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

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

AlgoRhythms is a collection of generative audio-visual data sculptures. Each unique hash drives the combination of colors, patterns and musical scales into a music box.

AlgoRhythms

Each Construction Token is unique and contains a randomized seed that determines the composition of the artwork. This includes the number, orientation, and placement of rectangles, as well as the color selections. Most tokens are monochromatic, with occasional light or dark variants. In some cases, the script will produce a token using complementary colors.

Construction Token

Fontana is Latin for fountain. 

This project is a playful attempt at abstractly capturing the flowing movement of a fountain using precisely drawn elements that evoke a static and considered rendering of a subject that is in constant flux. The visual language is reminiscent of hand-draughted technical drawing, a precise and methodical practice that progresses at a radically different pace to the flowing and capricious movement of water. To increase this tension between dynamic motion and static mechanical process I wanted the surface textures to appear worn and aged like a drawing that has spent its life in the bottom of a mechanics drawer. This process of abrasion and discoloration is occurring on yet another scale of time adding complexity to the references of time passing. 

Woven into the very fabric of Fontana is a fully generative solution for creating color expression. This means there is no reliance on preset palettes with every output being an entirely unique color articulation of the color story I want the project to reveal as a whole. Far from being random I attempted to create an approach which produces colors that evoke early 20th Century art and design media. With this intention I wanted  outputs to look like they could be working drawing artifacts from this period of time.

Art Blocks Curated

Ceramics #71

Charlotte Dann

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Michael Connolly

AlgoRhythms

Han x Nicolas Daniel

Construction Token

Jeff Davis

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Harvey Rayner | patterndotco

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