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

Random and anarchy, chaos and structurality. Jiometory No Compute is a living motion experimental study, a contemplative geometry organism that lives now and forever. Each individual units movement contributes and flows into a generative path for a greater purpose. Together they try to achieve a symbiosis, although an « ideal » computer program is very relative. Exploring domains of definitions and warping an input data-set leads to unexpected behaviors, sometimes surprising, often fascinating.   Interactions : Zoom-in / Zoom-out / Drag left and right / Best view in full-screen. 

ム サクイ デ ムチツジョ、 コントン ト コウゾウセイ。 Jiometory No Compute ハ、 セイブツテキ ナ ウゴキ ノ ジッケンテキ ケンキュウ デ アリ、 ゲンザイ ソシテ エイエン ニ セイチョウスル シコウテキ ナ キカガクテキ ユウキブツ デス。 ココ ノ ユニット ノ ウゴキ ハ、 オオキナ モクテキ ノ タメ ノ セイセイ ニ ナガレコミ、 ツカワレマス。 « リソウテキ ナ » コンピュータ プログラム ハ ヒジョウ ニ ソウタイテキ デス ガ、 ソレラ ハ キョウセイ ヲ タッセイシヨウ ト スル ノ デス。 テイギ ノ ドメイン ヲ タンサクシ、 ニュウリョク データセット ヲ ワープスル コト デ、 ヨキシナイ ドウサ ガ ハッセイシ、 トキニハ オドロク ベキ、 シバシバ ミリョクテキ ナ ドウサ ヲ ウミマス

Unique working GameBoy Cartridges certificate are redeemable for every holders of the Jiometory No Compute artworks to be displayed as a special and rare piece of hardware art. Because they are completely hand-made / crafted, those will be available in small batches for an additional fee, some more informations about the cartridges will be released after the sale.

Jiometory No Compute - ジオメトリ ハ ケイサンサレマセン

*Please Note: This is an Exponential Dutch Auction (no settlement). The price you purchase is the price you will pay.*

An ideal human being is one big optimization problem. We have a goal - we optimize our actions to maximize the outcome of this goal. 
In our initial days, we optimize to stay alive, during school, we optimize to study well, gain skills and obtain the best scores.

As we progress in our careers we optimize to get the most amount of money, material growth, and maybe even influential growth such as fame.

As we age we optimize to minimize diseases and maximize our lifespan - we workout, we eat healthily, we retire, and rest 

As ideal as it sounds, how do we know what exact actions would lead to maximizing my outcome? At this very moment - instead of reading this should you be doing something else that would make your life’s outcome better? Maybe, maybe not - We don't know... Although, we do find out through trial and error. 

In the grand scheme of things we’re just an agent exploring actions around us, learning which ones increase our reward and choosing the path that seems to lead to the maximum reward. Cerebellum is a window (pun intended) of the human mind - a continuously evolving art piece that is built on top of a reinforcement learning agent that is learning and optimizing and evolving as you see it. 

The project starts with an untrained model of a reinforcement learning agent that is deployed in an environment where it is faced with positive reward and negative reward. The agent is also equipped with a bunch of eyes that lets it sense the objects around it and judge if it wants to go ahead and consume the object or abstain and move in a different direction. The agent here is optimization to maximize its positive rewards while avoiding the negative ones. How does the agent know if a reward is positive or negative? - It learns that after experiencing a bunch of samples. And the magic is - all of this happens in your browser. The seemingly random motion of the agent at the beginning running into everything it sees subsides with time as it learns better about the environment and only hits on the positive rewards. How fast does this happen? Depends on your luck - every art has agents with varied number of eyes and range of these eyes. In addition with every refresh your agent would start from a new place, taking a new path - a path that might lead to it learning things at a different pace depending on what it comes across as it explores. To add some practicality - the environment also has some walls, elements that just block the agent from moving doesn’t add or decrease rewards. Hinders the agent’s movement, lets it find a different path - sometimes this is needed for the agent to strategize, sometimes it's just a hindrance… I’ll leave this to your imagination as you see the agent in action…
The seemingly random motion - the path towards true understanding - the process of optimisation is captured by the windows. Windows that show the beauty of this process expressed in a variety of ways. 

Cerebellum is a window into the black box of AI, an unapologetic exaltation of the unpolished, an ode to the process and its aesthetic vernacular.

+ Press 'p' to switch from 2d/3d views
+ Press 'e' to expose the reinforced learning layer
+ Press 't' to pause/unpause the training of the agent
+ Press 'w' to randomize the walls of the training environment

On mobile, tap to switch from 2d to 3d

Cerebellum

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.

Fontana

Escher-style tiling of a plane, gone wrong. Each image spins hash-driven colors, shapes, and symmetries into infinity. Fly through the spiral as it morphs between beauty and madness. Keys: F = Fly through/back, D = Distort on/off, Esc = Stop, S = Save image.

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Ceramics #217

Charlotte Dann

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Art Blocks Curated

Ceramics #217

Charlotte Dann

More in Art Blocks Curated

Jiometory No Compute - ジオメトリ ハ ケイサンサレマセン

Samsy

Cerebellum

Laya Mathikshara & Santiago

Fontana

Harvey Rayner | patterndotco

Inspirals

Radix

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Company

Learn

Jiometory No Compute - ジオメトリハケイサンサレマセン