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

Escher-style tiling of a plane, gone wrong. Each image spins hash-driven colors, shapes, and symmetries into infinity. Fly through the spiral as it morphs between beauty and madness. Keys: F = Fly through/back, D = Distort on/off, Esc = Stop, S = Save image.

Inspirals

Elementals is inspired by physical printmaking techniques and early Bauhaus principles. It starts with a few basic coloured shapes and arranges them in varying frequencies, sizes, and positions based on a unique transaction hash. Multiple overlaid variable grids allow for myriad layouts and opportunities for colour interaction. The goal is to create pieces that feel both intentional in composition and part of the same family.

Elementals

Memories of Qilin is inspired by traditional East Asian art. It channels the sense of movement and fluidity found in classical Chinese brushwork, while drawing from the colors, patterns, and forms of ukiyo-e woodblock prints. 

The series explores elements of folklore, evoking the mythological imagery of dragons, phoenixes, flowers, and mountains.  The title references a fabled chimerical beast found throughout East Asian mythology (while the qilin is its Chinese name, it is also known in Korea as the girin and Japan as the kirin) that represents prosperity and luck.

Viewers are invited to interpret elusive forms that verge on representation. As with the stories passed on through generations, each piece is imagined, organic, and ever-in-flux.

Memories of Qilin

**Sales note: The first 16 mints will be eligible for an 8''x8'' signed plot, posted anywhere in the world.**

The vein running through my work, linking each piece to the next and to me as an artist, is the opposition between physical rationalism (the idea that physics seeks to reveal the true nature of reality) and empiricism (the idea that physics seeks to identify the behaviour of the world through experiment). Empiricism describes the world, while rationalism explains it. This conflict has been at the core of me throughout my studies, and I explore the idea further in this project.

Dipolar tries to answer the question "What would electromagnetism look like in two dimensions?", itself rich in the ideas of rationalism. To an empiricist, it is a question which can not be answered, but the answer has impacts throughout physics, from 3D electromagnetism to condensed matter. These questions and those like them have been grappled with for thousands of years, and we will die without knowing if our attempts at answers will be seen any differently from Plato's theory of Forms.

Our three-dimensional universe constrains by its symmetry the behaviour of point charges to the radial fields that we are used to. In two dimensions the fields can curl around the charge, leading to two kinds of fields able to be produced by a charge. When paired with another particle of the same type and equal but opposite charge they create a 'dipole moment', which look alike when composed of either type of charge. Dipolar shows the field profiles produced by these combinations for each type, and as an idealised 'point dipole'.

The style was inspired by the sketches of Euler and da Vinci. Both were revolutionary minds, they sought to understand and explain the world in diagram, a tradition that has been preserved in art and science to this day. More broadly, I've felt inspired by Sol Lewitt and Vera Molnar, in particular their use of dense detail, seeing how it can provide tension in their work and draw the viewer in closer.

*An SVG for plotting can be downloaded by pressing DOWN*
*A 4096x4096 image can be downloaded by pressing UP*
*Plotting speed can be adjusted with LEFT/RIGHT*
*The animation can be restarted with SPACE*

Art Blocks Curated

Ceramics #35

Charlotte Dann

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Michael Connolly

Memories of Qilin

Emily Xie

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