Tara Donovan’s first-ever NFT project, titled QWERTY, comprises 500 unique, generative works that meditate on the ways that type can function as a building block for creating pattern. Donovan, whose practice spans sculpture, installation, drawing, and printmaking, often explores the talismanic qualities of everyday materials and objects. The artist’s new NFT series is deeply engaged with her screen drawings, in which she moves, pinches, and cuts the wires of woven aluminum insect screen to extract patterns from existing grids, using a mathematical methodology to draw out the phenomenological potential of the material.

Each NFT in Donovan’s QWERTY series depicts rhythmic, mesmeric arrangements of a single, repeating letter or symbol represented on computer keyboards. The 26 letters and 30 symbols that make up the layered, gridded compositions of the QWERTY NFTs are rendered in varying degrees of legibility, striking a balance between recognizability and obscurity. These screen-based images take on the qualities of woven textiles, and they are the result of the artist’s meticulous pattern development, organization, and refinement, which she executed through algorithmic processes.

The first 56 individuals to mint QWERTY NFTs will each receive an archival pigment print of their NFT from the artist and Pace Verso. These works will be signed and numbered by Donovan. Complete terms and conditions will be available on Pace’s website before the project’s release on October 10. 

Donovan’s QWERTY NFT project can be understood as an extension of the eponymous book she published in 2018, which features patterns the artist forged using characters from a 1930s typewriter. Both the digital and physical iterations of QWERTY reflect Donovan’s interest in surface depth and perspectival mutability. Her QWERTY NFTs shapeshift and transform depending on viewers’ position relative to their screens, bringing ghostly shapes and figurative elements into relief in the compositions’ interstitial spaces. The wide range of patterns in the QWERTY NFTs includes subtle, minimalist grids; architectural forms; psychedelic motifs; and optical illusions.

QWERTY

# eternity stirs
my finger stirred the pool. 
iridescent specks at this distance. 
molecules separated by infinities, 
attracted by a gentle gesture. 
matter built on reducible complexity, 
remarkable what emerges from the soup.

the specks of light flash for a moment, 
then flame out. 
the arc of their burning wick 
painting pictures; 
heating arguments;
bleeding in the darkness. 

helpless to start or stop anything, 
bodies in motion, 
tending to stay in motion,
until the fuel runs out.

# can there be beauty in pain?
Flora, Fauna, False gods & Floods continues a theme I began in Beauty in the Hurting. When turbulent acts of god subvert best-laid plans, is there beauty in the broken images of life we leave behind?

Left alone, these images would resolve to nearly symmetrical dreamlike ink blots of meaning:  a flower, a feathered creature, or a figure of worship. In fact, what is most beautiful in their image may lay outside the frame. 

The final resting frame in each composition does not paint the whole picture. You must go looking for it. Interact with each composition by following the controls below.

# **saving**
* **a key** - download transparent uncropped print
* **s key** - download print

# **controls**
* **f key** - toggle speed up / slow down at 5x speed
* **h key** - toggle speed up / slow down at 20x speed
* **r key** - reset the camera view
* **click/touch** - while rendering, toggles between full view and follow view, when finished, cycles through zoom levels
* **click/touch and drag** - change the cropping of the image
* **click/touch again after dragging** - restore the default image crop for the current zoom level

flora, fauna, false gods & floods

Drifting apart as the little islands that we are, you may ask yourself
_What is bigger - the inner space or the outer?_

This project was inspired by the multitudes we keep within us. The harsh shadows and the combination of pure 2d rendering with a 3d effect mimic feelings of separation from the rest of the world. Their undetermined scale reflects the seemingly unlimited depths of consciousness.

_The Inner World_ starts its rendering from one or more circular cores representing the centers of our personalities. Each of these cores spawns various thoughts and emotions, flowing as tendrils through the scene, making connections among themselves or reaching for the outside. Their movement ranges from straight and orderly to (seemingly) chaotic, sometimes twisting the clean underlying personality center into a completely different shape. Two rendering styles (illustrative and shaded) with palettes ranging from cool, gloomy and serious to cheerful or dramatic reflect the variety of predispositions.

While waiting for the rendering to complete, look at the focus animation highlighting the circular cores of your piece. You're invited to spend this time pondering how everything you know, everything you have or will ever experience, and even the most majestic sights from stars to microbes fit into the space between your ears.

