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.

---
 
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

“Apparitions” is an exploration of the space between algorithmic and organic. Each “Apparition” is unique to the transaction that originated it. Created by Aaron Penne

Apparitions

The essence of all things digital is– the bit. One or Zero. On or Off. Where digital becomes analog. This piece pays tribute to our digital legacy of 8-bit color and 7-segment LED displays– technological limitations which are mirrored in the constraints of putting art on the blockchain. Although the image represents the art, the art of the token itself is the code– which renders everything bitwise, pixel by pixel, all contained within 27-bits of information.

27-Bit Digital

A synthesis of over 777 days of generative artmaking, motion as survival, and coding as transformative ritual. Sky gardens of trustless techno-leviathans crystallize, entangle, and play between dimensions online and AFK, generating new forms altogether. I channel these speculative phenomena to highlight the fluid, transformative possibilities of structures perceived as rigid and immutable. Their intricate geometries move freely beyond limited social media compression that severely reduces the experience of digital art. These formations also embody choreographic elements from collaborative live coding dance performance.

glitch crystal monsters

Our studio, Aranda\Lasch, was formed in the early 2000s to explore algorithmic systems and generative processes as a means to understand the world around us and make things within it. Whether encapsulated in physical or computational techniques, these processes act with their own degree of autonomy from our own biases and as a result, open up new ideas and sensibilities while dismantling traditional notions of authorship. They allow one to code the possibility of discovery and surprise into the creative process in a manner that can be widely shared and because of this transmissibility, algorithms frustrate the idea of a single author, inviting speculation on the shared nature of creativity. For this reason we have always understood our work to be a collaboration between each other, those who share with us and those who inspire us. 

Over the years, the studio has indulged in a number of obsessions. One is the conviction that history is a generative source with which to constantly entangle. Whether it is through stories, characters, techniques, or events, history acts as a medium active with properties that constantly reshape and transform our concept of the present. We look back to move forward, like hitching a ride. It is here that we encounter Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) and his masterpiece Melancholia I (1514) to inspire a deep dive into the process of engraving as a representational technique reinterpreted through the contemporary medium of code. By scratching metal away from a plate, an inversion of conventional drawing, engraving allowed a work of art to be reproduced and disseminated widely. In addition to the piece’s masterful delineation, its allegory resonates with us as well. In Dürer’s time melancholy was associated with insanity but also with creativity. In the engraving, the winged personification of melancholy -- the work is widely regarded to be a self-portrait of the artist -- is surrounded by the tools and elements of geometry. For Dürer, as for a handful of others who came before and after, who test the porous borders between art, science and religion, geometry is a vehicle for imagination, a shadow of the divine and a portal to the infinite. 

This work Primitives is a kindred meditation on infinity through an exploration of a novel geometric structure using algorithm and code, the tools of today's geometers and mystics, made visible through the anachronism of the engravers trade translated into pure 1’s and 0’s. Primitives grows through a single shape that can repeat and scale in specific ways that are never random, but rather tightly governed by geometric logics. It is about drawing infinity through a radical modularity; ordered but aperiodic. Unlike a regular crystal, whose molecular pattern is periodic (or repetitive in all directions), the distinctive quality of this quasicrystal is that its structural pattern never repeats the same way twice. Endless and uneven in aggregate, Primitive clusters can be described by the precise arrangement of a single modular part. As these small units aggregate together they form larger figures that themselves combine into ever larger movements, always a little bit different from any other. In this sense, quasicrystalline patterns have an infinite capacity to create and carry information. 

We are here because this is a medium for sharing in perpetuity. In the last couple of years, on the cusp of our third decade of practice, we have watched with awe and delight a renaissance in generative work as it's adopted by an entirely new generation around blockchain technologies. This inspired us to enter this new space with our own enduring questions of form and geometry, modularity and variability, historical continuity, and the thirst for endlessness. Primitives is what we selected as our primer into generative art on-chain because both the work and the medium grapple with these questions. 

Some Notes:
On the screen, Primitives is represented as a two-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional figure. Each invocation comes with a sequence of projections, or rotations, around this object. As Primitives spins, there are moments when its blocks snap into alignment with other blocks  revealing its underlying lattice and crystalline nature. Each projection can be saved as a high resolution image for printing. Primitives can also be saved in three dimensions as an .obj file for a variety of uses including the creation of a physical object through 3-d printing or fabrication. Below is a list of interface instructions:

'left' + 'right' arrow keys to rotate 
'up' + 'down' arrow keys to zoom in 
'g' regrows geometry 
'i' saves image 
'o' saves .obj

Thank you,
Aranda\Lasch
2022

Art Blocks Curated

Ceramics #295

Charlotte Dann

More in Art Blocks Curated

Apparitions

Aaron Penne

27-Bit Digital

kai

glitch crystal monsters

Alida Sun

Primitives

Aranda\Lasch

Art

Company

Learn