The Four Seasons is a comprehensive generative art project consisting of four distinct, yet related, works: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. Each piece is a unique algorithmic interpretation of a season, exploring its characteristic palettes, movements, and energy.
While conceived as endless generative systems, the works are presented as long-duration, single-channel videos, a format tailored for institutional and public exhibition.
In 2025, the Spring variation was selected by the curated media platform StandardVision for large-scale public display. It is on view at the Los Angeles Public Library from March 2025 through March 2026.
The Four Seasons
Notes on the Series
Spring
After a long dark winter, in which nature loses all of its colour, and it feels as though everything has come to a halt, the coming of spring heralds rebirth, being awoken; a return to life. Plants that seemed to be dead were in fact only dormant. The first warm rays of the sun are an alarm clock that wakes up everything. It is like switching from a film noir, black and white and murder and mystery, to a musical full of singing and dancing, complete with a happy ending, in full colour. Over the span of a few days, buds burst into full blossom, the air bright with falling petals and sweet with the smell of flowers in bloom.
LIA’s new work Spring was created during the season of the same name in 2019, and forms the newest part of her Four Seasons series. As with the other pieces in the series, LIA translates her interpretations of nature in the springtime, a time where everything bursts with growth, into abstract forms that appear and change over time, growing clusters of blossom-like forms which continuously renew themselves from with. In a break with her usual monochrome tradition, LIA uses bright colours to express the joy and abundance and liveliness of spring, resulting in what is probably the most colourful piece she has made in over two decades of artistic work.
Summer
The sun has reached its peak; in the heat, everyone moves in slow motion. The air boils. It plays with your visual perception; a shimmer on the horizon or caught in the corner of your eye might make you doubt what’s real.
LIA’s new work, entitled Summer, abstracts a fictitious vacation at the seaside – blue sea, sand dunes, striped parasols and beach chairs – into fields of lines, shapes, and patches of colour, shimmering in and out of view like a mirage. The slowly-moving hot air distorts your vision, but if you squint, you might make out some small sailing ships in the distance, perhaps a turquoise wave, or maybe distant hills blasted brown by the sun, or … perhaps you see something else.
Developed during the hottest days of July 2019, and forming part of LIA’s Four Seasons series, Summer has its true origin in generative software; as such, it changes constantly, never repeating, each image present for a fleeting moment before shifting into something new. Let go and just breathe; soak in the digital summer vibes. Sets of small overlapping zig-zagging lines move slowly from side to side in horizontal fields. Illusory landscapes form and re-form. In contemplation, in the feeling of summer captured as a slowly shifting visual field, abstract patterns take on warmth, memory, the feeling of sand between the toes and waves crashing just beyond clear sight.
Autumn
For a computer artist as LIA, inspiration is not only found within software and computers. The world outside her computer, and nature, have often inspired her, and Autumn, produced at a time when the seasons change and the leaves fall, is a good example of such a case. LIA looks at the world computationally, using drawing as a surveying device to probe for form’s structures, and distil them to their structural essences. These elements are then used as starting points for a process of experimental programming. Experimental not in the sense that new techniques are developed or tested — although they may be, because influences arise from many other fields, and sometimes a mathematical formula or an algorithm can be as poetic as a street paved with fall leaves — but rather experimental as in experimental music, because it is a constructive process that is not planned in advance but that is defined and discovered as it is developed, a process whose goals can only be unearthed through doing. This is how LIA programs morphology, behaviour, and an emergent intricate choreography that spawns the artwork, or better still, that becomes the artwork.
LIA builds systems where everything is in motion, where everything is transient and fleeting, and also illusory. LIA usually works from the simplest, most fundamental, building blocks: points, lines, rotations, translations, etc., with prochronism often building the work’s surface. Forms are not drawn but rather built, from traces of behaviours and from the actions they originated. As such, in Autumn LIA did not actually program autumn leaves, or autumn trees, or what we may also perceive as autumn flowers. She did not draw them or program the piece to draw any such forms. She developed behaviours whose trails may be reminiscent of leaves, trees, or flowers. And what we see are not shapes but chronologies of those movements, vestiges of a dance that once was. We follow behind the action in the work, much as the fallen leaves of autumn follow summer.
Winter
Winter.
Frost.
Snow flakes, slowly falling.
A field of faded, washed out shapes.
Overcast in slow motion.
Stillness.
Stasis.
Death?
Hibernation.
Rebirth.Winter is built around these and other ideas associated with the season. LIA incorporates and enacts them in a work that exists in between the states of still and moving images. Winter is a piece in a transient state of stasis and constant evolution that captures both the essences of the season and of computation in art.
Series notes for Spring and Summer by Damian Stewart. Notes for Autumn and Winter by Miguel Carvalhais.
Project Details
Year: 2018–2019
Medium: Generative Art, presented as Single-Channel Video
Series: Four distinct works: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter
Exhibition Context: Featured by StandardVision for public display at the Los Angeles Public Library and other venues.
