Ancient Courses is a generative experience that explores the aesthetics of meandering rivers and the settlements that form on their banks. The design is graphic and cartographic with bold color palettes rendered against map iconography and line sensibility. From the river banks, roads stretch across the landscape: sometimes a single access road, other times sprawling towns. The river meandering is simulated via a custom algorithm which closely models the real world process.

Press 'r' to reset the simulation.
Press 's' to save an image to disk.
Press 'h' to re-run the simulation at print res. This is significantly slower than the default screen res version. The progress bar at the bottom of the screen shows how long before the print-res image is automatically saved to disk.

A limited number of Ancient Courses mints will come with a Treasure Map feature. The owner can request a physical print (max one print per treasure map).

Best viewed on Chrome, Firefox, or Safari.

Ancient Courses of Fictional Rivers

Every Singularity is unique. Each form’s properties; Symmetry, Chaos, Mass, Force and Turbulence are driven by data extracted from the transaction hash.

Singularity

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

Is code art? Autology is a study of not only how we interpret art, but also how art can interpret itself. Each piece has its source code embedded imperceptibly within the image itself. Hence the source code is literally part of the artwork. With a little sleuthing, one can derive the source code from the image and vice versa in infinite recursion. Click 's' to save the image and then visit https://steganon.com/autology.html to decode it. Or if you are feeling technologically adventurous, try to develop your own tool to do the same.

Autology

“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.


Art Blocks Curated

Cosmic Reef #647

Leo Villareal

About Cosmic Reef #647

Leo Villareal

648 of 1024

-

View on marketplaces

Additional details

More in Art Blocks Curated

Ancient Courses of Fictional Rivers

Robert Hodgin

Singularity

Hideki Tsukamoto

montreal friend scale

amon tobin

Autology

steganon

Art

Company

Learn