In the right hand, a pen can effortlessly reveal the most characteristic features of a person, inside and out. Following the twist and turn of the line, echoes of practice and repetition, the path becomes a walk through the recesses of a subconscious human mind. Total Strangers pays tribute to this time-honoured flight of the human creativity, generating a rogue’s gallery of faces from a continuous fluid line and a virtual pencil case of select drawing tools. We invite you to follow the line as it goes for a walk. Watch it unfold and give life a cast of unique characters, reflections of those around us.
Total Strangers #207 Artem Verkhovskiy + Andy Shaw
Just the things I like.
Arcadia #195 & #203 Zachariah Watson
Arcadia is a homage to the fridge-worthy landscape art of our youth. Childhood techniques of creating art are re-imagined by the scribbles of a nostalgic, computer-assisted mind.
Staccato practices capturing space with elemental geometry. Positive and negative ground dissolve as the eye reads the rows and columns as if distinguishing sheet music. Rhythm emerges from the space between the shapes that tie them together. The emergent forms of Staccato result from the perception of the collection of shapes as a whole. High contrast monochrome rendering maximize this psychological effect as the eye groups similar shapes and patterns into subdivisions. The process of Staccato stems from letterpress printmaking experiments with decorative typographic material. The process involves filling the letterpress with decorative borders and shapes, inking by hand, pulling a print, inspecting the result, making a small adjustment and repeating.
Staccato #21 Philip Bell
Ancient Courses is a generative experience that explores the aesthetics of meandering rivers and the settlements that form on their banks. The design is graphic and cartographic with bold color palettes rendered against map iconography and line sensibility. From the river banks, roads stretch across the landscape: sometimes a single access road, other times sprawling towns. The river meandering is simulated via a custom algorithm which closely models the real world process.
Ancient Courses of Fictional Rivers #641 Robert Hodgin
Our lives are scattered across several time scales, and the meaning of every event that takes place depends on the time scale that we choose to define & observe them from. Yet we fail to fully comprehend this in our daily errands. Entretiempos is an artwork that reflects on this, based on an aesthetic that pays a tribute to the works of Sonia Delaunay, František Kupka and other painters from their era, recreated by the usage of intersecting rings that create a varied and rich space. The work plays with the time scales by painting dynamically and letting the viewer pause the work, restart, set it to loop indefinitely, painting and vanishing in an endless cycle. And it can be set to be done at varying speeds, to appreciate what happens in between the time scales ("entre tiempos", in Spanish).
entretiempos #6 Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez
Para Bellum #665 Matty Mariansky
Para Bellum() is about the conflict of emotion and gut instinct versus logic and reason. Emotions are portrayed by color fields; logic is illustrated by words. These two forces are fighting for dominance over the canvas. Under the hood, Para Bellum utilizes a thin language engine that was trained by reading dozens of books about rebellion and anarchy to generate (mostly) non-existent English phrases. An on-chain embedded font is used to render the familiar, readable letter shapes against the abstract fuzzy color fields. () Para Bellum is half of the Latin phrase “Si vis pacem, para bellum”. If you want peace, prepare for war.
Autology #203 steganon
Is code art? Autology is a study of not only how we interpret art, but also how art can interpret itself. Each piece has its source code embedded imperceptibly within the image itself. Hence the source code is literally part of the artwork. With a little sleuthing, one can derive the source code from the image and vice versa in infinite recursion.
Letters to My Future Self #209 Ryan Struhl
Letters to My Future Self is a series looking at communication through time. There is so much I want to tell my future self that words can't express: from the fear and anger I've felt in lockdown isolation to the joy in finding new friends and community. Each piece in this series becomes a small part of a much bigger story -- letters sent into the future expressing our collective hopes, fears, sadness, and love. A moment in time captured in perpetuity on the blockchain for future generations to find and reflect on.
Divisions #125 Michael Connolly
Paper Armada #855, #1517 & #2725 Kjetil Golid
Divisions creates playful abstract compositions that can go all the way up to eleven.
Perfectly symmetric - imperfectly drawn. Exploring the contrast between precision and chance in a playful spacecraft / papercraft setting.
Alien DNA#218 Shvembldr
In the year 3075 of the Second Nuclear Age, a laboratory of an unknown race of aliens was discovered on the planet Vtolmr while drilling a well of molecular oil. Its presumed purpose is to study genetic mutations of races from neighboring planets. During the laboratory investigation, 512 silicon impressions with DNA of different alien species were extracted. Modern methods of quantum analysis do not allow the deciphering of the data obtained. At this point, their value is purely aesthetic. But that may change in time.
Himinn is a painterly cloud study exploring light, color, and the generative composition of clouds in the sky. The algorithm creates natural forms and the illusion of ever-changing atmosphere through carefully structured layers of color and shape. Himinn means “a sky”, and it has been incredibly fun to paint the skies with code.
