@256ART

Julien Labat: the story behind the artist

I come from a humble family with peasant ancestors and a popular culture. My grandparents had left their respective villages to work in the industry — in small cities — while my parents earned their lives working as employees in the service sector. 

Art, however, in some form or another has always surrounded me. Where I come from, people sing all the time: at dinners, parties, and gatherings, at weddings, births, and funerals, or simply when they meet in the street. They sing — loudly and in polyphony — traditional songs in an almost lost idiom. They play with words too, mostly through oral literature. Stories, poems, tales, speeches, jokes, and wordplays were the first books I read, and were my first experiences with the magic of the verb. This is what culture has always looked like to me, but the visual arts caught my attention the most. 

My mother — a seamstress and hobbyist painter — used the squaring-off technique to reproduce portraits from photographs, Van Gogh’s paintings, or life-size comic book characters. She taught me how to draw at a very young age and encouraged me throughout the practice. Drawing eventually became a shelter of sorts when my parents divorced. I was 6 years old when my father’s new partner moved with her two kids into what was previously our family home. This home no longer felt like mine and I spent most of the time at my mother’s. My little sister and I started moving from town to town with her, a new house every couple of years. In search of stability and comfort, music, drawing, and video games became my homes and my ways of escape — no matter where I had to go.

The first big geographical and cultural leap we took landed us in a housing project in the Bordeaux area. My social class became more concrete there. It was the golden age of hip-hop, and naturally, my passion for drawing switched to graffiti and lettering. French rap was mostly “conscious” and very eye-opening to me. While we weren’t the poorest family in our neighborhood, I still felt the prevalence of social inequality and injustice. I was sad and angry and didn’t know what to do with that, but what I did know was I wanted to work with computers.

My first idea was to learn computer science and programming, but everyone around me somehow convinced me I needed to be good at math for this type of career — which I wasn’t by the end of high school. Now that I recognize that what they said was the result of genuine ignorance at the time, I would tell my younger self, 

“Don’t believe what others tell you, you can do whatever you want as long as you truly commit to it.” 

But I did believe them, so I picked Applied Arts and chose to become a graphic designer.

In art school, I experienced another form of inequality: what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls “cultural capital”. Most of my classmates came from middle-class to upper-class families and already had a background in the arts and culture. I just wanted to make pretty images on the computer. I was definitely not equipped to learn art history and theory, or mature enough to appreciate contemporary art. Pretty much everything our teachers made us do felt like unnecessary overthinking, intellectual bullshit. I learned as much as I could there but stopped after one year and started more practical training in computer graphics. I built my graphic designer career one gig at a time and completed my knowledge of art slowly but steadily.

If I’m being honest, to this day I’m still puzzled about what good art really is. I’m still not sure what the most valuable culture is. Is it popular culture – the type that touches a wide audience, that talks simply about nature, human or otherwise? Or is it highbrow culture – the one that makes society progress on occasion, but is almost completely inaccessible to the neophytes? Both are extremely valuable, if you ask me. But do they have to live in two separate worlds?

My career kind of ended in a burnout around the age of 30 after an intense experience in politics. Being behind the scenes of a presidential campaign is super exciting and very instructive — but politicians are vampires. None of the money they paid me was worth the stress I endured, or the crazy hours. Neither did it lift the sadness and the anger that was slowly destroying me. Symbolically, I left this world and I studied again, to understand. I studied by myself, following the flow of what I discovered, reading books, and listening to talks and lectures. I learned about history, sociology, science, philosophy, religion, and mysticism. I stripped myself (consciously or unconsciously) of material belongings and experienced poverty once again. I killed the person I became so as to not kill myself.

What was left was the urge to create and to do something with all this. I didn’t know what I had to express but I had to find a way to express it. I started drawing and painting again, and seriously committed to it. The Tarot de Sète came out as an homage to my city and an ode to popular culture. As greater artists did before me, I reinterpreted the Tarot de Marseille deck of cards, but with symbols and archetypes from the vibrant and colorful city of Sète — the home I had chosen. Great reception to my first time selling original paintings. The sadness and the anger started to fade out – I was celebrating where I came from and reconnecting with who I am through art.

