Jimmy Griffith (remnynt) is a systems artist living in Asheville, NC. Harnessing a lifelong obsession with digital media, world-building, and generative algorithms, he seeks to capture feelings of joy and wonder within the emergent behaviors arising from layers of simple rules; he pursues aesthetics that reflect natural beauty and the sublime through the lenses of human experience and self expression. Griffith holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and previously worked in the gaming industry, where he designed, developed, and created “EverWing,” which was named “Facebook Game of the Year” in 2016. While exploring the Ethereum blockchain as a medium for art making, he founded vibes.art, releasing vibes in 2021 and the reliquary in 2022. 

Jordan Kantor: Hi Jimmy. Great to get a chance to speak here on the eve of the release of  your debut Art Blocks project Proscenium. You have a long creative history working across different digital mediums and contexts. Before we get to the project at hand, perhaps you can walk us back a bit. How did you first get into making art?

Jimmy Griffith: I’ve been obsessed with digital media since I was four years old. It was 1989, and every kid on my street had a Nintendo but me. I was like a moth to a flame. I even snuck into a neighbor’s house to play while they weren’t home. I slipped out the sliding glass door in the back when I heard them coming, but I forgot to turn off Metroid. As I grew up, that spilled over into world-building with anything I could get my hands on: drawing maps, writing stories, and even designing platformer games on paper. Oh, and the neighbors turned out to be pretty cool—I ended up marrying the girl next door—but that’s a story for another time.

JK: Your relationship with your future in-laws started by sneaking into their house to play video games?!? That’s incredible. Fun illustrations you’ve included here as well: With that background story, especially, they seem so apt. Moving forward a bit, how did you first get into digital or generative art?

JG: Game-making was my first medium, and it’s how I started thinking in systems. When I was twelve years old, I taught myself to program on a Texas Instruments TI-83 calculator. Between writing solvers for class and making games for my friends, I couldn’t put it down. I remember trying to graph the random number generator on the bus, driving to a math competition—I just had to understand how it worked! My mind was blown. How could a computer’s logical circuits create something truly random? Well, they couldn’t, that’s why they’re called pseudorandom, but the idea stuck with me as a simple, yet powerful tool—both as a multiplier and as an element of surprise.

“My career in games had a profound impact in how I think of systems as art supplies, building blocks for worlds, and other complex structures...”

Years later, in 2008, while I was studying Computer Graphics I created my first generative art system. It was random terrain using a custom heightmap algorithm, and I fell in love with exploring the unintended emergent outputs. In fact, I started Proscenium by revisiting that project and rebuilding the terrain system in WebGL.

JK: So, in a way, the project has its roots many years ago. Tell us a bit about how and when you discovered the blockchain as a medium for art?

JG: After spending a decade in the games industry, I wanted to get back to making art for art’s sake, and I felt like the only way was if I had enough savings to build an art practice. I learned the hard way that I was not financially literate, and that led me to Bitcoin in 2020. I studied it for a while, tried to poke holes in it, until finally, I was convinced it could change the world. I remained skeptical of everything else in crypto, however, but after hearing about Art Blocks, and then Dom Hofmann’s Loot, I quickly realized that the art scene on Ethereum was where I wanted to be. I set out to make a generative art piece to submit to Art Blocks. I took the leap and left my job to focus on it full-time, but I was a little too late. It was October 2021, and the application process was closed, so I pulled up the Loot smart contract, and began to learn Solidity.

JK: Perhaps inadvertently that allowed you some time to develop your projects. Can you talk a bit about how your creative process has evolved over time?

JG: Absolutely. With my first release on Ethereum, vibes, I was thinking in terms of beauty and aesthetics through what I would’ve called a digitally native lens. Each pixel had an RGB value in a gently warped gradient, making up a color study that I’d hoped would leave the viewer in contemplative awe. Shortly after, Studio Mathcastles released Terraforms, and this marked a major inflection point in my practice and thinking. I was immediately jealous because it reached a level of excellence and conceptual depth that I had yet to achieve in my own work, while exploring some of my favorite subject matter, terrains and landscapes. I felt similarly when I first saw Matt DesLauriers’ Subscapes and Meridians.