Himinn #261 Sarah Ridgley
Dopamine Machines #464 Steve Pikelny
🔥 🤑 🔥 🤑 🔥 🤑 🔥 🤑 🔥 🤑 🔥 🤑 🔥 WOW! TOP ART CRITICS AGREE: "DOPAMINE MACHINES" IS THE HOTTEST GENERATIVE ART PROJECT OF THE DECADE! HERE'S WHAT THEY'RE SAYING: → "EXCITING!!!" ← → "AN ABSOLUTE MASTER CLASS IN HTML & CSS" ← → "I COULDN'T BELIEVE MY EYES... OR EARS!" ← → "THEY'RE EVEN BETTER FULL-SCREEN!" ← → "🤯 MIND BLOWING 🤯" ← → "SO COOL" ← → "EXCITING!" ← → "AN OVERWHELMING SENSATION" ← → "I COULDN'T LOOK AWAY!" ← → "IT WORKS ON ALL MY DEVICES! 🤳" ← → "THESE NFTs ARE GOING STRAIGHT TO THE MOON!" ← → "I'VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING QUITE LIKE IT" ←
YOU DON'T WANT TO MISS THIS! THINGS ARE MOVING FAST, SO ACT NOW BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE! 🚀 💸 🚀 💸 🚀 💸 🚀 💸 🚀 💸 🚀 💸 🚀
Sparkling Goodbye #60 Licia He
Sparkling Goodbye is a generative painting algorithm that celebrates all departures. It's a Farewell to the past, a Bye-Bye to the familiar, and a See-You-Later to faces that you will soon forget.
Each Sparkling Goodbye is meticulously loaded with machine-picked emotions, made from the finest ingredient (100% pixels, full refund if you find any impurities in our ingredient). This hands-off approach makes every single Sparkling Goodbye a chaotic blend of happiness, sadness, serenity, and anxiety. With every glance, you'll discover the impulsiveness of the machine touch as you savor the delightful interplay of dramas that only a maniac generative algorithm can create.
Let Sparkling Goodbye create a moment for you. It will insist that goodbyes are not meant to be said with tears but with sparkling water.
Torrent #260 Jeres
Inspired by residual evidence of torrential downpours, floods and derailed rivers as well as thrown paint and ink, cathartically applied for the purpose of merely having watched it land, streak, smear and drip; just to leave a mark.
Textures of fabric, concrete, paper and marble fused by a tempest... now desiccated and faded, bleached and marred by debris washed on after exposing moments of life. Moments lost; etched incomplete into the landscape.
A nostalgic and possibly misguided love song fusing frantic rhythmic action, erosion and history in a way only time can compose after the violence has long ceased and we are left to excavate the damage and beauty of what can't be harnessed, only experienced or interpreted after the fact, even if any resulting conclusions are fictions filled with contradiction.
Less about truth, more about just having a story that we believe makes sense of it all. Rarely are things black and white.
Torrent is about coming to terms with the past so we can understand the present and navigate the future. In a sense, we're talking about trauma processing, the imperfection of memory and how history changes with time and reflection.
Edifice #232 Ben Kovach
"Edifice" is a series of 976 massive, deteriorating structures built on strange terrain. It is an exploration of buildings being conceptualized, constructed, and eroded away under a wide variety of conditions. Edifice's outputs run the gamut between minimal and maximal, with some showing few large, static blocks of color, and others many small, highly textured and warped shapes. Each image is progressively constructed in front of the viewer's eyes. It is a system full of surprises that I'm excited to share with the world.
Rippling #16 Yi-Wen Lin
Rippling is a generative algorithm that recreates the impression of a raining day. It is a research for the balance between order and chaos. It is also a journey through time and light. Each token represents a different moment and space, creating a unique composition. I took great inspiration from Impressionism, focusing on capturing the light of a moment. The highlights of the ripples are calculated with a simulated 3D water surface combined with a directional light in order to achieve the realistic look of the reflection. The result of this then serves as a base for laying the strokes on the canvas. Light plays an important role in our memory. Through the light and the colour we travel back to different moments and places in our memory. The colouring of Rippling is inspired by the 24 solar terms of the Traditional Chinese Calendar. Each term represents a different period in the year. Rippling uses these terms to represent not only the time but also the memories of the season. Growing up on a subtropical island, rain was a big part of my childhood. I can vividly recall those heavy showers in the afternoon of the summer. It washed out the agitating heat and calmed the world. With Rippling, I'm seeking to use a generative algorithm to recreate the feeling of a rainy day or night at different moments. And perhaps, it could remind you of the sound of the rain drops, the scent of the dirt after the rain or that moment the sunset peek through the heavy cloud ...
Radiance #453 Julien Gachadoat
Radiance explores the combination of simple line patterns structured at different scale to produce unique connected geometric forms. Resulting shapes can vary from minimal to organic and intricate with an underlying modulation of line spacing radiating from center.