
Simple and easily identifiable, each squiggle embodies the soul of the Art Blocks platform. Consider each my personal signature as an artist, developer, and tinkerer. Public minting of the Chromie Squiggle is permanently paused. They are now reserved for manual distribution to collectors and community members over a longer period of time. Please visit OpenSea to explore Squiggles available on the secondary market.
There are an almost infinite number of ways to wrap a string around a set of pegs. On the surface it may seem like a simple concept but prepare to be surprised and delighted at the variety of combinations the algorithm can produce. Each output from 'Ringers' is derived from a unique transaction hash and generated in Javascript in the browser. Feature variations include peg count, sizing, layout, wrap orientation, and a few colorful flourishes for good measure.
Fidenza is by far my most versatile algorithm to date. Although the program stays focused on structured curves and blocks, the varieties of scale, organization, texture, and color usage it can employ create a wide array of generative possibilities.
Pigments is an exploration of colour and spatial distortion. Each instance is an abstract representation aimed at evoking a micro or macro-environment; from unknown substances, or oil in a canvas, to nebular formations. The pieces are animated, meant to be experienced live. The piece can run endlessly, with infinite output. To run it smoothly you need a capable GPU. If this proves to be too computationally intensive, or if you prefer a static view, feel free to press the spacebar.
This project is a visual representation of realities that are out of phase. Interference patterns, colorful echoes, and emerging secrets are explored. Mathematical functions produce constant motion, but rarely, a peaceful scene resolves within the chaos. Click or press any key to pause. *Photosensitive seizure warning: These artworks contain flashing colors and moving patterns.
An exploration in generating forms in 3-dimensional space. This exclusive set of sculptures has been carved from a sea of infinite possibilities, much like a sculptor creates a singular reality from the potential in a block of stone. The shapes are illuminated by a variety of complex virtual lighting environments and yet the piece retains algorithmic minimalism with the code reduced to its pure essence -- 6370 bytes. Skulptuurs render in real time. In live view, the image keeps improving in quality. Keys 0-7 change speed: 0=Stop, 5=Default, 7=Fastest. Careful, requires a powerful machine. Requires a WebGL2-enabled browser.
Since the dawn of humanity, the Moon's phases have fascinated humans, influencing any number of activities on Earth including ocean tides, seasons, harvests, migrations, hunting, crime, sleeping, sex, and has inspired countless works of art. The first lunar calendar, dated to 32,000 BC was discovered, drawn on animal bone in caves. It's believed hunters during the last Ice Age used these portable lunar calendars to anticipate the behavior of different animals like Mammoths. Since then, our Moon has been imprinted across all our ancient and modern cultures, even becoming the system from which our Gregorian calendar evolved from. In the present day, investors in crypto have used the Moon symbolically.
What does it mean for all of us in crypto to be so ahead of our time, all while using the same metaphor of the Moon for the various measures of success and individual goals we collectively share in crypto? And how will the future appreciate our ambitions and perseverance within the present moment's growing pains on our way to mass adoption? These are some of the questions that Gazers ask.
On the surface, Gazers function as a lunar calendar, algorithmically synching closely with Moon phases in the sky, joining the blockchain with one of humanity's longest running lineages in art. Gazers seeks to create a community of collectors celebrating the change of our perceptions that happen over time, our collective goals in crypto, and our love of color theory, astronomy, and generative art.
What we are building in blockchain and NFTs will primarily be for the benefit of the future. As such, this artwork was designed to pace itself and speed up its frame rate over time, scaling into anticipated advancements in technology that will steadily allow the artwork to run at faster speeds while at larger scales. Each NFT starts out with the assignment of a date from the past 20 years. These dates correspond to events that happened under particular New Moons that shaped my path as an artist. This is the Origin Moon trait and how Gazers is in part a conceptual self portrait.
Starting from the Origin Moon, each New Moon that arrives will speed up the potential animation of the NFT. For example, an NFT with a 20 year old Origin Moon might run at 20 frames per second, appearing as an animation. But one with an Origin Moon fresh from the sale will run closer to 1 frame per second, appearing more like a slowly evolving painting. Every moment, the frame rate of the artwork speeds up fractionally, indecipherable to our eyes. Stacking these advancements over time creates a generational evolution of experience. There is something undeniably beautiful about everything speeding up within our lifetimes, but the Moon, high above us, continues to carry on at the same meandering rate of 29.53 days in each cycle. Much like these blockchain technologies and NFT markets, this artwork was designed to be collected by the present, but appreciated in a greater sense than we can even imagine by the future.
I created Gazers to be like a living artwork, to be lived with, and to not only have the artwork evolve over time but also the appreciation and experience of viewers. As I coded the work, I imagined it hanging on the wall of collectors, a fixture in their physical space. Collectors might spend a moment admiring their work, walk away for a couple hours, and then come back to be delighted, noticing the most subtle of shifts. Each layer of the work consists of pattern designs. With the passage of time, the thickness of the layered lines pulse and the direction a design moves will advance or rotate, changing our perception of color in the most subtle and optical of ways. Each day at midnight, each layer receives a new set of rules in terms of how to rise or shine over the next 24 hours. The result is color that rises and sets, echoing the change of light in our sky.