Feeling both challenged and inspired by 113, the artist behind Mathcastles, I began work on the reliquary. It is a smart contract artwork with an on-chain dungeon to conquer, and evolving glitch pixel visuals. Its software aspires to be both literature and an art piece that speaks to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) as an interactive networked medium. I was proud when I finished it, but I also realized I’d fallen back into a habit of making work purely for myself, and it reminded me of all the generative projects and games I’d made over the years that would never see the light of day. Proscenium grew out of that experience, and brings my practice back towards art-making intended for an audience—an overlap of my passion and artistic aesthetic with what resonates more broadly with others. It combines the pursuit of sublime beauty, which I started with, and layers on conceptual depth and a relentless drive to outdo myself—to further close the gap between my technical ability and artistic aesthetic.

JK: You mentioned your background in game design. How does your art practice connect to and depart from other work you do?

JG: My art is my full-time focus, but my career in games had a profound impact in how I think of systems as art supplies, building blocks for worlds, and other complex structures. To me, software is the most unconstrained and limitless medium we’ve ever known.

JK: I really appreciate that idea of systems as art supplies. Well stated. To the project at hand. Please tell us a bit about Proscenium.

JG: Proscenium started as a way to learn WebGL and to explore landscapes as a subject matter—to rekindle that spark—but it was also rooted in my fascination with physics and harnessing kinetic energy as a tool for mark-making and self expression. I wrote more about my inspirations in this essay, but I can outline the core concept here.

‍Proscenium imagines a world where paint bounces like rubber and the land itself is a canvas that collapses from threedimensional to two-dimensional. The result is a painting. All of that can be witnessed in real time for each piece as a live render animation—a simulation built on layers of simple rules.

I spent the second half of 2022 building that concept from scratch. I avoid using libraries directly within my work, which takes a bit longer. I want to understand the techniques as fully as I can, and I don’t want to miss an opportunity to discover new aesthetics. After finishing it, I was proud of what I’d built, but I still had a gnawing feeling that it wasn’t as good as it could be.

I spent all of 2023 refining it—pushing myself to explore the space created by the idea in greater depth. How should I make the color palettes? Have I said all that I can with the work? I’d spent enough time with the lineage of computer graphics, but had I done so with painting? Can every output be truly great? Friends and family asked, “How will you know when you’re done? What if you never finish?” I realized I’d be done with the work when it was done working on me.

JK: The poet Paul Valéry is credited with saying something like “a poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Sounds related to your comment about the work being done with you. I think that is a common feeling. So, what should collectors look for in the series as it is revealed?

JG: I’ve put together some writing outlining the core algorithm and traits in this introduction, but I’d love to share some of the thinking and inspiration with you, too.

The palettes are mostly derived from real paint pigments or mixtures, curated using a color palette tool I created for Proscenium. I used spectral.js for any mixing while refining a palette, because I wanted the paint colors to be true to life. In total, there are 17 palettes, and most of them take the piece in a bright and colorful direction. Those that aren’t based on pigments are either monochromes or inspired by nature photos I’ve taken while hiking.

The other leading trait to look out for is the style. The set of styles define the shape of the terrain, which, through the simulation, ultimately affects the way the paint pools and forms compositions. Styles were influenced by a combination of world-building and aesthetics. There are 19 in total, ranging from sci-fi cityscapes to rugged mountaintops that recall the era of low-poly graphics.

Apart from hanging a stretched canvas print on your wall, I think the best way to experience Proscenium is to spend time with the live render. The final polished outputs will take up to 10 minutes, but you can see them soonery by watching in realtime on almost any browser, mobile, or desktop. Personally, I like to trace the paths of specific paint drops through each bounce to the final piece.

JK: That sounds like a fun exercise. Thanks for the tip. Lastly, what is the best way for people to learn more and follow your work?

JG: You can find me on X (Twitter) and Farcaster, under my pseudonym @remnynt. I also keep my studio site, vibes.art, up-to-date with links to all of my work. To catch any writing I do, folks can subscribe at vibes.mirror.xyz.

Thank you so much for being here and engaging with my work!

JK:  Thank you, Jimmy, for bringing Proscenium to Art Blocks. We are looking forward to seeing what the algorithm yields on February 14.