As art could not provide enough revenue, I decided to finally take the leap I didn’t take when I was a teenager. I started to learn programming to begin a new career as a developer. As I write these words I’m still in the process of retraining, but along the way, I stumbled upon generative art and I knew instantly,

This is what I’m here to do.

This is where my path leads. So here I am, experimenting and playing, meeting the kindest people, and learning again every day, on the breach to reconcile all the versions of myself. With the higher hope of someday reconciling a bit of both popular and highbrow culture in my work.

Tibout Shaik: the story behind the artist

At the age of eleven my parents went through a very violent divorce (escalating with my dad hitting my mother on the head with a hammer). I think this divorce; and more so the aftermath of it; has probably shaped my entire outlook on life. For a very long time I felt like I didn’t belong. A bad family situation, being bullied at school, etc. It made me very strongly revolt against society. At the time it was very black and white for me: society bad – alternative lifestyle good. This made me always look at life in a different light and look for other ways of doing things. I performed in bars with my poetry, did odd jobs, worked on my own projects and mostly traveled whenever I could. Growing older, I realized my travels were a form of escapism and however beautiful they were I wanted to build something lasting. This is when I started to full on focus on my projects, which eventually leads us here to me creating 256ART.

For me art has always been a way to scream very publicly, without being looked at as an insane person. When I started with my poetry way back when, it surprised me how many people felt a connection with my writings. It made me realize a key point, art has to be pure. Someone enjoying any form of art, will nearly always look at what it represents in their own life rather than that of its creator. I think my art often times combines a fairly mathematical / analytical side of me with a darker side that has always been a part of me. Whilst I want to be clear, my life right now is great, at times I feel that darkness coming up and inside I feel the heart and head clash so intensely, I just shut down. I’m in a stage in my life now, where I have a strong internal framework to get myself past these moments. One way to do so is by letting it out in the form of art. From very non-abstract poetry in the past, to more abstract generative art now.

My generative art journey started with the 256ART genesis series. It was me experimenting with the possibilities of generative art and blockchain technology. This was most definitely one of my way more mathematical focused pieces. And you guessed it, the focus lies on the number 256. It’s a number you will stumble upon time and time again in computer science. The underlining cryptographic hash function for Bitcoin is SHA256, for me Bitcoin especially in its inception was a big “fuck you” to the way our society runs. Bitcoin in itself represents what I stand for in multiple ways, freedom and an alternative way of doing things.

This gradual insanity, my latest work (launching soon), is definitely a darker piece. It’s very personal for me, as at times I do feel like I’m descending into insanity. My brain will go in overdrive, I can’t sleep and I question everything. But at a larger scale, it also represents society as a whole for me. Wars in the world, technological addiction, opportunity inequality etc. It’s not something that happened all at once, it’s been very gradual which made it become normalized. It’s a series that I hope can let you question the status quo and see where we can improve or find an alternative way altogether.

Building out 256ART has been incredibly fulfilling for me and I hope it can give other upcoming generative artists a platform to share their story and the art that flowed out of that story. Even right now as I’m writing this in the middle of rebuilding the project, I can easily say it’s been an amazing journey so far. And I can’t wait to see what it will grow into over the years to come.

I want to end on a realistic note, as it may sound like I’ve always been in an upward trajectory ever since my messy childhood, this hasn’t been the case. There have been moments where I felt it was all going to go downhill again. During the last decade of my life, I’ve been at the verge of self-destructing after failed relationships and failed projects. Even when everything was seemingly going perfectly, there have been moments I’ve severely struggled with my mental health. That said, I do believe that if you keep working on yourself and keep improving a bit each day, in the long run, you end up where you want to be. And I’m incredibly blessed to be able to say, that I do feel I’m pretty much exactly where I want to be in life.