My use of color has consistently been what I've been best known for across my 20 year artistic career. In all my work until now, I've made all the color and design choices as I've painted as a human in the moment. But in Gazers, I designed a complex system around color theory as I understand it, joining my talent for coding with my vision for color.
Many NFT collectors of my work might be familiar with the additional experiences some of their NFTs unlock at my website. Rather than use a Gazers NFT to unlock a website, I decided this time to create rendering modes that unlock within the code over time. These additional modes of viewing are intended to help a collector better understand the architecture of their artwork's design and also benefit from greater enjoyment of it. The addition of these experiences should present an additional benefit to HODLing for some.
Every 29 and a half days, we reach a Moon phase called the New Moon. This is when the dark side of the Moon is fully visible and no sunlight is reflected from the lunar surface back to Earth. In Gazers, each New Moon phase creates a New Moon design. In this artwork, the hash seed creates color theory and design rules. These rules are deterministic and dictate all the moons that will generatively be created into infinity. Time reveals our moons. Pairing time with deterministic generative code creates the ephemeral moment. We can all agree that looking at the Moon in the sky never seems to be the exact same experience twice, nor the exact same from different locations. I wanted to echo this nature in Gazers and emphasize the urgency and rarity of our present moment and how an artwork can capture this.
As individuals, we all have our own version of the Moon and what reaching it means. Just as our goals change over time, often subtly, sometimes dramatically, so will our moons, creating a visual representation that might coincide with what's changing inside of us. In crypto, we are all ahead of our time. We are all gazers. And we are all waiting for our next Moon.
Chimera is a mutation, its genetics a merging of past and present.
New creative mediums almost always ingest those that came before. Pictograms and hieroglyphics turned into paintings, which eventually became moving images and photoreal graphics. Spoken words evolved into written text, eventually becoming complex screenplays, computer code, and a world of hyperlinks. Most mediums are not discarded, but combined or extended to incorporate new technology or ideas.
When a new medium comes into existence, the capabilities of both the artist and viewer increase. The potential subjects within said medium can grow in complexity as well, some fully dependent on the medium that holds them. Other subjects are timeless, popping in and out of multiple movements and genres throughout history. An example of the latter is still life. From ancient carvings through contemporary art, scenes of commonality, beauty, and metaphor have persisted. Traditionally viewed as a type of technical practice or meditation (the bottom of the “hierarchy of genres”), some examples of still life have gone on to be among the most important works in art history.
Chimera is a natural progression of still life. It is an old tradition in the very new medium of on-chain generative art, a movement that will have an enormous presence in the future. Chimera simultaneously reaches into the past while exploiting the capabilities of the present and seeks to represent a unique moment in time, a generation of art in between digital and physical realities, encapsulating where we came from and where we are going.
NOTES:
Chimera is graphically intensive. Modern hardware is recommended. Ensure that your browser has hardware acceleration enabled.
The charitable portion of this release will be donated to various cancer research efforts.
CONTROLS:
“A”: Toggle animations “R”: Toggle autorotation “C”: Capture screenshot “H”: Capture HD screenshot (CPU intensive)
—
Thank you to all that participate in, share, or otherwise support this release. It means more to me than I can say.
Memories of Qilin is inspired by traditional East Asian art. It channels the sense of movement and fluidity found in classical Chinese brushwork, while drawing from the colors, patterns, and forms of ukiyo-e woodblock prints.
The series explores elements of folklore, evoking the mythological imagery of dragons, phoenixes, flowers, and mountains. The title references a fabled chimerical beast found throughout East Asian mythology (while the qilin is its Chinese name, it is also known in Korea as the girin and Japan as the kirin) that represents prosperity and luck.
Viewers are invited to interpret elusive forms that verge on representation. As with the stories passed on through generations, each piece is imagined, organic, and ever-in-flux.
Anticyclones are a weather phenomena. They pierce through darkness to instill peace and calm. Their planetary scale reminds us of how little we are and how powerful they can be.
High pressure, rotation, air flow… The "Anticyclone" series is an artistic exploration and interpretation of those concepts.
The rendering borrows its aesthetics from traditional and organic media like paper and crayons, to lend an analog/archival look.
"Can a computer draw like a human?" The question is asked and challenged once more through "Anticyclone".
[Press the left/right keys to explore the different steps building the final image. Bottom/top for the first/last step. Can be intense for your machine]
Fontana is Latin for fountain.
This project is a playful attempt at abstractly capturing the flowing movement of a fountain using precisely drawn elements that evoke a static and considered rendering of a subject that is in constant flux. The visual language is reminiscent of hand-draughted technical drawing, a precise and methodical practice that progresses at a radically different pace to the flowing and capricious movement of water. To increase this tension between dynamic motion and static mechanical process I wanted the surface textures to appear worn and aged like a drawing that has spent its life in the bottom of a mechanics drawer. This process of abrasion and discoloration is occurring on yet another scale of time adding complexity to the references of time passing.
Woven into the very fabric of Fontana is a fully generative solution for creating color expression. This means there is no reliance on preset palettes with every output being an entirely unique color articulation of the color story I want the project to reveal as a whole. Far from being random I attempted to create an approach which produces colors that evoke early 20th Century art and design media. With this intention I wanted outputs to look like they could be working drawing artifacts from this period of time.