*The mind moves at the speed of dreams.
Hold on! Hold on! Hold on!
I like to think of my brain as a hand,
palm of my soul, fragile nerve bundle.
I think about my brain as I hold my heart
in both hands — a private thing, a pulsing secret.
It fills my palms and bones with heat.
The world is full of heartbeat.
I am trying to hold it all together...*
    &nbsp; -- &nbsp;Excerpt from *STILL MOVING*, by Technelegy

**NOTE: To fully experience *STILL MOVING*, please open in LIVE VIEW and enable your webcam for motion tracking.**

The first project of its kind, *STILL MOVING* is an interactive poem about humanity’s visceral engagement with the virtual – written and published via the blockchain as a token word performance, and embodied by each collector as a uniquely intimate, personalized interpretation. In this epic on-chain ode to the relationship of bodies and machines, literal and figurative wordplay activates the liminal space between text and reader, extending the two-dimensional screen/page into a somatic, material realm where language moves us in every sense of that phrase – up, down, sideways, forwards, backwards, and in otherwise inexpressible directions – urging us to reclaim our dynamism and intuitive physicality in an age of technological acceleration, bodily inertia, and rote gestures.

A collaboration between Nathaniel Stern and Sasha Stiles – rooted in Stiles’ AI-powered verse and Stern’s career in digital, interactive, and networked art – *STILL MOVING* is an ars poetica about what it means to be a human body facing a machine: a showdown, a form of worship, a distraction, a mirror gaze, an other, an alter, an alter. After we bend to our technologies, do we spring back into shape, or assume new forms? Where does input end, and output begin? As we continue to think, work, and play faster than ever while rooted in place, it is still possible to be moved – *really* moved?

*STILL MOVING* also embodies the future of web3 literature, in which the book – read-only – evolves into a read-write-interact experience, and authors begin to adopt such tools as webcams and NFTs in their writerly arsenal. In each unique edition of *STILL MOVING*, camera-based motion tracking (data confined to your local machine only) facilitates a play-full and meaning-full interface between the reader’s physical self and language on screen. Human forms and gestures shape machine expression, and vice versa, cybernetic serendipity inspires poetic association. Make a move, and be moved… Stand still, and instill meaning…

Palettes pair paper, charcoal, and pencil colorings – emblematic of the stationery/stationary – with neon and electric highlights that nod to computational restlessness. Preview images feature lines from the core poem, potent standalone phrases, or rare, gestural graphics and images, caught somewhere between language and illustration, expression and wordless apprehension. 


**FUNCTIONS**

*Click inside the interaction area if any of the function keys below are not working.*

*Space Bar* to toggle Play/Pause the interaction and animation

*'d'* Downloads the current image at the screen/browser resolution

*Up/Down arrows* increase/decrease camera sensitivity by 5
(for use in high and low light situations;
0-150, default is 90; higher numbers = more text)

*Top two keyboard rows (numbers 1 thru 0 and letters q thru p)* also birth semi-mapped text

*'c'* toggles Camera use (if present and on) between keyboard only or both

*'v'* Views/hides the Verse (your poetry / your iteration’s text)

*'f'* toggles Full screen (Live View only)

*'s'* downloads / Saves the entire AI poem to the hard drive

Still Moving

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

An on-chain experiment with interactive abstract art.

Dynamic Slices

Solar Transits is a procedural exploration of the origins of astrophotography. Each image in this series depicts a randomly generated astronomical event but viewed through the lens of mid-to-late 19th century image capture techniques. The collection features a variety of rare alignments of stars, planets and moons, and are rendered in the spirit of the daguerreotype.

In June of 2012, I took a trip to Minneapolis to speak at the Eyeo Festival. Venus was going to transit while I was there. I was curious. I had not seen a transit before. At 5:09 pm on June 5th, a nearly imperceptible black circle began its march across the sun. Were it not a predicted mathematical certainty, it is doubtful anyone would have noticed. For six minutes, the light from the sun was 0.087% dimmer.

It is a significant thing to see an object silhouetted against the sun. We are so accustom to seeing our perfect circle of pure light that we can't help but to celebrate the occasions where something blocks the view. I still feel a little more excitement when a slight shadow shoots across the landscape on a cloudless day, the source being an extremely rare transit of a commercial jet liner.

Exponentially more rare is the planetary transit. When Venus hangs on the horizon, glowing against the night sky, it is all too easy to think it another star. Only when it is viewed in silhouette can its position in our universe be fully appreciated: orbitally locked like us, and forever drawing it's path around the sun. That tiny black circle effected me in a big way. The scale of the cosmos shifted into perspective. That doesn’t happen often. I was incredibly moved. It was an experience I will never forget. This project is an homage to that strange once-in-a-lifetime event.

As it turns out, I was very lucky to have seen it at all. In the time since my birth in 1972, a Venus transit has only happened twice. The 1st time was in 2004 but I lived in a part of the world where it was not visible. The 2nd time was in 2012. Unless I live to be 145 years old, there won’t be a 3rd time. There are a couple silver linings: the Great American solar eclipse is on April 8 2024, and Mercury will transit in 2032.

The first 10 sales will have the option to purchase their output in the form of a framed daguerreotype.

Solar Transits

Memories of Qilin is inspired by traditional East Asian art. It channels the sense of movement and fluidity found in classical Chinese brushwork, while drawing from the colors, patterns, and forms of ukiyo-e woodblock prints. 

The series explores elements of folklore, evoking the mythological imagery of dragons, phoenixes, flowers, and mountains.  The title references a fabled chimerical beast found throughout East Asian mythology (while the qilin is its Chinese name, it is also known in Korea as the girin and Japan as the kirin) that represents prosperity and luck.

Viewers are invited to interpret elusive forms that verge on representation. As with the stories passed on through generations, each piece is imagined, organic, and ever-in-flux.

Art Blocks Curated

Still Moving #28

Nathaniel Stern and Sasha Stiles

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