Degrees of Disruption: Vera Molnár at the V&A

Peter Bauman, Le Random, editorial, 16 October 2026. Original. Copyrighted: summary with quoted passages.

Summary

Bauman, Le Random's editor in chief, wrote the piece for the opening of the display at V&A South Kensington on Friday 16 October 2026. He describes "more than fifty works from Vera Molnár's career, from early paintings to plotter drawings and late self-portraits" and reads the hang as an argument about history:

"Degrees of Disruption tells a certain history of art since midcentury. It starts with painting, moves to human-executed rules, then to computer-executed rules and ends with machine-learned models."

Most of the editorial argues that sharing control with machines is old. Molnár's machine imaginaire, instructions she wrote out from the late 1950s and executed by hand, preceded her computer work, which began in 1968 through the composer Pierre Barbaud. Bauman uses the point against the stigma attached to working with neural networks today. He lists the Molnár plotter drawings on show, Interruptions (1969), In Search of Paul Klee (1970) and (Des)Ordres (1974), mentions My Mother's Letters (1988), and notes that the display includes a self-portrait never shown before, Autoportrait à la Sainte-Victoire (2004), six collages cut from one photograph. The piece includes two interactive sketches of Molnár's methods, labelled "not a work of art", and quotes the collector Michael Spalter of Spalter Digital on the institutional recognition of digital art.

The contemporary section

"The last section is perhaps the most argumentative, demonstrating Molnár's legacy by placing her work beside eight works by ten contemporary generative artists. It shows the reach of her influence, exploring and extending terrain trod by Molnár for decades around questions of control, agency and authorship, often in dialogue with technology."

"Among the contemporary artists are Casey Reas, Licia He, William Mapan, Zach Lieberman, Harm van den Dorpel, Matt DesLauriers and Entangled Others, whose Sediment Nodes (2022–23) uses neural networks to imagine microscopic life."

Bauman does not discuss van den Dorpel's works individually. He calls the neural-network piece by Entangled Others "the show's quiet argument", the endpoint of a path "from abstract painting objects to Molnár's person-executed rules to her automated rules and to today's neural networks". Le Random also published a podcast conversation with the curator, "Melanie Lenz—Generativity and Vera Molnár at the V&A with Peter Bauman".