Inside the computer there’s a digital hand. The hand selects a metal implement, cuts off a slab of clay, and carves into its surface. It wanders like your hand wanders; it carves imaginary contours, sinuous and exploratory. It doesn’t know the end result so it carves lines until it feels content, and then it numbers the piece and stamps its maker’s mark. It fires the slab in a digital kiln (it calls this “minting”) and through this act its art is preserved for millennia. The hand runs its fingers over the textured surface, feeling satisfaction at having spontaneously produced a piece of art so beautiful, expressive, and unique.

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Ceramics is a generative sculpture that mimics the physical expression of carving into clay. Through uncanny naturalistic rendering it challenges our notion of “handmade”. It asserts that the value of handmade isn’t the time it takes to make the work nor the physical materials consumed, but the endless small decisions and serendipitous details that appear along the way, as can be felt in each Ceramics mint.

Despite the handmade nature of Ceramics the outputs cannot be touched. Highly tactile images enchant the viewer to imagine their tangible representations, and leave them to dwell on their perception of materiality — both in the experiential physical world and conceptually-infinite digital space.

Ceramics

*FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT* borrows from the bubbly language and pastel aesthetics of text driven instagram graphics to scrutinize the promotion of wellness, self-care, and confidence on social media.

The piece concentrates on the rhetoric employed in these posts. Persuasive, upbeat, and relentlessly inspirational, there’s a sense of authority embedded in each one. By remixing words and phrases sourced from these types of existing instagram posts, the program generates combinations that mimic their cheerful tone, but range from feeling vaguely familiar to totally absurd. 

Text is wrapped in the sugar cookie aesthetic world of “girl power positive vibes boss babe” kind of media, imitating the graphics designed to catch your eye as you’re scrolling through your feed. Visual variables include the output’s background style, color palette, and layout, as well as other decorative elements such as stars ✹, hearts ♡, flowers ✿, and sparkles ✧ :D

Online, these media objects survive on likes, comments, and shares. *What do I believe?* becomes *What do I want to appear to believe?* Fake it till you make it! Maybe your dream life lives here: In a digital, fantasy world where the algorithm plays god and loving yourself feels like looking into the light of your screen.

ଘ(੭ˊᵕˋ)੭* ੈ✩‧₊♡ ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*ﾟ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*ﾟ✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*ﾟ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*ﾟ✧･ﾟ

FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT

The essence of all things digital is– the bit. One or Zero. On or Off. Where digital becomes analog. This piece pays tribute to our digital legacy of 8-bit color and 7-segment LED displays– technological limitations which are mirrored in the constraints of putting art on the blockchain. Although the image represents the art, the art of the token itself is the code– which renders everything bitwise, pixel by pixel, all contained within 27-bits of information.

27-Bit Digital

A real-time live interactive piece that also acts as a clock. 720 unique ways to show the current time, one per minute over twelve hours. Each clock will activate on its given minute, giving you a special moment every twelve hours to consider what one minute means to you.

720 Minutes

The field is a work inspired by the current trend in image synthesis made possible by machine learning technology. The latent spaces (the algorithmic structures that make AI image synthesis possible) can be seen as a part of our human collective unconsciousness; a hyper dimensional field of unlimited outcomes, inspired by our human symbols and language.

Exploring this new type of space, it sparked the idea of exploring the algorithmic essence of my own artworks. What would the structure behind my creative processes look like? What if I could visualize the algorithmic structures of my own mind that produced my artworks in the past?

These questions led me to The Field, a multidimensional machine hiding in my subconscious.

# THE GENERATOR
The first step to reach The Field, was to capture the algorithmic structure behind all my artworks. By compressing several hundred artworks from HyperHash, EnergySculpture, UltraWave & HashCrash into a 64X64 matrix, a noise image has been created. This was done by adding up all these works together.

This noise image I call The Generator was the starting point to explore possibilities for the creation of a new work. This 64x64 matrix filled with noise data was embedded in the source of the piece and functions as the core of The Field algorithm.

# THE FIELD
The Generator is being transformed into a multidimensional field of colors and motion, called The Field. The motions of the field relate to natural processes of creation and destruction. The field is like a fluid, solid and gas-like structure at the same time. It goes from a noisy formless state to a solid material state and back.

The field is created in a few steps. First a 2d noise pattern is being created from The Generator. This 2d pattern is made by picking random points from the 64x64 matrix. This is the fundamental background of the Field.

The second step is to use this pattern to set the field in motion. By using the color data per pixel, movement is being initiated. The colors are in that sense multifunctional, on one hand it visualizes random colors extracted from The Generator on the other hand the colors are used to set the field in motion and showing the interrelationship between the colors in an extra dimension: time. This creates the 3D effects, but also creates the effect of lighting bouncing in the field.


# REGRESSION, DESTRUCTION & CREATION
The creation of the field felt for me like a form of regression. Reviewing the concepts of my previous work, thinking about what overlapped in terms of topics conceptually and design wise drew me back in time.

The main topic of this work represents is the cyclical nature of creation and destruction. By revisiting my old works and literally destroying them, this new work was created. In this way the work reflects on the causal relation between creation and destruction (what's created will someday be destroyed, something has to be created to be destroyed). A  universal essence of our causal reality behind all that is, a balance between forces, from light to dark, from warm to cold, from dry to wet, from finite to infinite.

This theme of creation and destruction is visible quite literally in The Field. Every mint of The field has a unique position in the field with color filtering added on top. The locations in the field are composed of  either creational vortices (expanding spirals) and destructional vortices(contracting spirals), a combination of the two in a balanced state (order) or a combination of the two in an unbalanced state (chaos). 

The positions and coloring are a combination of hand-picked settings by me and totally random settings generated by the hash input from the token.


# Extra
- By pressing the buttons a,s,w,d you can move through the field.
- By pressing L you can activate LavaMode.
- By scrolling you can zoom in and out.

**** BEST VIEWED IN FULLSCREEN LIVE MODE ON DECENT GPU. ****

Art Blocks Curated

Ceramics #20

Charlotte Dann

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