LoVid’s signature video work mixes handmade analog synthesizers with digital tools in immersive Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) compositions that celebrate luminosity, chaos, relationships between craft and engineering, and connections between body and tech.
 
Tide Predictor, LoVid’s first onchain generative work, builds a bridge from video synthesizer patches to algorithmic code-derived imagery. This collection is formally and technically inspired by hardware-based image generation, and places experimental moving-image, circuit boards, and electrical signal-based video art at the conceptual roots of generative art.

Tide Predictor is a modular video synthesizer patch model, designed to reflect the analog spirit by working with three channels: RGB. Tide Predictor reimagines NTSC-encoded, oscillator driven electrical current based video synthesis while adding digital randomness/unpredictability, and transformations based on code, along with each mint’s unique content.
 
In the late 19th century, mechanical analog computers used rhythm and repetition to anticipate the rise and fall of water levels. In addition to “tides”, which are low frequency oscillations of the ocean, higher frequency changes or “waves” are frequently discussed in reference to both water and electrical signals. By working with looping - and explicitly addressing the period (=1/frequency) for each RGB color - Tide Predictor extends analogies between the flow of water and the flow of electricity.

LoVid’s Tide Predictor brings these relationships from the blockchain, through your screen, straight to your retina!

Tide Predictor

The contemporary moment is defined by the appearance of artificial systems that mimic intelligent behaviours with uncanny skill: bots that you can converse with, machines that can act as pets, and even the algorithms that recommend ads to you. At times they appear as strange beings; alive. To make sense of this phenomenon, we are forced to reconsider our notion of the living state beyond what we are familiar with on Earth. 

Calian is an infinitely zoomable and scrollable exploration of lifelike behaviour. It exhibits ambiguous natural-digital forms in a dynamic rendering. Species grow and compete; they get carried by the elements; they face boom, bust, and echo. 

What makes something alive? To go beyond recognition of terrestrial biology we need to delineate general principles and apply them to new intelligent systems. Calian uses the fruits of my research into the origin of life to create persistent, complex systems that we can experience and study (*). We can identify properties of living matter but these fall short of a satisfactory and succinct criterion. When does agency begin? Or identity? Calian asks you to ponder this as you wander through its ecosystems. 

Feel free to explore but be careful: although life is pervasive, living things are delicate. Your interactions affect the ecosystem, obliquely. 

Calian continues a thread of my work probing deep scientific questions with artistic means. It furthermore connects to my previous Artblocks projects Mazinaw and Glass through the theme of ambiguity: while Mazinaw suggested the hand of an unknown creator, and Glass visualized the intrinsic ambiguity of our quantum mechanical universe, Calian's amorphous forms bear characteristics both of familiar organic matter and digital technology. 

Interactive features allow you to explore each ecosystem, infinitely, both in depth and in scope. As you wander, the shader repopulates the world from its initial condition, while the physical laws governing the dynamics themselves evolve.

See Display Notes for Controls.

(*) For more on Calian's dynamics and its grounding in my research, see the Calian page on my website.

Calian

Our studio, Aranda\Lasch, was formed in the early 2000s to explore algorithmic systems and generative processes as a means to understand the world around us and make things within it. Whether encapsulated in physical or computational techniques, these processes act with their own degree of autonomy from our own biases and as a result, open up new ideas and sensibilities while dismantling traditional notions of authorship. They allow one to code the possibility of discovery and surprise into the creative process in a manner that can be widely shared and because of this transmissibility, algorithms frustrate the idea of a single author, inviting speculation on the shared nature of creativity. For this reason we have always understood our work to be a collaboration between each other, those who share with us and those who inspire us. 

Over the years, the studio has indulged in a number of obsessions. One is the conviction that history is a generative source with which to constantly entangle. Whether it is through stories, characters, techniques, or events, history acts as a medium active with properties that constantly reshape and transform our concept of the present. We look back to move forward, like hitching a ride. It is here that we encounter Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) and his masterpiece Melancholia I (1514) to inspire a deep dive into the process of engraving as a representational technique reinterpreted through the contemporary medium of code. By scratching metal away from a plate, an inversion of conventional drawing, engraving allowed a work of art to be reproduced and disseminated widely. In addition to the piece’s masterful delineation, its allegory resonates with us as well. In Dürer’s time melancholy was associated with insanity but also with creativity. In the engraving, the winged personification of melancholy -- the work is widely regarded to be a self-portrait of the artist -- is surrounded by the tools and elements of geometry. For Dürer, as for a handful of others who came before and after, who test the porous borders between art, science and religion, geometry is a vehicle for imagination, a shadow of the divine and a portal to the infinite. 

This work Primitives is a kindred meditation on infinity through an exploration of a novel geometric structure using algorithm and code, the tools of today's geometers and mystics, made visible through the anachronism of the engravers trade translated into pure 1’s and 0’s. Primitives grows through a single shape that can repeat and scale in specific ways that are never random, but rather tightly governed by geometric logics. It is about drawing infinity through a radical modularity; ordered but aperiodic. Unlike a regular crystal, whose molecular pattern is periodic (or repetitive in all directions), the distinctive quality of this quasicrystal is that its structural pattern never repeats the same way twice. Endless and uneven in aggregate, Primitive clusters can be described by the precise arrangement of a single modular part. As these small units aggregate together they form larger figures that themselves combine into ever larger movements, always a little bit different from any other. In this sense, quasicrystalline patterns have an infinite capacity to create and carry information. 

We are here because this is a medium for sharing in perpetuity. In the last couple of years, on the cusp of our third decade of practice, we have watched with awe and delight a renaissance in generative work as it's adopted by an entirely new generation around blockchain technologies. This inspired us to enter this new space with our own enduring questions of form and geometry, modularity and variability, historical continuity, and the thirst for endlessness. Primitives is what we selected as our primer into generative art on-chain because both the work and the medium grapple with these questions. 

Some Notes:
On the screen, Primitives is represented as a two-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional figure. Each invocation comes with a sequence of projections, or rotations, around this object. As Primitives spins, there are moments when its blocks snap into alignment with other blocks  revealing its underlying lattice and crystalline nature. Each projection can be saved as a high resolution image for printing. Primitives can also be saved in three dimensions as an .obj file for a variety of uses including the creation of a physical object through 3-d printing or fabrication. Below is a list of interface instructions:

'left' + 'right' arrow keys to rotate 
'up' + 'down' arrow keys to zoom in 
'g' regrows geometry 
'i' saves image 
'o' saves .obj

Thank you,
Aranda\Lasch
2022

Primitives

A collection of on-chain, generative cumulonimbus buddies. Created using vanilla javascript, each unique NimBud features random wires, colors, eyes, mouths, cloud bodies, and more. Each with their own personality.

NimBuds

Lines are bent and shaded. There are no wrong turns. 

[Interaction in live view: press 1-7 or left/right arrow keys to see the stages of sketch construction: 1-grid, 2-divide, 3-tile, 4-bend, 5-shade, 6-color, 7-texture].

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