This gallery is a selection of works from my formative years as an artist, when I was focused on static 1/1s. They were shared as a series of tweets over 100 days in 2022 as a retrospective on where I've been, and minted as NFTs, but placing them together in a gallery helps tell the story of my journey into math art. I had a lot of fun organizing them according to the tools, techniques, or themes used -- categorizations I didn't give as much thought at the time of their creation!
In 2009, I'd just graduated from college and moved back to my hometown in rural Broadway, VA. I'd experienced a few years of immersion in math and programming, and an eclectic intersection of engineering/academic and EDM/psychedelic cultures. I was 22 years old -- at a turning point where it felt like whole rest of my life was in front of me. It was mine to do what I wanted with, but I had absolutely no idea what that was. There was a historically bad recession at that time, and a tough job market, so I took one of the only jobs I could find nearby in my field -- as a part-time software tester. This left me with a lot of free time on my hands.
My senior year in college, I'd taken a class on Cyber Art that resonated with me. I'd adopted the practice of sketching out creative ideas using technology, and soon found myself sketching for fun -- which I carried forward into my free time after college. It ended up being a prolific time where I was making art using fractals and photographs. Photography had become a hobby in college, and it was exciting to see how I could blend it with my new practice of digital art. The Cyber Art class had left me with a very "how can you hack this?" approach to art that led down a path of altering, distorting, or corrupting photos (a technique I called "photomod").
100 Days of Ixnay
I spent a lot of time exploring fractals with Xaos, a free program for zooming into escape time fractals. I'd explore, adjust the equations until I liked the colors, and then export for post-processing in Paint.NET (which was my go-to for image editing). This was my first experience with printing my work -- as posters, that I sold at music festivals. It was the first time I really felt like I was "making art"
A few of the themes I was interested in were: the relationship between order and chaos, the repetition of shapes or textures, glitchiness/chaos, and capturing shapes and colors that make me feel things. I think my photography practice came into play with these, as I thought a lot about how to "frame the scene" when zooming and cropping in Xaos. The interactive/realtime nature of Xaos also means there were a lot of opportunities to find shapes that look like things -- like hearts, mountains, snowflakes, etc.
Selected Works, 2009 - 2013
ixnayokay
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