“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.


Cosmic Reef

Anticyclones are a weather phenomena.
They pierce through darkness to instill peace and calm. Their planetary scale reminds us of how little we are and how powerful they can be.

High pressure, rotation, air flow… The "Anticyclone" series is an artistic exploration and interpretation of those concepts.

The rendering borrows its aesthetics from traditional and organic media like paper and crayons, to lend an analog/archival look.

"Can a computer draw like a human?"
The question is asked and challenged once more through "Anticyclone".

[Press the left/right keys to explore the different steps building the final image. Bottom/top for the first/last step. Can be intense for your machine]

Anticyclone

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

An exploration in generating forms in 3-dimensional space. This exclusive set of sculptures has been carved from a sea of infinite possibilities, much like a sculptor creates a singular reality from the potential in a block of stone. The shapes are illuminated by a variety of complex virtual lighting environments and yet the piece retains algorithmic minimalism with the code reduced to its pure essence -- 6370 bytes. Skulptuurs render in real time. In live view, the image keeps improving in quality. Keys 0-7 change speed: 0=Stop, 5=Default, 7=Fastest. Careful, requires a powerful machine. Requires a WebGL2-enabled browser.

Skulptuur

"Edifice" is a series of 976 massive, deteriorating structures built on strange terrain. It is an exploration of buildings being conceptualized, constructed, and eroded away under a wide variety of conditions. Edifice's outputs run the gamut between minimal and maximal, with some showing few large, static blocks of color, and others many small, highly textured and warped shapes. Each image is progressively constructed in front of the viewer's eyes. It is a system full of surprises that I'm excited to share with the world.

Art Blocks Curated

Cosmic Reef #142

Leo Villareal

About Cosmic Reef #142

Leo Villareal

143 of 1024

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