The 256ART genesis series

It’s late August 2021, I’m sitting outside on top of a hilltop in the country of Georgia, where my brother has opened his glamping earlier this year. What was supposed to be a one month stay; quite literally spending the last of my fiat savings; had turned into 5-month hiatus. The last year and a half or so, I had been feeling lost. The three years before that, I had been working on a social media application for travelers. Then Covid hit. Investors pulled out, finances dwindled, the project ran a slow death to the point where I could barely keep it in maintenance mode. Spending a few months in nature, meeting incredible people day after day that would visit the glamping, starts to invigorate something inside of me again. A few of my side projects in the blockchain space are keeping me afloat and NFTs are starting to get wider acceptance, well, at least in the crypto space.

I decide to learn more. I’ve always been a very curious individual and the more I learn the giddier I’m becoming. At the time I have around 0.4 ETH in my wallet with no real money coming in. To learn is to do in my opinion, so first thing I did was scout through OpenSea to find some cheap (think 0.01 ETH) NFT projects where I think the concept is unique or interesting. I dive into Twitter Spaces and soak up all the information I can like a sponge. Then I stumble upon generative art. What was just a small side interest had quickly become a major focus in my life. Creating art with code.

Tezumie: the story behind the artist

I was raised by a single mother along with my two sisters. Being the only boy I was always rather independent and spent most of my time out in the nearby forests and creeks. I always enjoyed drawing, but I was never any good at it. My passion for exploring the outdoors switched to art after I had seen my uncle drawing Dragon Ball Z characters — this made me want to create my own characters and stories.

I quickly became obsessed with art and my mother made sure I had all of the supplies I needed. Growing up, artwork had quickly become my main hobby until about the age of twelve, this is when my mom brought home a desktop computer. Playing on the computer was an amazing thing for me. I could learn anything I wanted at the touch of a button. Through free art programs, I discovered that my characters and stories could be translated into the digital world. I even attempted to make a game using blender 3D which, at the time, had a form of visual scripting where you didn’t have to code. I played with this all the time, bringing my artwork to life with 3D and drawing programs.

At the age of 14, I moved from home a thousand miles away from my mom and sisters to a very small town with a population of fewer than 1,400 people. In small towns, there is a very distinct atmosphere, more community-focused, and I had abandoned artwork and computers to spend more time with friends. I lived with friends and their families in this small town until I graduated high school, and went off to join the military.

After finishing my service, I was unsure of what to do. I tried a few different things and eventually decided to put myself through college to gain further education in something I actually wanted to pursue. This got me thinking about what I actually enjoyed in life — computers. I enrolled at a school for software development before quickly learning that you don’t actually do any programming for a couple of semesters and instead do basic education courses first.

Around this time a friend of mine had reached out to me to ask for help with some art, designing a patch for my old military unit. This got me back into art and I found I really missed it. I continued to draw art as a fun hobby and once again became obsessed. The same friend knew I was also interested in computers and this brought up NFTs.

After looking into it, I decided to make some NFTs of some characters just for fun. I made my first illustrative project, Tezumies. The Tezos community is mostly generative art based so I looked into it and realized I could learn to program while making artwork, combining my two interests into one! I proceeded to learn programming through YouTube tutorials and continue to improve my newfound passion every day.

Entangled

The original concept of Entangled was inspired by text art, also known as ASCII art. I wanted to create something which had characteristics of text art, but without using any text to create it. This concept evolved drastically and the finished product only has a minor connection to ASCII, that being the pattern displayed in the background of the artwork, which is made up of hash marks combined with noise.

For me, the final product of any generative piece never fully represents my initial vision. Throughout the creation process I do a lot of experimentation, this often has unexpected results which sometimes I find appealing. For Entangled, one of these happy accidents was what I am calling "abstract growth" , which also inspired the title of the series. This abstract growth started as small weeds, but through experimenting with random values, created these long abstract lines that became entangled with the rest of the composition.

I experimented with a lot of different compositions, less trees, more flowers/ plant species, but none if it felt right. I thought of the concept of being Entangled with nature and decided the trees should be the main focus, where the branches could wind around and fill the majority of the space. Adding more nature to the ground layer distracted a lot from the trees so I decided to make the ground simplistic and focus more on filling the canvas with the leaves. This created more space in the ground layer to see some basic geometry which gives a nice contrast between the unpredictable lines of nature and the structured shapes which fill the ground.

