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zoologic (zō- ə- ˈlä- jik) - relating to the properties and vital phenomena exhibited by an animal, animal type, or group.
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Why do animals evolve into different species? Why do they evolve to look or behave one way, and not another? Why do some animals have a few children, while others have many? What makes some animals better at surviving than others?

Zoologic is an exploration of these questions, and of forces that drive the evolution of life. It's a cellular automaton where small creatures ("crobes") compete for survival in a shared space, as their traits and reproductive strategies drift over time. Population dynamics and r/K selection theory play a role in their gradual evolution into new forms.

Life for the bacteria-like crobes is a simple affair. Each explores their world — a hexagonal grid  — according to their own pre-coded movement strategy. Each step requires a little bit of “energy,” the fuel that powers movement. Running out of energy means a crobe can’t move, but more energy can be obtained by consuming the only available food source — other crobes! Crobes can detect their neighbors within a couple of spaces, identify them as predators or prey, and react according to their needs.

Crobes consume each other for resources, then use those resources to reproduce -- but not perfectly. Each reproduction introduces new mutations, causing traits to change and new behaviors and appearances to emerge! The crobes’ neural nets learn over time, and only the fittest survive, making Zoologic an example of a neuroevolutionary algorithm. As neural nets are trained, they can be saved, loaded, and battled, shared with others. Train your crobes locally and compete with friends! Each output includes a fully on-chain, pre-trained neural net that has been generatively modified at the time of mint to give each set of crobes their own unique personality.

Key controls: [A] Fullscreen (press a second time for edge-to-edge animation), [H] Help menu, [I] AI menu, [Space] change color palette, [D] Toggle Dark mode, [F+#] Adjust framerate, [X+#/arrows] Adjust detail level, [N] restart animation with different random seed. Please see Help menu for a more comprehensive explanation of available controls and settings, including some intended for improved presentation for longer periods of time.

Zoologic #133

Zoologic #143 - Static 2/3

#35.1 - peggy sue-jean amanda peggy-jean sue 2

“mono no aware” is an exploration of change at the borders between existence and emptiness. Shapes and colors appear, twisting and fading gradually into new forms. The evolution of the system creates unpredictable and surprising emergent patterns, as deviations from neat symmetry quickly evolve into chaos. The animation is a cellular automaton running with no pre-defined end — but some patterns don’t have what it takes to survive indefinitely. That’s okay; not everything lasts forever (but the pieces will restart in this case).

[Click] to restart. The Level of Detail (LOD) on each animation can be adjusted using [Left Arrow] for less, or [Right Arrow] for more, to allow a customized visual experience and achieve the desired framerate for various devices. Note that while different LODs all follow the same animation rules, they may exhibit slightly different behaviors from each other due to size-dependent resonance — much as the same guitar string plays different notes at different lengths. Each token contains a family of several closely-related animations to choose from.

mono no aware #381

__*Implications*__ explores the symmetry of a chaotic system in motion. Each output contains a selection of geometric shapes that slide, twist, and resize over time. Their intersections divide the canvas into two regions, each with its own set of rules for generating mathematical textures. As predictable geometry and chaotic automata intersect and evolve, a variety of organic and artificial patterns emerge. Gradually, the colors and rules shift, and new forms appear. Through a series of carefully reflected changes, symmetry persists.

Each animation is constructed from large virtual pixels. By varying their scale, spacing, and alignment a variety of patterns are generated — ranging from a pixel art aesthetic to one with softer, larger-scale structures. Where does a tiny pixel end, and the emergent whole it’s a part of begin?

Building on the foundation laid in __*mono no aware*__ and __*Zoologic*__, __*Implications*__ continues the work of making the beautiful complexity of cellular automata visible and accessible. New techniques for optimization, color generation, and constraint selection -- along with simplifications to features and interactive controls -- place focus squarely on an endless and compelling animated experience.

__*Implications*__ is a meditative work best experienced over the course of at least a few minutes. Put on some music, full-screen the live view, and enjoy the show! What sorts of symmetry do you see? What sorts of shapes and textures are there, and how do they move? For viewers who would like to customize the detail level, frame rate, and other aspects of the viewing experience, press **[H]** to open a menu describing the available keyboard controls.

