grails

Dispyr by Pierre Casadebaig

This series is an attempt to emulate etching drawings with code, by playing with noise and data removal to create a more natural rendering.

Elevation data centered on a point of interest in the Pyrénées mountain range is obtained from a digital elevation model. Then, this 3D point set is processed into 2D, by computing multiple lines of elevation as a function of longitude, for discrete latitude values. The intersections between lines are avoided by checking for a minimum distance between a point at a given longitude and its neighbourhood.

Finally, the overall aesthetic is obtained by adding noise and discarding information as a function of various attributes (elevation, slope, elevation dispersion).

Garden, Monoliths by zancan

"Garden, Monoliths" is the result of an algorithm that started in April 2021. It was called "Grass.js".

Spring was blooming all around the house, taking over the stones and remnants of ancient battles that stood here. Inspiration was everywhere.

The initial goal was to use mathematical formulas for creating patterns inspired by the density of nature, that could be used by a pen plotter, so it kept focusing on outputting vector lines. This history and practice produced a graphical style based on line strokes, plus occasionally some transparent, filled shapes.

Mind the Gap by Mount Vitruvius

A generative series inspired by childhood memories, play and exploration. The program can use a variety of motions, collision types, colour processes, palettes and scales to create a wide range playful output.

Bent by ippsketch

Bent is generative art. Generative art is created by combining code with randomness. Randomness provides endless possibilities for what the final output will look like, but the number of mints written to the blockchain is finite (1023). The outputs emerge from a combination of features, often with results unimagined by the artist. In that sense, the art is collaborative with the minter. The minter brings the transaction hash, which pulls only one specific configuration from the sea of infinite possibilities. That mint is their catch, as much as it’s mine, and neither of us knew what would result before the token was generated. That is the excitement (and the terror) of generative art.

Decagon by Kjetil Golid

The Decagon is the infinitely evolving, always unique, and eternally open membership token of the Decaverse.

Proxima by Jacek Markusiewicz & Ismahelio

The preparations for the first mission began in 2142. It had become clear that mining petroleum on Earth would soon become financially unfeasible, so looking to other planets was the only logical choice. It took seventeen more years to perfect the technology so that the first colonists could reach Proxima b within the lifetime of one generation.

After 45 years of travelling at almost one-tenth of the speed of light, they reached their new home. It was rich in petrochemicals but scarce in the nutrients necessary for long term human survival. After merely six generations, humanity was forced to travel once again in search of a new world. The four missions that parted from the Proxima system to colonise other possibly habitable planets in the galaxy sparked a new age of human civilisation that would never see itself united and thriving again.

Eventually, all the colonies became independent societies as their differing interests drove them apart. Each small civilisation chose its path, wandering the void of space alone. Over time, millions of kilometres apart, each colony developed its own culture and traditions. While their habits and customs changed, some things remained the same across all the societies, like how it became a certain tradition to convert the outer world years and days to Earth time and celebrate holidays according to the calendar of the old world.

RGB Elementary Cellular Automaton by Ciphrd

Stephen Wolfram's Elementary Cellular Automaton where 3 different rules are drawn in the Red, Green and Blue color components of the image.

Rules are selected randomly among a pre-selection of 53 rules from which nice behaviors emerge.

Tokens can have a cell size in the [1; 20] range.

Entretiempos by Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez

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).

Repeater by Michael Connolly

An even grid of coloured stripes, triangles, or a mix of both is generated. Then a variety of copy/paste mechanisms take slices of this in various thicknesses and reapply in various ways on top of the original grid. These are subsequently copied and resampled by any copy/paste mechanisms further down the loop. We end up with a wide range of possibility - from super repetitive to completely fragmented and glitched out.

Emotional Shell by William Watkins

The feeling of being human – with all of its intricate hopes, struggles, and fleeting emotions – seems so unique that we assume artificial intelligence could never replicate our experience. And while we devise systems for solving unfathomably complex problems, generating algorithmic creativity, and unlocking regenerative biological possibilities, we simultaneously cling to the power and originality of emotional feeling – believing it to be the irreplaceable source of what makes us human.

If the body is our shell for emotion and soul, can an artificial humanoid be another vessel for these thoughts and feelings – for human essence itself? If our ‘soul’ is the last stand between us and the machines, what happens when the soul becomes transferable? That we may see answers to these questions looks more real every year, and is perhaps a little frightening.

