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

These cute companions live 100% on-chain where their bytes are cleverly stored in a scalable vector format. Built with quality components and complex algorithms, each Algobot is issued with a unique serial number and a NIFTY license which permits them to help out on any commercial projects where you might require their assistance.

Algobots

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

**Human Unreadable (Privacy Collection - Lot 03)**

**Human Unreadable** is a three-act, embodied generative artwork hiding the human body in plain sight (on-chain). Bringing together choreography, code, blockchain, generative art, and cryptography, the work culminates in a live performance. Each output is driven by the motion data of its underlying unique, on-chain choreographic sequence. The sequences behind the first 100 minted works (mint #2 to #101) will be performed during the IRL premiere. The hosting art institution will be announced in 2023. 

A journey of slowly recovering the human unfolds as such: 1) reveal on Art Blocks, 2) uncover the choreographic score, and 3) final performance. After the reveal, the human is still unreadable, visible only through the results of movement on glass, obfuscated by code, rendered as a still image. In the next phase of the work, collectors get a glimpse at their underlying choreography by unlocking the secondary token—an on-chain choreographic score. In the final phase, the performance, life is breathed into the human movement that has been lying dormant inside the pieces. **Human Unreadable** brings flesh and viscerality into code and "vulnerability as a feature" into long-form generative art. What you don’t immediately see in the visual artwork outputs is the invisible potentiality of performance, inscripted on-chain and able to be brought to life by a dancer at any moment. 

 **Human Unreadable** intentionally punctures the safety of modernist design and the idea of a universal voice, pushing the limits of human expression within rigid technical systems. With a focus on the body, the collection brings risk, chaos, confusion, and vulnerability to the reveal, everything that function-focused design systems normally prevent. Each piece is an invitation, a transparent layer through which the messy human experience can come into focus through the three phases of the work. This work is a continuation of the pivot away from modernism, clean lines, and the quietly gendered values therein, in favor of a more embodied and sensual approach to human-machine collaboration pioneered by early women in digital art. **Human Unreadable**'s 6 distinct looks derive from the core materiality of Operator’s Privacy Collection: glass, light, x-ray and the human body. The transparent and illuminating nature of these materials reveal what is below the surface.

What are you revealing when you reveal?

**Human Unreadable** has roots in various histories such as computational choreography (Analivia Cordeiro, Jeanne Beaman), Merce Cunningham's Chance Dance, and the Experiments in Art and Technology movement. With Ti’s extensive background as an HCI technologist and multimedia artist and Catherine’s background as a choreographer and performance artist, Operator architected a bespoke team, 25+ individuals ranging from specialized engineers to dancers, who embarked on a 9 month process to realize the work. Operator's on-chain generative choreography method is the technical backbone of **Human Unreadable**—the process and open source tooling for which will be made available via white paper in 2023.  


***Additional Information***

**First Minter Benefits** 
The first 100 minted pieces (mint #2 to #101) from the collection will be performed in the IRL premiere in an art institution. 
-Mint #2 to #101 will be counted as the first 100 mints. Mint #0 and #1 are artist mints held by Operator.
-Hosting art institution will be announced in 2023. 
-Additionally, Privacy Key 00 holders will have one of their collected Human Unreadable sequences performed.

**Choreographic Score (secondary token)** 
-The secondary token will be released at the end of June 2023.
-The secondary token is a choreographic score that represents the unique choreography that generated the output minted on Art Blocks. For this reason, the Art Blocks token and the secondary token are bound together and cannot be transferred separately.
-The underlying choreographic score visible through the secondary token can be performed by a choreographer or dancer at the collector's discretion.

**GPU Intensive Rendering / Live Preview** 
This piece involves GPU intensive composition and rendering of programmatically drawn body parts, generative glass objects, x-ray shaders as well as motion paths. As a result the ‘live preview’ on your laptop or phone may look less detailed than the PNG on Art Blocks which is rendered by a high powered computer. Not to worry!

**Official Token-gated Prints** 
Human Unreadable collectors will be able to purchase Operator official, signed, token-gated prints (on hand-selected materials) of their collected piece(s).

Human Unreadable

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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Gazers #565

Matt Kane

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