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

**Cargo** is a series of abstract paintings created with animated pixels that are constantly moving without ever repeating. It is painting new patterns on the fly in between macro and micro compositions with a duality of different rhythms and continuous synchronicity. The focus is alternately drawn to detail, then distracted by movement elsewhere and caught up in the overall picture. This rhythm turns the visual complexity into an active experience.

ASDF: “My work should offer individual ways of interpretation, or even allow one to find some self in it. It wants to inspire some thoughts about dynamics and systemics and also just mesmerize the audience, capture them in a little fantasy, or just for a brief moment in a state of satisfaction.”

Cargo is the latest work in Kim Asendorf’s ongoing work series of pixel pattern animations. Starting with [monogrid](https://monogrid.xyz) in 2021, and [Sabotage](https://sabotage.kim) in 2022, both highly conceptual series, therefore visually very raw and unimaginable. Asendorf discovered various interesting details in these works, which eventually became fundamental in his artistic expression.

Cargo is a real time WebGL software written in JavaScript and GLSL. At its core is a flip-flop render buffer, also known as feedback buffer. That means the animation is alternately rendered in two different frame buffers. This technique allows the usage of the previous frame of the animation as an asset in the current rendering, which allows for a series of reactive animation strategies.

An initial image with variable structures and patterns is rendered and subsequently loaded into the frame buffer. A fragment shader is used to apply a set of animation algorithms that make the pixel move and a set of reset algorithms that constantly try to recreate the initial image. The final animation happens in selected containers and is always a combination of two algorithms, one from each set. By regularly animating and partially resetting the pixels, a wide range of movement patterns appear.

Cargo is a responsive and pixel exact artwork and it will fill the screen on any display size, thus changing the total amount of used pixels accordingly. This results in the fact that the detail level in the artwork is changing depending on the dimensions. The overall structure is consistently stretching the x and y axis independently. Single containers scale along the dimensions and offer more pixels to render the patterns at a larger representation compared to a smaller representation. This behavior leads to a brilliance, perfect pixels, a crisp rendering with nothing like compression artifacts.

This software includes the [simplex noise](https://github.com/jwagner/simplex-noise.js) JavaScript implementation by Jonas Wagner and the [cellular noise](https://github.com/stegu/webgl-noise) GLSL code by Stefan Gustavson.

Cargo

Chimera is a mutation, its genetics a merging of past and present. 

New creative mediums almost always ingest those that came before. Pictograms and hieroglyphics turned into paintings, which eventually became moving images and photoreal graphics. Spoken words evolved into written text, eventually becoming complex screenplays, computer code, and a world of hyperlinks. Most mediums are not discarded, but combined or extended to incorporate new technology or ideas. 

When a new medium comes into existence, the capabilities of both the artist and viewer increase. The potential subjects within said medium can grow in complexity as well, some fully dependent on the medium that holds them. Other subjects are timeless, popping in and out of multiple movements and genres throughout history. An example of the latter is still life. From ancient carvings through contemporary art, scenes of commonality, beauty, and metaphor have persisted. Traditionally viewed as a type of technical practice or meditation (the bottom of the “hierarchy of genres”), some examples of still life have gone on to be among the most important works in art history. 

Chimera is a natural progression of still life. It is an old tradition in the very new medium of on-chain generative art, a movement that will have an enormous presence in the future. Chimera simultaneously reaches into the past while exploiting the capabilities of the present and seeks to represent a unique moment in time, a generation of art in between digital and physical realities, encapsulating where we came from and where we are going. 

NOTES:

Chimera is graphically intensive. Modern hardware is recommended. Ensure that your browser has hardware acceleration enabled.

The charitable portion of this release will be donated to various cancer research efforts.

CONTROLS:

“A”: Toggle animations
“R”: Toggle autorotation
“C”: Capture screenshot
“H”: Capture HD screenshot (CPU intensive) 

—

Thank you to all that participate in, share, or otherwise support this release. It means more to me than I can say.

Chimera

Trossets explores the emergence of diversity. Combining twelve construction blocks the system generates endless patterns with a unique result each iteration. Trossets /trusɛts/ means parts, blocks, pieces and it's my particular homage to a classical generative system, the multiscale Truchet tiles. The systems plays an interlocking blocks game creating unexpected drawings with colors borrowed from the Mediterranean. To keep this colors alive 10% of the profits will be donated to Marilles Foundation, an NGO for marine conservation (https://marilles.org/en). And 15% of the minting profits will go to OpenArms, an NGO that helps refugees that try to cross the Mediterranean (https://www.openarms.es/en).

Trossets

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.

Art Blocks Curated

Ceramics #92

Charlotte Dann

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Cargo

Kim Asendorf

Chimera

mpkoz

Trossets

Anna Carreras

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Bryan Brinkman

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