Monk Antony Burner, whose real name is Peter Bauman,writes editorial content and historical research on generative art as part of the core team at Le Random.He found his way into Web3 through the FxHash discord and became a founding member of the collective Tender. In February 2022 he made his Web3 writing debut with a Tender editorial piece on Erik Swahn's Farbteiler.
Bauman spent 12 years living in Hong Kong, where he worked in teaching and finance and earned two master's degrees in international relations. He joined Le Random in November 2022 as one of its four core team members, handling editorial content, the Twitter presence and its generative art history timeline. He began building that timeline around the same time, working decade by decade and drawing on primary sources alongside books such as Grant Taylor's When the Machine Made Art and Herbert W. Franke's Computer Graphics – Computer Art.
In an essay titled Demystifying Generative Art, he proposed a framework for analysing generative art built around five elements: process, result, concept, context and autonomy. He developed the autonomy element from an earlier essay he wrote for Right Click Save. There he argued that a generative artist cedes control to an autonomous system, with the degree of control ceded depending on whether the artist works in short or long form.In a later essay, The Cerebral Samba, published in Le Random after the exhibition “Strange Rules” opened, he mapped an emerging field he called Protocol Art. He divided the field into three archetypes: protocol instantiators who define rules that others can instantiate, protocol critics who analyse the protocols that influence daily life, and worldbuilders who create emergent environments from loosely defined protocols.
