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The Toledo Museum of Art is opening "Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms" on July 12, and the curatorial frame is worth paying attention to. Julia Kaganskiy traces generative art back to ninth-century Persian mathematician al-Khwarizmi — the algorithm's namesake — and the Islamic tile mosaics that emerged from his work. Five equilateral polygonal shapes, combined into seemingly infinite tessellated patterns. The show argues this was the first generative art. From there it moves through Vera Molnar's "machine imaginaire" — algorithmic equations executed by hand before she ever touched a computer in 1968 — through Sol LeWitt's instruction-based wall drawings (which the show describes as early "prompts"), and into the present: CryptoPunks, Autoglyphs, Chromie Squiggles, Ringers, QQL's interactive touch-screen installation, 0xDEAFBEEF's Glitchbox. Several digital artists are getting their first museum showing: Operator, the duo behind "Human Unreadable," and Emily Xie, who reimagines traditional textile crafts through generative systems. Many of the digital works come from Alan Howard's collection — the hedge fund manager who owns a $43 million Monet once belonging to Imelda Marcos and started buying generative art during the NFT boom. He describes digital art as existing "in dialogue with" traditional media, not competing with it. The Artforum review flagged an interesting tension: many code-based works share aesthetic DNA with midcentury geometric abstraction, and wall texts list Ethereum and bespoke software as tools but elide the hardware and display materials. The locus of meaning has shifted to digital identity — the physical realization is almost secondary. Opening July 12, running through November. Free admission.

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