1ABSTRACT: THE STORY BEHIND THE ARTIST

Without having any say in the matter, my story begins in a small town in southern Romania in the mid-1970s. I say this because I really hate to define myself by things I didn't choose, like nationality, region, religion, the language I speak or the football team my father supported. However, this is part of the story. I grew up in Ceausescu's Romania, where having parents with connections in "the party" was always an asset. I didn't have any, and this sometimes led to very conflicted feelings during my childhood, but this was normal for many children at that time. Although my working-class family initially had absolutely nothing to do with the arts, art crept into my environment through an unlikely combination of circumstances. One day, a drunken painter forgot his tubes of oil in my grandmother's garden after buying (illegally) mediocre homemade brady pomace. When he never came back, my mother picked them up and started painting, then took some evening art classes. So, I grew up with my mother interested in art and she occasionally painted impressionist oil paintings and watercolors. This may have played a role in my recent discovery of generative art as a new passion, but it's hard to say for sure.

Growing up, I was fortunate to have several key figures in my family who shaped my direction by constantly advising me to "get out of this town." There were two main ways to do this: sports or education. My father really pushed sports on me, and I think it definitely helped me in many ways, including allowing me to travel the country and expand my horizons. However, it didn't work out, I guess in part because my last coach was nothing short of a bully, and I was too young to deal with it. But it was for the best, because it forced me to refocus on my studies. Before high school, I was passionate about two things, anything computer related and anything nature related. I was not confident enough in my mathematical skills so I chose the path of nature conservation and ecology. I took a BSc and an MSc in ecology in Bucharest. I almost dropped out at one point, as I was disappointed by the low quality of the teaching, which focused only on memorizing information, but the prospect of a scholarship abroad allowed me to continue my studies during my master's degree.

Finally, in 2001, I managed to get my scholarship and went abroad to Germany to do the practical/experimental project of my MSc. Here I participated for the first time in experimental research and discovered the scientific method. I realized that this was what I wanted to do. Then I continued with a PhD in ecology in Germany and several postdoctoral positions in the UK and France before getting a permanent research position in Montpellier.

I first heard about NFTs via CryptoPunks probably around early 2018. My first thought was something along the lines of "this is crazy!", but it intrigued me enough to dig deeper. At the time, I was already on board with some of the ideas behind blockchain technology like decentralized funding, secure voting, supply chain tracking, proof of ownership, etc. but no one really knew if this technology can deliver on its promise. While I think the jury is still out on many of these promises, the rapid adoption of blockchain technology by the digital art environment via the development of multiple decentralized platforms to showcase the work of generative artists while providing a much-needed solution for tracking authenticity and royalties has already shown that it adds significant value to digital artists.

Regarding my beginnings in generative art, I'm not particularly proud to say that I only started to get interested in it around January 2021, and that was by chance while looking for some tricks to plot with R, a statistical software regularly used by ecologists. It took me several months before my first real attempt to do something with R myself, and I met my first collectors on Hic Et Nunc. Soon after, "fxhash" appeared and I was quickly drawn to the idea of long-running generative art. This forced me to self-teach p5.js, a JavaScript library for creative coding, which quickly became my primary means of creation. That being said, while one might think I'm an experienced programmer, I have no formal programming training and am aware that I am unable to write very elegant code. I'm still working on my toolbox.

As for my artistic style, I am particularly drawn to abstract art. Although it is less easy to grasp than figurative art, I really like the fact that it is open to interpretation and gives the freedom to explore and assign its own meaning. Some of the long-running generative series I've published on fxhash are in this vein. I'm thinking in particular of one of my favorite series, entitled "Lost in the multidimensional planes", in which I try to create both the feeling of smallness and the feeling of being lost in an infinitely vast universe. But you have to let yourself be taken by the drawing. It will speak to you in your own language and take you somewhere, but only if you engage with it.

For now, I am enjoying my new hobby and the journey that comes with it. I can't wait to see where the 256ART chapter will lead.

