuition for form and a rebellious embrace of computational spontaneity would flourish.