The Inner World

*3 Minute Meditations* is a set of audio/visual generative-art NFTs designed to provide the listener with a short, meditative experience.  Each *3MM* starts with a **unique fundamental frequency** and composes harmonics on top of it. One of these harmonics is a **binaural beat** that ends in the **delta** or **theta** band (associated with **mediation**, **deep** and **REM sleep**).  The others take shape as a combination of **constant and arpeggiated tones** to form an entrancing soundscape that moves through **temporary dissonance** into **climactic harmony**.  The associated visuals are representative of the sound, and follow a journey that mirrors the **sonic meditation**.

** ***The focus of this piece is the audio, which must be enjoyed with headphones in order to properly realize its effects***. **

Listeners can watch the visuals as well, or close their eyes and **sink fully into the auditory experience**.

3 Minute Meditations

*For everyone that should still be there.*

*For everyone that went through hell and came back.*

*For everyone that stood on the sidelines, helpless.*

*For everyone that fights, day in and day out.*

We all deal with unexpected events in different ways - you can never be ready for the worst. What happens to the soul when you get too close to the end? How will you perceive the crossing to whatever awaits?

Will you be alone?

Or will you see the souls of the other *Departed?*

---
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*Departed* deals with the uncertainty of life, feelings of helplessness and how we might be losing touch with our humanity when everything is online, when you are not allowed to see your relatives, when you are not allowed to be with them - even at the worst of times, when you can not even know what is happening. *Departed* is a representation of what the people close to me might be going through.

An experiment in composition that pushes everything I do to new extremes (with familiar elements), *Departed* works around creating various layers with different centers of interest, from colours to shapes, textures to frame.

Departed

This project is an exercise in simplicity, simulating stains of ink made through points and noise. 

Since creating art with code, I’ve wanted to reproduce the physical with the digital. 
Stains On A Canvas emerged from this desire to produce a hand-made canvas painting. 

Stains On A Canvas’s background textures use points or grids, and the algorithm explores the maximum difference between each iteration. The collection is divided into styles, named after popular flowers in my country [Brazil]. Colors are randomly generated to create unique tones paired with the variety of shades and shadows.





-Press from 1 - 9 in your keyboard to adjust the pixelDensity and increase/equalize the resolution quality according to your screen.

-Press "S" to save a .png file in the resolution quality you choose.

Stains on a Canvas

Sudan
Omdurman
Brown dust, hot air
Broken system, broken roads
Sweet sandalwood incense rising in smoke
Ladies wrapped in every color and every pattern
Morning milk tea with cookies out under the mango tree
Hopeful graffiti of revolution on every street wall
A thousand guests, a million cups of coffee
The two Niles converging at one point
Mixing, sorting, moving on North
I will leave for my home soon
But I won't forget
Omdurman
Sudan

This piece was made while I was visiting Sudan and during the time I started meetings to build a school using the charity money collected from all the amazing collectors of Sudfah.  I was inspired by the contrast between the ubiquitous dirt and broken system of Sudan and the beautiful colorful culture and people.  The colorful forms represent to me both the long flowy garments of the ladies and the smoke and aromas rising from the unique incense and perfumes of Sudan.

25% of the proceeds will be donated toward building a school for an underdeveloped community in Sudan.

Sandaliya

inward 🌹 outward
shrinking 🌹 growing
splitting 🌹 merging
suggesting 🌹 negating

Intersections

*Erratic : irregular in performance, behaviour, or attitude; inconsistent and unpredictable*

One’s harmony with the world can become severed while experiencing stress. Feeling lost or confused within a clouded mind, struggling to call upon a creative muse, defending your self-worth against creeping doubts, and projecting flashes of anger towards others. This torrent of bubbling turmoil can sustain by fixating on the moments of chaos, past, and present. Continuing to feed the storm in this way ultimately will lead to burdensome strife and a ravaged mind.

As a nascent artist working to hone my artistic abilities and establish myself within a historical art movement, I have often experienced stress along my journey. This collection captures these internal struggles as fragmented waves of colour arranged across a spectrum of relative calms, chaotic bursts, and winding paths. Each piece reflects a unique sense of uncertainty.

My intent for Erratic was to challenge myself to create a purist’s form of generative art, wherein a set of randomized values are shaped to be used directly as inputs into an instruction path that is consistent in execution and does not use branching conditionals as a means of achieving variety in composition, colour or form. By actively rejecting predetermined features in favour of shaping a domain that is acted upon consistently, I felt I could achieve occurrences of uniquely identifiable emergent design that I otherwise may not have discovered. The work begins with a euclidean coordinate space intended to render a smoothed half-torus which is then randomly mutated through progressive iterations of translations, rotations, polar reflections, slices, twists, and distortions. This pattern of operations produces a nearly infinite set, shaped only by the defined input ranges, from which each piece will be minted. Any knowledge of the instantiated values before viewing could not lead to any reasonable prediction of what will be rendered.

