Since the dawn of humanity, the Moon's phases have fascinated humans, influencing any number of activities on Earth including ocean tides, seasons, harvests, migrations, hunting, crime, sleeping, sex, and has inspired countless works of art. The first lunar calendar, dated to 32,000 BC was discovered, drawn on animal bone in caves. It's believed hunters during the last Ice Age used these portable lunar calendars to anticipate the behavior of different animals like Mammoths. Since then, our Moon has been imprinted across all our ancient and modern cultures, even becoming the system from which our Gregorian calendar evolved from. In the present day, investors in crypto have used the Moon symbolically. 

What does it mean for all of us in crypto to be so ahead of our time, all while using the same metaphor of the Moon for the various measures of success and individual goals we collectively share in crypto? And how will the future appreciate our ambitions and perseverance within the present moment's growing pains on our way to mass adoption? These are some of the questions that Gazers ask.

On the surface, Gazers function as a lunar calendar, algorithmically synching closely with Moon phases in the sky, joining the blockchain with one of humanity's longest running lineages in art. Gazers seeks to create a community of collectors celebrating the change of our perceptions that happen over time, our collective goals in crypto, and our love of color theory, astronomy, and generative art. 

What we are building in blockchain and NFTs will primarily be for the benefit of the future. As such, this artwork was designed to pace itself and speed up its frame rate over time, scaling into anticipated advancements in technology that will steadily allow the artwork to run at faster speeds while at larger scales. Each NFT starts out with the assignment of a date from the past 20 years. These dates correspond to events that happened under particular New Moons that shaped my path as an artist. This is the Origin Moon trait and how Gazers is in part a conceptual self portrait. 

Starting from the Origin Moon, each New Moon that arrives will speed up the potential animation of the NFT. For example, an NFT with a 20 year old Origin Moon might run at 20 frames per second, appearing as an animation. But one with an Origin Moon fresh from the sale will run closer to 1 frame per second, appearing more like a slowly evolving painting. Every moment, the frame rate of the artwork speeds up fractionally, indecipherable to our eyes. Stacking these advancements over time creates a generational evolution of experience. There is something undeniably beautiful about everything speeding up within our lifetimes, but the Moon, high above us, continues to carry on at the same meandering rate of 29.53 days in each cycle. Much like these blockchain technologies and NFT markets, this artwork was designed to be collected by the present, but appreciated in a greater sense than we can even imagine by the future. 

I created Gazers to be like a living artwork, to be lived with, and to not only have the artwork evolve over time but also the appreciation and experience of viewers. As I coded the work, I imagined it hanging on the wall of collectors, a fixture in their physical space. Collectors might spend a moment admiring their work, walk away for a couple hours, and then come back to be delighted, noticing the most subtle of shifts. Each layer of the work consists of pattern designs. With the passage of time, the thickness of the layered lines pulse and the direction a design moves will advance or rotate, changing our perception of color in the most subtle and optical of ways. Each day at midnight, each layer receives a new set of rules in terms of how to rise or shine over the next 24 hours. The result is color that rises and sets, echoing the change of light in our sky.

My use of color has consistently been what I've been best known for across my 20 year artistic career. In all my work until now, I've made all the color and design choices as I've painted as a human in the moment. But in Gazers, I designed a complex system around color theory as I understand it, joining my talent for coding with my vision for color. 

Many NFT collectors of my work might be familiar with the additional experiences some of their NFTs unlock at my website. Rather than use a Gazers NFT to unlock a website, I decided this time to create rendering modes that unlock within the code over time. These additional modes of viewing are intended to help a collector better understand the architecture of their artwork's design and also benefit from greater enjoyment of it. The addition of these experiences should present an additional benefit to HODLing for some. 

Every 29 and a half days, we reach a Moon phase called the New Moon. This is when the dark side of the Moon is fully visible and no sunlight is reflected from the lunar surface back to Earth. In Gazers, each New Moon phase creates a New Moon design. In this artwork, the hash seed creates color theory and design rules. These rules are deterministic and dictate all the moons that will generatively be created into infinity. Time reveals our moons. Pairing time with deterministic generative code creates the ephemeral moment. We can all agree that looking at the Moon in the sky never seems to be the exact same experience twice, nor the exact same from different locations. I wanted to echo this nature in Gazers and emphasize the urgency and rarity of our present moment and how an artwork can capture this. 

As individuals, we all have our own version of the Moon and what reaching it means. Just as our goals change over time, often subtly, sometimes dramatically, so will our moons, creating a visual representation that might coincide with what's changing inside of us. In crypto, we are all ahead of our time. We are all gazers. And we are all waiting for our next Moon.

Gazers

Click to activate sound 🔈 The work is responsive, it will adapt to any screen size 🌹

👉 Legowelt: *For Polychrome Music I designed a generative music system that plays an infinite composition on 3 different audio channels, each with their own synthesizer. These randomly generate simple musical timbres inspired by early computer sound chips. 🌴 The music itself is generated by randomly selecting 3 patterns out of a pool of 180. These patterns, which are little 8-bar music pieces, were written in the same C# Dorian scale so they always fit together. This is a pleasant sounding minor and colorful scale that I believe fits the general vibe of Rafaël’s work. 🌲 Composition wise, channel 1 plays the bassline and channels 2 and 3 the melody, countermelody, arpeggios and harmonies. 🌳 The system changes the patterns each time they are played, reversing, speeding up or slowing down the pattern or changing the synthesizer channel they are played on. In essence the system infinitely randomly remixes the source melodies to create ever new surprising pieces that harmonize with the colorful compositions.* 👈

Polychrome Music

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

Abstract typographic elements slide together to create new characters. In some compositions, a single character is featured. In others, characters string together to form words and sentences, which the algorithm shapes into often-familiar layouts.

The type designer Gerard Unger said “it is almost impossible to look and read at the same time”. Asemica invites you to look without the burden of legibility.

Created by Emily Edelman, Dima Ofman, and Andrew Badr. Command-S to download a vector file. Live token best viewed in Chrome.

Asemica

The Caretaker awakes. After a millennia of slumber it must again usher its minions into the expanse. It must sustain. It must replenish. So it guides its horde out to the stars, visiting countless worlds to restart the cycle. For an eternity the cycle has repeated, minding and tending this garden of worlds. Now it is time for the garden to give back. This event has come to be known as *The Harvest*.

*The Harvest* depicts worlds that exist in eternal symbiosis with the Caretaker. We witness the spectacle of monumental chromatic beams as they impact the surface of these beautiful, alien bodies. The Caretaker assigns different constellations to each planet, giving rise to unique combinations of beams as they extract the much needed nectar. This project has been inspired by a life-long fascination for science fiction and space exploration. Aiming to capture a moment of awe, the beams reach to their origin, emulating a cathedral-like atmosphere in the vein of Hugh Ferriss, while borrowing inspiration from Micheal Whelan’s landscapes. All in the effort of capturing a sense of how small we are in relation to the cosmos.

*The Harvest* is built on p5js, and takes advantage of its 3d api. With the orthogonal view enabled, the algorithm uses volumetric rectangular units to create the stylised illusion of alien landscapes. Each beam has a position, color, reach and yield that is calculated and procedurally drawn over time.

Art Blocks Curated

Gazers #164

Matt Kane

More in Art Blocks Curated

Polychrome Music

Rafaël Rozendaal & Danny Wolfers (Legowelt)

montreal friend scale

amon tobin

Asemica

Emily Edelman - Dima Ofman - Andrew Badr

The Harvest

Per Kristian Stoveland

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