Description
Many minds dance together
Creating a bigger piece
We do it when we ignore it
Even if we don't believe
Waves and pulses
Shake to us all
Because we are the earth
Or at least a part of it
We share the same blood
We share common ancestors
I've seen your heart open
When you bring art to existence
Thanks for creating
What I have to see
So my path enables
What I want to be
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This piece started with a pulse to collaborate with many of the artists I admire, so I asked 28 artists to create a tiny looping piece with the idea of creating a long-form generative collection mixing the pieces together.
The rules were simple:
Size: 16x16 pixels
Duration: a power of two (4, 8, 16, 32, or 64 frames)
Colors: Grayscale
Each piece is a rich miniature that condenses the knowledge and aesthetics of each artist. And my challenge was to mix every creation, each with a different energy, to create unified pieces in a unified project.
The pieces are used in two different ways: one explicit, in which the pixels from that miniature are shown as they are; and the other implicit, where the pixels are used to control something else. For example, one pixel could be used to control the transparency of a group of displayed pixels sourced from another piece.
By using these basic mechanisms, every piece contains the behaviors of many of the source pieces. The movements embedded in the GIFs by the collaborators are mixed, creating new, unexpected results.
It has been a very long project that contains many of the algorithms I have been exploring over the years—from the Quad Trees present in pieces like Conceptor or Mindset, to SDF raymarching as in Crude Acceptance, or moving geometrical spaces as in The Place Where We Were.
But it also includes new explorations, such as building Fractal Brownian Noise textures using GIFs as a source—a technique that has opened many doors in my artistic explorations into what pixel mixing can be.
Each piece combines one or many algorithms, working with them sometimes one at a time and other times as layers, the same way they are used in a VJ set. The possibilities are endless: the source pieces are overlapped with varying scales, speeds, and systems, but in each iteration, the observer can detect the input of one or many of the collaborators, creating a complex experience that can only be understood by exploring different iterations.
All the technicalities are necessary to make the project and to merge all the source data into a flow of emotions that can forget the how—to fall into the abyss of emotional intelligence that these collaborating artists have placed into those tiny assemblages of pixels, without knowing what the final result will be. The result is not the piece itself, but the transformation that may occur in the consciousness that opens itself to the observation of itself, using this project as a mirror.
Collaborators:
Aleksandra Jovanic, Spogelsesmaskinen, Urbandrone, vectorz3r0, mumu the stan, Gamzika, Jess Hewitt, Nagayama, Pablo Alpe, Mandy Brigwell, Pulse58218, Liasomething, Ina Vare, Xer0x, Sturec,Nicolas Sassoon, dist.cs, loackme,Makio135, Melissa Rodriguez, Koma Tebe, Datura, Wblut, Satoshi Aizawa, Ahmad Moussa || Gorilla Sun, Michael Hughes, Hexeosis, Incre.ment, Kerim Safa
Victor Doval 2025
Controls:
G to export GIF
V to export Video
X to export short GIF
A to see the collaborators list