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

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 ██▀███   ▄▄▄        ██████ ▄▄▄█████▓▓█████  ██▀███  
▓██ ▒ ██▒▒████▄    ▒██    ▒ ▓  ██▒ ▓▒▓█   ▀ ▓██ ▒ ██▒
▓██ ░▄█ ▒▒██  ▀█▄  ░ ▓██▄   ▒ ▓██░ ▒░▒███   ▓██ ░▄█ ▒
▒██▀▀█▄  ░██▄▄▄▄██   ▒   ██▒░ ▓██▓ ░ ▒▓█  ▄ ▒██▀▀█▄  
░██▓ ▒██▒ ▓█   ▓██▒▒██████▒▒  ▒██▒ ░ ░▒████▒░██▓ ▒██▒
░ ▒▓ ░▒▓░ ▒▒   ▓▒█░▒ ▒▓▒ ▒ ░  ▒ ░░   ░░ ▒░ ░░ ▒▓ ░▒▓░
  ░▒ ░ ▒░  ▒   ▒▒ ░░ ░▒  ░ ░    ░     ░ ░  ░  ░▒ ░ ▒░
                                              
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*Screens no longer only frame and display virtual spacetime. Connected together and surrounding us on all sides, their framings and displays have also opened, activated, and added another spatiotemporal dimension to the four in which all of us live.*
—Vivian Sobchack, *From Screen-Scape to Screen-Sphere: A Meditation in Medias Res*

An exploration of a technical concept I call "pixel overpainting."

Rasterized procedural brush strokes with low transparency slowly layer themselves over each other in a rhythmic loop until they achieve colorful equilibrium. They continue to overpaint themselves endlessly. The resulting color mixtures are then quantized and dithered to separate them into patches of pixels that recall the discrete materiality of the screen: a strictly digital variation on color field painting. The resulting texture is not a skeuomorphic grain but an overt reference to the universe of screens that surround us every day. Electric light arranged in a grid, fluttering and flickering everywhere all the time.

Please allow a few minutes for the colors to reach equilibrium.
For best results use Chrome browser with enabled webGL and hardware acceleration. Though it is encouraged to explore the subtleties in viewing the same pixels on different hardware and software to reflect on the subjectivity of contemporary computer graphics and the materiality of CPUs, GPUs, resolutions, pixel densities, browser APIs, and other medium-specific entropy.

Press '1', '2', '4', '8' to change pixel sizes.
Press 'p' or click canvas to pause/resume.
Press 's' to grab a still frame.
Press 'r' to re-paint.

Collectors will be eligible to receive a signed giclée print of a still frame of their mint as well as high-resolution looping media in GIF or lossless video format.
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RASTER

Unigrids are collectible digital art pieces 100% stored on the Ethereum blockchain. Each Unigrid consists of 421 individual Pure Javascript generated SVG grids, ensuring each Unigrid is entirely unique. Not only are Unigrids visually unique, but they also hide an ingenious animation and a generated beat to enhance your experience. Unigrids are an experiential piece of art, with a static image for printing, an animation, and companion beat - all generated and stored on the blockchain. You truly need to play around with Unigrids to understand the essence of them. Be sure to hold onto your favorite piece as we will be adding interactive easter eggs for art owners, giveaways, and other engagement with the community.

Unigrids

white noise contains all possible harmonics/notes/chords. by filtering out narrow frequency bands from the noise, pure sine wave “notes” become audible. we’ve limited these bands to only ever reveal specific notes from a particular musical scale. 

each piece then, is a unique iteration of this scale with different notes from it gaining prominence. sometimes they will be chordal and sometimes dissonant but always beautiful because the scale is beautiful.

visually, the white noise is represented by particles which congeal into dense lines. each line that appears is a specific note you can hear and it's amplitude is defined by the corresponding particle density. chords are represented by the lines crossing over each other.

so in summary, it's a quite literal visual representation of sound moving from an arbitrary form to musical form. natural order from chaos with infinitely variable patterns depending on which notes are audible. 

*note we’ve implemented the following variables for more radical variation in particle behavior in addition to the random generation of notes and their corresponding patterns.

- particles will either form straight line shapes or curved shapes 
- particles with vary in size from one iteration to another 
- particles will either favor white or black as their prominent b&w bias creating stark contrast between iterations as well as variables in between the two extremes
- some iterations will reveal faster and some slower

montreal friend scale

“A particular order can be found in deepest space, in our oceans and forests, and in all living things, including ourselves – a unified code producing endless variation.  Gravity and cosmic winds shape star-forming nebulas into coral-like forms.  Flowers self-organize in radial symmetry with signals hidden from the human eye.  Stars are birthed, explode, collapse, and are reborn.  Invertebrates move on the tides of oceans, signaling with ever-changing bioluminescence.  Light bends time as events unfold in our own lives.” 

Cosmic Reef reflects on the ordered randomness in nature, capable of producing beauty and symmetry.  The individual works begin with a simple geometry that becomes more complex through composed dynamic layers, each born of a combination of human control and computational chance.  

Leo Villareal creates intricate sculptures that speak to the underlying rules and structures of systems for both gallery and public settings.  He is interested in exploring ways to express this through base units such as pixels and binary code.  Villareal is most known for two monumental public artworks: The Bay Lights, a site-specific light sculpture that occupies the entire western span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, and Illuminated River, a series of generative light sculptures installed on nine bridges over the River Thames in London.

CONTROLS:

“Z”: Journey along the Z-axis   

Cosmic Reef is graphics intensive & requires a WebGL2-enabled browser.


Art Blocks Curated

Ceramics #245

Charlotte Dann

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