“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

CENTURY is my homage to paintings and drawings from the twentieth century and the countless hours I’ve spent looking at them. The references span the origins of concrete and non-objective art to color-field painting and minimalism. The strongest direct reference is a series of pictures created by Ellsworth Kelly in the 1950s where he cut his paintings into pieces and reassembled them in different orders. CENTURY creates a distinct picture for each unique transaction hash, and you can “cut” and “reassemble” it in different ways by pressing ‘1’ on your keyboard. Press ‘2’ to put the slices in the original order. These are landscapes; they look best large and in motion running as live code.

CENTURY

My interpretation of Aerial View is a bird's Eye View over a city block with illuminated/twisted buildings and light trails. It uses an on-chain stored algorithm to represent the generative artwork based on a hash. Each Aerial comes with different distances, building elevations, rotations and colors. Welcome to my genesis project and the first step on my on-chain journey!

Aerial View

This edition of video artworks is the result of my research in video art from the 60s and 70s, especially early analog video synthesizers. These were heavy hardware machines capable of generating shapes and patterns from the ground up, with no external visual input. How could these machines generate such complexity by just manipulating electronic voltage? I decided to investigate this process. Although with modern technologies, Spectron shares the procedural logic with its analog ancestors.

Spectron

Lines are bent and shaded. There are no wrong turns. 

[Interaction in live view: press 1-7 or left/right arrow keys to see the stages of sketch construction: 1-grid, 2-divide, 3-tile, 4-bend, 5-shade, 6-color, 7-texture].

Art Blocks Curated

Cosmic Reef #546

Leo Villareal

About Cosmic Reef #546

Leo Villareal

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