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

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░██▓ ▒██▒ ▓█   ▓██▒▒██████▒▒  ▒██▒ ░ ░▒████▒░██▓ ▒██▒
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*Screens no longer only frame and display virtual spacetime. Connected together and surrounding us on all sides, their framings and displays have also opened, activated, and added another spatiotemporal dimension to the four in which all of us live.*
—Vivian Sobchack, *From Screen-Scape to Screen-Sphere: A Meditation in Medias Res*

An exploration of a technical concept I call "pixel overpainting."

Rasterized procedural brush strokes with low transparency slowly layer themselves over each other in a rhythmic loop until they achieve colorful equilibrium. They continue to overpaint themselves endlessly. The resulting color mixtures are then quantized and dithered to separate them into patches of pixels that recall the discrete materiality of the screen: a strictly digital variation on color field painting. The resulting texture is not a skeuomorphic grain but an overt reference to the universe of screens that surround us every day. Electric light arranged in a grid, fluttering and flickering everywhere all the time.

Please allow a few minutes for the colors to reach equilibrium.
For best results use Chrome browser with enabled webGL and hardware acceleration. Though it is encouraged to explore the subtleties in viewing the same pixels on different hardware and software to reflect on the subjectivity of contemporary computer graphics and the materiality of CPUs, GPUs, resolutions, pixel densities, browser APIs, and other medium-specific entropy.

Press '1', '2', '4', '8' to change pixel sizes.
Press 'p' or click canvas to pause/resume.
Press 's' to grab a still frame.
Press 'r' to re-paint.

Collectors will be eligible to receive a signed giclée print of a still frame of their mint as well as high-resolution looping media in GIF or lossless video format.
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RASTER

"Edifice" is a series of 976 massive, deteriorating structures built on strange terrain. It is an exploration of buildings being conceptualized, constructed, and eroded away under a wide variety of conditions. Edifice's outputs run the gamut between minimal and maximal, with some showing few large, static blocks of color, and others many small, highly textured and warped shapes. Each image is progressively constructed in front of the viewer's eyes. It is a system full of surprises that I'm excited to share with the world.

Edifice

Sudfah (Arabic for "happy accident") is a generative collection celebrating the beauty that can emerge from chaos, mistakes, and accidents.

A single calligraphic line intends to tell one story (sometimes wandering and confused in its own right, but always meandering from one side to the other).

Digital liquid is spilled upon it and takes the ink in directions that are unexpected, uncontrolled, and tell a much more interesting story than the one the line intended.... and often more beautiful.

Sudfah

Ancient Courses is a generative experience that explores the aesthetics of meandering rivers and the settlements that form on their banks. The design is graphic and cartographic with bold color palettes rendered against map iconography and line sensibility. From the river banks, roads stretch across the landscape: sometimes a single access road, other times sprawling towns. The river meandering is simulated via a custom algorithm which closely models the real world process.

Press 'r' to reset the simulation.
Press 's' to save an image to disk.
Press 'h' to re-run the simulation at print res. This is significantly slower than the default screen res version. The progress bar at the bottom of the screen shows how long before the print-res image is automatically saved to disk.

A limited number of Ancient Courses mints will come with a Treasure Map feature. The owner can request a physical print (max one print per treasure map).

Best viewed on Chrome, Firefox, or Safari.

Art Blocks Curated

Ceramics #54

Charlotte Dann

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