Emotional Shell uses introspective portraits of future selves to question what it means to be human, when the people around us are no longer human.

Vertebrae by Rich Lord

Ancient Courses of Fictional Rivers by Robert Hodgin

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.

Tesseract by Studio Yorktown

'Tesseract' is a generative collection drawing on the concept of the cube from oneirology, the interpretation of dreams. In many mythologies and fields of study, the square is considered a 'perfect shape', thus with its abstraction into three isometric dimensions, the cube is seen by some as a representation of the various aspects of the human condition.

In 'Tesseract', the ribbons flowing between the cubes represent the shared experiences that connect us all. No matter how different our lives might be, we all go through the same joys, sorrows, trials, tribulations and experience attachments of varying degrees.

It is these experiences that bind us together and make us who we are. With these concepts in mind, viewers are invited to interpret each composition as it relates to them and their unique story, from the perspective of that which has been and that which is yet to be experienced.

Andradite by Eltono

The digital drawing series Andradite is a way to explore the interactive possibilities of the Modo n.°7 protocol. The script generates two layers of 6 shapes on a 2×3 grid (10 points around the square). The layers have a slight offset. Each non-vertical and non-horizontal edge is highlighted with a white line making cuts and giving a sense of depth to the two dimensional shapes.

The generated digital images display monolithic dark blocks with white edges that evoke the andradite stone — a very angular shiny mineral. I used color gradients in the background as a nod to the traditional way that minerals are photographed.

222 iterations were made ready to be generated on May 25th 2021 at 9h00 pm and sold out on June 26th 2021 at 10h05 pm (Paris Time).

The sky is so colorful tonight by Olivier Bodini

This “Digital Stitch” is the result of a large number of boundaries being woven. this is something I arrived at during my work on the theme of “earthworm that can hear music”. ...Have you ever seen a dancing worm? - qubibi

Mimizu by Qubibi

Horizon(te)s by Iskra Velitchkova and Zach Lieberman

For this collaboration we focused on horizons as an organizing principle. What are the edges and borders of our vision and what do we see there?

Rather than create one collective piece where we mix our styles, we instead opted to create essentially a series of works – focusing on our own personal responses to the prompt as well as how we imagine the other responding to the prompt. Each of us took on three challenges as central modes:

Me as me Me as you Me as you as me

Each mode has a variety of variations. This framework allowed for speculation, ambiguity, and time to reflect on our own voice and the voice of our collaborator. The idea was not to mimic styles but rather use this framework to try to have a conversation and explore what we see in each other’s work.

"For me as me, I created a series of block / glitch based images on a simple horizon. I love creating color field compositions and often find myself staring at them – especially the subtle and luminous ones. They seemed well suited for exploring horizons.

For me as you, I focused on Iskra’s use of layers and simple geometry for creating compositions that reframe space. I am a huge fan of her work – especially how she elevates and uses simple geometry and creates ambiguous forms that reference architectural structures so I enjoyed exploring what I could do with a constraint of just using rectangles. I see blocks, windows and portals.

For me as you as me, I explored light. Although Iskra’s compositions often use densely overlapped lines and forms there is often a really luminous and airy quality to her works that I deeply resonate with. She creates curtains and shapes we can see through and I tried to imagine a form of light curtain that Iskra would create to generate my work. In this mode, a set of color bands are organized along a horizon and overlap to create new spaces and forms."

"Working with Zach has been a challenge and a trigger to go beyond my own expectations, limits and the technology itself. Once we made the decision of splitting the work into these three approaches we basically focused on knowing better each one and our work.

Starting with the most difficult mode for me “Me as you ” (How could I recreate the magic lights of Zach?) After some integration work, I got into something minimal and played with colors, contrast and shadows to recreate this feelight of shine, in my case using just lines.

For “Me as you as me” I came up immediately with the idea of candies. Not sure why, but somehow I found colors and positive vibes very much associated with Zach’s work and I tried to recreate this idea by playing with sparks, flashes and vivid tones.

Last, “Me as Me” has been like my safe space. I changed easily through more than 5 different systems before getting the right one. The whole project is about Horizons and the idea of divisions, so I decided to focus on the concept of sea. Either a port or a mystic sailing boat, both have some disturbing elements in the scene. Sometimes a mesh –is it possible to reflect this smell of iron? And sometimes an undefined stone cave – is it there to protect us, or to attack us?"

