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

Dreams is an exploration of uneven subdivision. It focuses on the interaction between uniform and crooked lines, and the complex structures that can emerge from simple rules. Each iteration of Dreams is unique, with characteristics determined by the hash created at the moment of transaction. Created by Joshua Bagley

Dreams

**Human Unreadable (Privacy Collection - Lot 03)**

**Human Unreadable** is a three-act, embodied generative artwork hiding the human body in plain sight (on-chain). Bringing together choreography, code, blockchain, generative art, and cryptography, the work culminates in a live performance. Each output is driven by the motion data of its underlying unique, on-chain choreographic sequence. The sequences behind the first 100 minted works (mint #2 to #101) will be performed during the IRL premiere. The hosting art institution will be announced in 2023. 

A journey of slowly recovering the human unfolds as such: 1) reveal on Art Blocks, 2) uncover the choreographic score, and 3) final performance. After the reveal, the human is still unreadable, visible only through the results of movement on glass, obfuscated by code, rendered as a still image. In the next phase of the work, collectors get a glimpse at their underlying choreography by unlocking the secondary token—an on-chain choreographic score. In the final phase, the performance, life is breathed into the human movement that has been lying dormant inside the pieces. **Human Unreadable** brings flesh and viscerality into code and "vulnerability as a feature" into long-form generative art. What you don’t immediately see in the visual artwork outputs is the invisible potentiality of performance, inscripted on-chain and able to be brought to life by a dancer at any moment. 

 **Human Unreadable** intentionally punctures the safety of modernist design and the idea of a universal voice, pushing the limits of human expression within rigid technical systems. With a focus on the body, the collection brings risk, chaos, confusion, and vulnerability to the reveal, everything that function-focused design systems normally prevent. Each piece is an invitation, a transparent layer through which the messy human experience can come into focus through the three phases of the work. This work is a continuation of the pivot away from modernism, clean lines, and the quietly gendered values therein, in favor of a more embodied and sensual approach to human-machine collaboration pioneered by early women in digital art. **Human Unreadable**'s 6 distinct looks derive from the core materiality of Operator’s Privacy Collection: glass, light, x-ray and the human body. The transparent and illuminating nature of these materials reveal what is below the surface.

What are you revealing when you reveal?

**Human Unreadable** has roots in various histories such as computational choreography (Analivia Cordeiro, Jeanne Beaman), Merce Cunningham's Chance Dance, and the Experiments in Art and Technology movement. With Ti’s extensive background as an HCI technologist and multimedia artist and Catherine’s background as a choreographer and performance artist, Operator architected a bespoke team, 25+ individuals ranging from specialized engineers to dancers, who embarked on a 9 month process to realize the work. Operator's on-chain generative choreography method is the technical backbone of **Human Unreadable**—the process and open source tooling for which will be made available via white paper in 2023.  


***Additional Information***

**First Minter Benefits** 
The first 100 minted pieces (mint #2 to #101) from the collection will be performed in the IRL premiere in an art institution. 
-Mint #2 to #101 will be counted as the first 100 mints. Mint #0 and #1 are artist mints held by Operator.
-Hosting art institution will be announced in 2023. 
-Additionally, Privacy Key 00 holders will have one of their collected Human Unreadable sequences performed.

**Choreographic Score (secondary token)** 
-The secondary token will be released at the end of June 2023.
-The secondary token is a choreographic score that represents the unique choreography that generated the output minted on Art Blocks. For this reason, the Art Blocks token and the secondary token are bound together and cannot be transferred separately.
-The underlying choreographic score visible through the secondary token can be performed by a choreographer or dancer at the collector's discretion.

**GPU Intensive Rendering / Live Preview** 
This piece involves GPU intensive composition and rendering of programmatically drawn body parts, generative glass objects, x-ray shaders as well as motion paths. As a result the ‘live preview’ on your laptop or phone may look less detailed than the PNG on Art Blocks which is rendered by a high powered computer. Not to worry!

**Official Token-gated Prints** 
Human Unreadable collectors will be able to purchase Operator official, signed, token-gated prints (on hand-selected materials) of their collected piece(s).

Human Unreadable

Archetype explores the use of repetition as a counterweight to unruly, random structures. As each single component look chaotic alone, the repetition brings along a sense of intentionality, ultimately resulting in a complex, yet satisfying expression.

Archetype

Screens have been at the heart of art mass production and mass consumption for ages. From screen printing techniques, first developed in China around 1000AD and later popularized in western art culture by e.g. Andy Warhol, to the screens on our devices used to consume both digital art as well as most traditional art we experience in our life.

The "Screens" series is a celebration of modern art. It is inspired by the aesthetics inherent in screen printing along with the compositions and colors of both Bauhaus, Constructivism, and pulp fiction sci-fi covers.

The compositions in "Screens" is based purely on strict geometries and plays with the tension, and symphonies that can be created from combining simple rules. The end result can range from chaotic non-figurative to strongly ordered isometric scenes.

The generative system underlying the rendering mimics the screen printing process by rendering and applying a single color at a time to a master image. Each virtual screen may be more or less aligned with the master, creating a lovely flawed balance to the precision of the rendered geometry.

25% of the proceeds from this project will be donated to Den Blå Planet, The Danish National Aquarium, in support of their work on preserving and restoring marine life and ecology.

Art Blocks Curated

Ceramics #122

Charlotte Dann

More in Art Blocks Curated

Dreams

Joshua Bagley

Human Unreadable

Operator

Archetype

Kjetil Golid

Screens

Thomas Lin Pedersen

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