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

**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*

Dipolar

Translucent color bubbles playfully mix and morph to create organic and ephemeral blobby forms. [Shortcuts] spacebar: pause/resume, s: save screenshot, 1→5: high→low resolution. If needed, please adjust resolution or window size for optimal performance.

Bubble Blobby

Simple and easily identifiable, each squiggle embodies the soul of the Art Blocks platform. Consider each my personal signature as an artist, developer, and tinkerer. Public minting of the Chromie Squiggle is permanently paused. They are now reserved for manual distribution to collectors and community members over a longer period of time. Please visit OpenSea to explore Squiggles available on the secondary market. 

Chromie Squiggle

These cute companions live 100% on-chain where their bytes are cleverly stored in a scalable vector format. Built with quality components and complex algorithms, each Algobot is issued with a unique serial number and a NIFTY license which permits them to help out on any commercial projects where you might require their assistance.

Art Blocks Curated

Ceramics #93

Charlotte Dann

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