P1X3LBOY: THE STORY BEHIND THE ARTIST

I grew up with my Mum, Dad, brother and sister as a close family. My mum and sister are very artistic so we would often go to museums and galleries and walk in the English countryside.

For my ninth birthday my parents gave me and my brother an Amstrad CPC 6128, with not just a tape drive but a disk drive too! This was my first venture into making pixel art. This advanced to making more complex art and animation projects and even my own front-end operating system in BASIC for my BBC B computer at the age of 11. The real advance though was when I got a Commodore Amiga 500 with Deluxe Paint 3 for my 13th birthday. My walls were filled from top to toe with full-page images and adverts for computer games from the latest game magazines. Pixel-by-pixel, I used to try to recreate these images using Deluxe Paint 3 and went on from there making Amiga demo-scene style animations, and coding graphics mostly for fun.

I studied at university in the remote seaside town of Aberystwyth in Wales and have an MSc in Computer Science, where I coded in Java, and focused on the use of neural networks. Working in data, technology and marketing for most of my career, I have always had a passion for art having come from an artistic family. Seemingly, like so many generative artists, I enjoy playing the guitar and used to play bass guitar in a band as a teenager which was a lot of fun. Mostly I now play guitar to relax as a break from intensive coding rather than publicly and I enjoy listening to an eclectic mix of music whilst I code, ranging from Morcheeba to Guns & Roses and from J.S. Bach to the Beastie Boys!

After university I took a year travelling around the world seeing some incredible sights and really trying to understand the cultures. Probably my two favourite places to visit were Indonesia and New Zealand. On arrival back in the UK with quite a lot of debt but a whole stack of memories, I went to work for an IT company but not as a developer, in the sales and marketing team. The reason behind this decision was a desire to work as part of a team and the opportunity to network with clients. I have been involved in web development and UX in my most recent job roles and started making generative art back in 2020 after various requests and commissions from friends and family.

When the lockdown hit in the UK and I was unable to go out and visit clients, this unexpected pandemic allowed me more time to focus on my art and ultimately led to my decision to pursue generative art as a full-time career. In some ways this was a gamble for a 43 year old but a risk my family and I were willing to take. Put simply, my career goals are to continue making art that I enjoy, I feel like I am only just getting started on this journey and have lots more ideas floating around in my mind to commit to code. One day I would love to have my own solo exhibition in a renowned gallery and to have a huge animated piece exhibited in a public space. Whilst I am working on these goals, in the short term I hope to inspire others to create their own art and to raise the profile of generative art among more traditional collectors. As a member of a few Discord groups I regularly chat with other creative coders and both give and take second opinions from a select group whose judgement I trust.

My first NFT 'Ripple Effect' was made using Pico-8 and my second, 'Dripping Pixels' has been my profile picture ever since August 2021. What I love about Pico-8 is that it is so restrictive. Because you are working with a 128 x 128 grid and only 16 colours you have to work on pushing the grid to it's limits. I enjoy making Pico-8 tweet carts, where I use 280 characters or less to make a generative work. I was already starting to make work in P5.js when FXHash was set up, for example with 'Generative Flowers'. Due to this experience, I was able to create project #100 on that platform and have really enjoyed making P5.js work ever since. My latest piece of work was a collaboration with Paper Buddha, where we spent three months creating generative Paper Mandalas. Mandalas dating back to the 4th century are arguably one of the original generative art types, along with Roman mosaics which I like to class at the original pixel-art!

Being asked to create a piece as a tribute to the late Herbert W. Franke along with some of the generative art pioneers like Frieder Nake and Vera Molnar and more recent prominent artists like Casey Reas, Mario Klingemann and Zancan is right up there as one of my greatest successes. Also having separate works selected by both Kate Vass, and Paris Hilton for their curated shows at NFT Liverpool this Summer have been the highlights of my artistic career. My biggest success, however, has been creating a loving family home with my wife and two children who support me on my artistic journey.

I have made more than enough mistakes in life, but genuinely feel that every decision, right or wrong has got me to the position I am in now, so no regrets!