“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

The phenomena of the spiral is located throughout the natural world, found in everything from nautili and galaxies, to fractals and sacred geometries. Much like the gravitational pull of patterns in the universe, Jen Stark's series of generative vortexes pays homage to the intricate systems present in our daily lives. 

Drawing upon the aesthetic practice of her signature paper sculptures, Stark's hand-cut techniques are translated to adapt and evolve within the digital realm through code, brought to life through harmonic sine waves.

Click and drag to interact with these sculptural tunnels.



Vortex

“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

WaVyScApE
wave flow vibrate oscillate swing waft drift float undulate surge meander...

is it landscape?

after years of living in cities, on a trip through the alps, i’ve been immersed in a beautiful landscape. i was shocked by this vastness, depth, rhythmic beauty...
soft rolling hills that gently swing into each other, to the depths of overlying rugged ridges, followed by billowing cloud banks, this kind of loving frequency!
was it then when the theme “landscape” became a constant companion of my work? maybe.

nevertheless, it's not my ambition to create landscape illustrations. rather, through the joy of playing with code, many different abstract structures led me to this sort of linear turbulence, which can sometimes leave a pleasant impression of “familiarity”. however, an openness that stimulates the imagination has always been important to me.

softly morphing blob shapes traveling horizontally and leaving their trails behind. creating virtual three-dimensional forms, layered over each other, building up staggered fields out of random color sequences of partly pre-defined color arrays. mixed and overlaid with white and greyscale palettes.
when some remaining colorful structures shine through, sometimes, this reminds me of thawing snow in spring, when yellow and green grasses and early bloomers, or lost toys or trash suddenly appear.
sometimes it's the case that when the picture is built up randomly, by chance, a beautiful colorful structure is suddenly overlaid with gray again, an appropriate allegory to the concealing snow or wrapped gifts, or similar things, and for whom i consider the secret to remain hidden.

...

computer-based aesthetics have always had a strong fascination for me.
in the early 90s, during my 2 year residency in new york i used to go into clubs and bars around the East village.  once entered a small place with electronic music playing and animations beamed onto the wall. i couldn’t stop staring at these into-each-other-morphing structures. fractals! this was completely new to me, and i so was stunned!  …waited till the end and talked to the couple who made it. they told me something about the apple-II computer and some software, but i barely understood anything.

it was a pretty cold winter and i lived in williamsburg, so i went over the bridge and had this amazing starry city night around and inside me. i must have mumbled something like: i have to go for it, have to find out, have to start anew again…
the next days, i talked to my girlfriend, and she encouraged me to call around at computer departments. maybe someone would have a clue.

the first call i made was the institute of technology: “hold on, i’ll give you the art department,” and then there was this guy, “yeah, fractals! so you studied art in germany and want to learn something about computer graphics and fractals? come by next monday."
i showed him my catalogs from galerie-gebr-lehmann.de, “this is bauhaus!, i love bauhaus!”. he offered me an internship.

so i started working on an IBM workstation, somewhere in midtown, somewhere between the 30th and 40 floor, in front of 2 large workstations, one wall side completely glassed in, in the middle of all these thousands of block buildings. i stood extremely next to me; “where are you!?, what are you doing here!?” it exceeded my wildest dreams.


...

over the years, working with code has not only become a practical technique, but also a factor that determines the aesthetics itself. or it was even the main reason, when i started with code, using a formal language and principle that's based on algorithmic functions, representing mathematical processes and simulations. which leave behind a kind of the machine's own characteristic design language, representing our culture in its essentials. to me it also offers sort of a meta-level of looking at/into nature.

i'd call myself a code minimalist
fascinated by bauhaus, constructivism and minimalism, i developed many if not most of my processing apps exclusively with basic shapes like circles, squares and lines. sometimes i caught myself doing e.g. programming a shadow only to take it home again after all, since it seemed to be tipping over stylistically somehow.
such as. also in the "flower code" work series, where i developed the blossoms with detailed petal shapes, only to turn everything back again to only work with circles and lines, because i was horrified to realize that it immediately became naturalistic or even kinda cheesy, not what i wanted... 

holger lippmann, berlin nov. 2022
bauhaus small writing

WaVyScApE

# Neural Sediments

## “Before objectivity, there was truth to nature; after the advent of objectivity came trained judgment”

Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison

Improving my decision-making process is how I would sum up my lifelong quest. Understanding yourself and the unlimited variables and actors surrounding us daily requires a radical yet utopian pursuit of objectivity.

A prerequisite to an objective observation is identifying and eliminating cognitive and observational biases.

My obsession with objectivity started as a sociology student; while studying epistemology of science and pondering the works of Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Popper.

This quest never left me and has been a cornerstone of my artistic practice for 25 years.

“The map is not the territory” is a mainstream expression highlighting a potentially oversimplified version of reality. In this series called Neural Sediments, inspired by the works of Alberto Burri, František Kupka, and Swiss topography, I highlight the complexity of our brains and some of their biases.

Looking at one Neural Sediment will deliver you a first broad impression; however, looking at it for a longer time will yield a never-ending and much more nuanced and delicate observation. Like Alberto Burri’s Cracks series, some things not obvious to the eye become real over time. Each Neural Sediment opens itself to the viewer in a unique way. The more you look at it, the more you can decipher it. 

Like Swiss alpine glacier sediments, this material appears only after a certain amount of time and a decent amount of gravity. Burri used a special technique to envision time with cracked canvas; František Kupka, in his Katedrála painting, opens the fourth dimension by looking at the vertical lines of the glass window.

In the Neural Sediments series, I used both as an inspiration to push the viewer’s eye to search for more details and a deeper perspective.

Choosing color palettes for a long-form generative art collection is as demanding as solving technical algorithmic challenges. 

The color palettes I create result from a process I've built into my practice over time. Each palette comes from my own algorithmic selection trained on classical masterpieces.

After this first selection, each set of colors used in a Neural Sediment is re-arranged to be linked with endangered ecosystems such as dark blue waters, peach salmons, rare botanic species, or volcanos.

Like Josef Albers, who highlighted the instability and deceptiveness of colors, my color sets are here to reinforce the question of objectivity in the art world and life in general.

Looking at its overall structure, each Neural Sediment evokes a brutalist architecture. 

Prioritizing function over form, each Neural Sediment aims to be used as a tool to rediscover oneself, free from the cognitive constraints we put on ourselves and the world around us.

PS: From a technical point of view, Neural Sediments require some heavy calculations, considering the very large number of intersections to compute prior to rendering.

PPS: Pressing the letter “i” on your keyboard will generate a high resolution export for a large scale and print friendly format.

Art Blocks Curated

Cosmic Reef #394

Leo Villareal

More in Art Blocks Curated

Vortex

Jen Stark

Apparitions

Aaron Penne

WaVyScApE

Holger Lippmann

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