Implications #219

Zoologic #172

*“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” - Mark Twain*

In our day-to-day lives, it’s natural for us to fix a conceptual view of the people, places, and things around us in our minds. We might think, “that is the tree outside my window. This is my house. That’s my friend. I’m me.” In fact, this type of abstraction is necessary for us to make any sort of sense of our world. But is the tree outside your window today truly the same tree as it was yesterday? Are you exactly the same person as you were yesterday? Or twenty years ago? In a sense, the abstraction is an illusion. Our physical reality is inseparable from the flow of time; everything is changing, all the time. Sometimes the changes are fast, and sometimes they’re imperceptible — but time never stops. Change never stops.

__*because unless until*__ represents this concept in art, as a generative system of systems where each output changes over time. New days present new views of the algorithm, where a variety of mathematical shapes gradually and endlessly shift, demonstrating a more local and immediate form of change. Even so, each day’s appearance has enough in common with the one before it to provide the output with a continuous sense of identity. With the arrival of each day, what about the art has changed -- and what remains the same?


Changing Over Time
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One of my favorite aspects of generative art is the joy of discovery when viewing a new output for the first time. I also enjoy the novelty that comes with watching a chaotic system evolve over time. But, once you’ve seen a particular output from a long-form generative art collection, you’ve seen it. My intent, with the time-based mechanics in this algorithm, is to preserve that feeling of discovery so that every viewing and every day brings something new. 

In __*because unless until*__ colors are applied differently depending on the day of the week. The detail level of the animation changes over the course of a month, providing a different visual balance between the shapes, and the textures that fill them. Each month, the animation’s shapes are altered. The weave of these different cycles mean that each day has its own characteristics. It would take at least seven years to see every available combination.

Some outputs come with “Daily Modes” tied to a specific day of the week, where colors and textures are altered in a particular way. Each output also comes with a "Fiesta Day" -- one day of the year where it shows a set of new behaviors. One day in December is designated as “Glitchmas” — a holiday shared across all outputs with another unique behavior. Glitchmas falls on a different day each year.


Animation
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The algorithm works by layering multiple animations, whose intersections are used to divide the canvas into regions that determine the palettes and rules for a section of the output. The rules are applied to an underlying field of cellular automata, which change state accordingly. At the core of the project is a generic framework that runs arbitrary animations in their own threads. The threading enables performant, fluid motion (I find it sensuous -- I often find myself thinking "I want to run my fingers through it.). Threads run asynchronously, which in combination with the chaotic behavior of cellular automata means that outputs evolve in a unique, non-deterministic way each time. After a few minutes, the canvas is likely to be in a state that will no-one will ever experience again.

The animations in __*because unless until*__ are a return to some of my favorite mathematical techniques from a prolific period (2010-11) when I was first beginning to make art: Mandelbrot and Julia fractals, isolines, polar inversions, spirals, regular and irregular polygons, and — of course — cellular automata. It’s been a joy to revisit them, and to combine them with my more recent animated practice. As the animations progress, a variety of emergent features sometimes appear — such as cloudlike trails, regular and irregular structures, and moiré.

There are dozens of cellular automaton rules in the algorithm, which can take the states of surrounding cells as input in one of over a hundred ways. Derived from these rules, there are over a thousand possible textures, and billions of ways that a cell might change depending on its rules, state, and surroundings. The states of cells in an area around each cell are used in one of 18 different ways to select from the palettes available in the output — each of which is an interpolated gradient containing hundreds of colors. The large number of possible combinations contribute to a diverse pool of possible appearances.


Help
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Press **[H]** to open a set of interactive menus providing additional information about the available time-based features and interactive controls. The “Today” panel provides realtime information about which detail level or special day is currently active.

For collectors wanting a more concrete experience, a “Canonical” mode is available that makes the animation appear as it did at unix epoch (January 1, 1970), and a “Synchronous” mode is available that makes animations evolve in a deterministic way (at the cost of performance). These modes are used when generating the thumbnail animations for each output.

because unless until #162

A Julia set rendered using isolines in Perl.

#97.1 - tegeturas beta

This is an unofficial, "non-canonical" out-of-bounds generator capable of generating a (practically) endless number of Implications outputs. Given as a free airdrop to 31 early minters (of Implications #0-30). For the official editions, please check the Art Blocks site! By default, switches to a new output every 2.5 minutes. Press H for instructions.

Implications Infinite - #21

Art by ixnayokay, starting with the 100 Days of Ixnay collection -- 100 days of art from his prolific period from 2010-2013

ixnayokay

ixnayokay

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