Erratic

Totem of Taste is all about the donuts. More than donuts, it is about taste buds.
It celebrates the delightful, sweet, and mysterious flavors that the tip of your tongue wants to remember but cannot disentangle.
In a bite, one sense ignites another.
On the palette, a color blends with its ethereal neighbor.
A point moves in tandem with millions of other points to reflect the monumental presence of food in our lives in real-time.
The donuts are made with strange attractors – dynamic systems that are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. The algorithm guides the trajectories of the points until they settle into deterministic shapes to naturally form textures.


[Minimal interaction involved. Press 's' to save to the current screen size.]

Totem of Taste

Compression has been the driving force behind the image-based internet since the early 90s. No compression, no Netscape, no social media, no NFTs. The JPEG compression has specifically enabled photography-based imagery on the net. It has always served that purpose and over time become the de facto default for showing high quality imagery online. But compression always leaves a trace, which has become the lens through which the network sees the world of uploaded images.

"A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience." ― Mark Rothko

JPEG tries to create an image programatically fully expressing that signature compression. An image that is like empty made from barely nothing, yet fully present in its blazing appearance. A work deeply material, expressing itself through the language of code and codec only. This is not a JPEG depicting an image. The JPEG is the image itself.

Delving into the depths and peculiarities of the digital, tethered to art history, JPEG found its way to the surface. Generated color fields are utilised to trigger the compressing algorithm, resulting in a world of raw visual entities. Where the abstract expressionists cut out the depiction in painting, aiming to let the artist convey pure emotion, JPEG cuts out the artist's emotion and lets it emerge from within the algorithm. Carefully you could categorize the work as *compressionism*. An art form where the machine speaks in its own raw language, but nevertheless makes a direct touch to our human heart.

JPEG is a collection of generative images in the JPEG file format. The work tries to break with the idea of the fixed file format, therefor creating the JPEG entirely from code using no image material whatsoever. The individual JPEGs are generated responsively at the moment of viewing based on the token hash as a random seed. You can literally drag the JPEG out from the browser window.

JPEG pays tribute to interface culture, and as such the work is responsive and not scaling. When the work is resized, the work is again rendered and compressed. When viewed smaller, details will disappear, yet the composition stays recognisable. It’s like stepping back to see a work from further away. The choice of color wanders from monochromatic tones to the brutality of complete randomness and everything in between.

In honour of the blockchain and the web, the work is written in vanilla JavaScript, using no dependancies, and generates a standard JPEG. This way the file is downloadable, aiming for a materiality that comes as close as possible to the standard browser.

JPEG

Fontana is Latin for fountain. 

This project is a playful attempt at abstractly capturing the flowing movement of a fountain using precisely drawn elements that evoke a static and considered rendering of a subject that is in constant flux. The visual language is reminiscent of hand-draughted technical drawing, a precise and methodical practice that progresses at a radically different pace to the flowing and capricious movement of water. To increase this tension between dynamic motion and static mechanical process I wanted the surface textures to appear worn and aged like a drawing that has spent its life in the bottom of a mechanics drawer. This process of abrasion and discoloration is occurring on yet another scale of time adding complexity to the references of time passing. 

Woven into the very fabric of Fontana is a fully generative solution for creating color expression. This means there is no reliance on preset palettes with every output being an entirely unique color articulation of the color story I want the project to reveal as a whole. Far from being random I attempted to create an approach which produces colors that evoke early 20th Century art and design media. With this intention I wanted  outputs to look like they could be working drawing artifacts from this period of time.

Fontana

Revisiting one of my first algorithms on the occasion of the Tribute to Herbert W. Franke. All artist proceeds from minting will be directed to *art meet science – Foundation Herbert W. Franke* to support the preservation of Herbert's legacy with ZKM Karlsruhe and technology education through RÜTGERS Foundation.

This sale has a fixed price of {base_price} Ξ.

Rectangles (for Herbert)

“…the box was a fascist symbol and the architecture of freedom/democracy needed something besides the box.” - Frank Lloyd Wright.    Freeplan explores the early 20th-century modernist architectural concept “open plan” which indicates the dissolution of rooms and the visual building boundaries. Instead of conventional boxes, freely placed partitions, floors, structures, and other elements create a feeling of space. The transaction hash determines the overall architectural composition, context, existence of components, and representation style. Each iteration is scaled, oriented, and numbered like a proper architectural project.

latest curated release

Fontana
Harvey Rayner | patterndotco

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