Also, there is a broader theme that I find of interest to explore from every work that I engage with. It has to do with the concept of what I call total cognitive space, or the total range of possibilities that can be expressed / achieved with a given scenario and set of conditions. In this case, I was interested in expanding my rendition of the works of Delaunay into a broader space. How does this approach scale with varying parameter ranges? Is the painting still interesting? Can it express something new? Connected to this, I am also interested in thinking about what emotions would mean for an artificial sentient being. We talk about artificial intelligence, but leave aside artificial emotions all too often. While artificial intelligences are indeed interesting, we fail to recognize the paramount importance of emotions in human behaviour. To this end, this work explores also the result of painting with machine-like precision vs. performing the artwork with a range of possible imprecisions. The perfection of the machine vs. the imperfection of the human, does it trigger different emotions in us humans? What will the reaction of a machine be whenever they develop a taste?

This work exposes features that deal with its time and space scales, background colour, background elements, the palettes used, certain colour accents that may happen (golden accents, b&w tones), the style used to draw the geometric shapes (fill, lines, outline), the degree of paint precision and other features that influence the final result.

The challenge with an algorithm of this nature is the number of shapes being placed. It can take anywhere from 15-60 seconds to render depending upon the computing power of the displaying device or computer.

Factura by Mathias Isaksen

Two years ago, in July 2020, I started my journey into generative art and creative coding. Some of my earliest work explored the process of cutting shapes along a line, producing two or more smaller shapes. While this is a very simple (and unoriginal) idea, I was deeply fascinated by the complex and intricate behaviour it produced, and the number of ways it could be expanded upon. This is demonstrated in "Tunneling Into the Structure Until It Falls", a 2020 piece that features circles recursively cut into smaller shapes. It starts with a large, plain circle, and ends with a small circle cut so many times that the lines blend into a solid fill. Despite utilising only straight lines and flat fill, this process produces an unexpected illusion of depth.

Eventually, I placed shape cutting on the shelf and moved on to new ideas. A year or so later, in October 2021, I decided to take a sabbatical from work. Around the same time, I started experimenting with 3D rendering, initially exploring three.js and Blender. While these tools are fantastic, they offered many features that I simply didn't need, and I arrived at a naive assumption: "What I want to accomplish essentially boils down to drawing a bunch of lines and shapes onto a canvas, that can't be too hard?" With unlimited free time on my hands, I was primed to discover how wrong this would turn out to be.

The development of "Factura" can be described as a an act of balancing pairs of opposing qualities: Monolithic and minute. Structure and disorder. Intricate and plain. Subtle and explicit. This is a difficult task, with many interconnected parts that interact in unpredictable ways. A few of these are so essential that they deserve a closer examination:

Subdivision methods: To construct the blocks that make up the structure, we first generate their base tiles. This is done by dividing the entire extent into regions, which again are divided into smaller tiles. The subdivision methods and their parameters are selected in a way that ensures variation across the canvas.

Surface shape:The general shape of the structure is determined by a surface function. More precisely, when a block is constructed, its height is determined by sampling the value of a 2D function in the center of its base tile. In areas with a high density of tiles, the structure will follow the shape of the surface closely. Large blocks, on the other hand, cause erratic protrusions.

Block type: The shape of a block is determined by three pieces of information: its base tile, its height, and its type. The last determines whether the block looks like a pyramid, a piston, a Moka pot, or a plain old box.

Balancing opposites

Grails

some of the best generative art from the wallace collection

Featuring art by

kira

Pierre Casadebaig

Zancan

William Watkins

Rich Lord

Mount Vitruvius

Sarah Ridgley

ippsketch

Robert Hodgin

Eltono

Studio Yorktown

Iskra Velitchkova

Zach Lieberman

Kjetil Golid

Jacek Markusiewicz

Ismahelio

Michael Connolly

Caesuras (Casey Reas)

Mathias Isaksen

Ciphrd

Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez

Olivier Bodini

Qubibi

Computational Specimen No. 2 by Sarah Ridgley

Mediterranean by kira0

CSRSNT Series by Caesuras

(aka Casey Reas)

Abstract generative art designed using custom algorithmic brushes to blur the lines between physically and generatively-drawn brushstrokes. This 1/1 was minted in July 2021 on the Tezos blockchain. It is the second of a three-part set.