Simple and easily identifiable, each squiggle embodies the soul of the Art Blocks platform. Consider each my personal signature as an artist, developer, and tinkerer. Public minting of the Chromie Squiggle is permanently paused. They are now reserved for manual distribution to collectors and community members over a longer period of time. Please visit OpenSea to explore Squiggles available on the secondary market. 

Chromie Squiggle

Pigments is an exploration of colour and spatial distortion. Each instance is an abstract representation aimed at evoking a micro or macro-environment; from unknown substances, or oil in a canvas, to nebular formations. The pieces are animated, meant to be experienced live. The piece can run endlessly, with infinite output. To run it smoothly you need a capable GPU. If this proves to be too computationally intensive, or if you prefer a static view, feel free to press the spacebar.

Pigments

*Please Note: This is an Exponential Dutch Auction (no settlement). The price you purchase is the price you will pay.*

An ideal human being is one big optimization problem. We have a goal - we optimize our actions to maximize the outcome of this goal. 
In our initial days, we optimize to stay alive, during school, we optimize to study well, gain skills and obtain the best scores.

As we progress in our careers we optimize to get the most amount of money, material growth, and maybe even influential growth such as fame.

As we age we optimize to minimize diseases and maximize our lifespan - we workout, we eat healthily, we retire, and rest 

As ideal as it sounds, how do we know what exact actions would lead to maximizing my outcome? At this very moment - instead of reading this should you be doing something else that would make your life’s outcome better? Maybe, maybe not - We don't know... Although, we do find out through trial and error. 

In the grand scheme of things we’re just an agent exploring actions around us, learning which ones increase our reward and choosing the path that seems to lead to the maximum reward. Cerebellum is a window (pun intended) of the human mind - a continuously evolving art piece that is built on top of a reinforcement learning agent that is learning and optimizing and evolving as you see it. 

The project starts with an untrained model of a reinforcement learning agent that is deployed in an environment where it is faced with positive reward and negative reward. The agent is also equipped with a bunch of eyes that lets it sense the objects around it and judge if it wants to go ahead and consume the object or abstain and move in a different direction. The agent here is optimization to maximize its positive rewards while avoiding the negative ones. How does the agent know if a reward is positive or negative? - It learns that after experiencing a bunch of samples. And the magic is - all of this happens in your browser. The seemingly random motion of the agent at the beginning running into everything it sees subsides with time as it learns better about the environment and only hits on the positive rewards. How fast does this happen? Depends on your luck - every art has agents with varied number of eyes and range of these eyes. In addition with every refresh your agent would start from a new place, taking a new path - a path that might lead to it learning things at a different pace depending on what it comes across as it explores. To add some practicality - the environment also has some walls, elements that just block the agent from moving doesn’t add or decrease rewards. Hinders the agent’s movement, lets it find a different path - sometimes this is needed for the agent to strategize, sometimes it's just a hindrance… I’ll leave this to your imagination as you see the agent in action…
The seemingly random motion - the path towards true understanding - the process of optimisation is captured by the windows. Windows that show the beauty of this process expressed in a variety of ways. 

Cerebellum is a window into the black box of AI, an unapologetic exaltation of the unpolished, an ode to the process and its aesthetic vernacular.

+ Press 'p' to switch from 2d/3d views
+ Press 'e' to expose the reinforced learning layer
+ Press 't' to pause/unpause the training of the agent
+ Press 'w' to randomize the walls of the training environment

On mobile, tap to switch from 2d to 3d

Cerebellum

CENTURY is my homage to paintings and drawings from the twentieth century and the countless hours I’ve spent looking at them. The references span the origins of concrete and non-objective art to color-field painting and minimalism. The strongest direct reference is a series of pictures created by Ellsworth Kelly in the 1950s where he cut his paintings into pieces and reassembled them in different orders. CENTURY creates a distinct picture for each unique transaction hash, and you can “cut” and “reassemble” it in different ways by pressing ‘1’ on your keyboard. Press ‘2’ to put the slices in the original order. These are landscapes; they look best large and in motion running as live code.

CENTURY

Ori is an art series that draws inspiration from paper folding to create deeply abstract and highly contrasting imagery. The loose interpretation of origami dynamics quickly dissolves as physical rules are bent and reimagined.

An artifact of this process is the distinctive fold lines, which symbolize the Yoshizawa-Randlett diagrams that serve as instructions for Origami. The practice of Kirigami (folding and cutting paper) is also represented and is occasionally visible as highly destructured forms.

Contrasting the precision of the folding engine is a spray paint simulation that gives the image its color. Paint is applied with a wandering nozzle, sometimes overflowing past boundaries and dripping downwards. Inspired by the freeform nature of graffiti, the spray paint layers are chaotic and unrefined.

Note: The spray paint simulation may take many seconds to fully render.

After the render is complete, press any key to destroy the artwork.

Art Blocks Curated

Chromie Squiggle #2051

Snowfro

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