Sudfah (Arabic for "happy accident") is a generative collection celebrating the beauty that can emerge from chaos, mistakes, and accidents.

A single calligraphic line intends to tell one story (sometimes wandering and confused in its own right, but always meandering from one side to the other).

Digital liquid is spilled upon it and takes the ink in directions that are unexpected, uncontrolled, and tell a much more interesting story than the one the line intended.... and often more beautiful.

Sudfah

Archetype explores the use of repetition as a counterweight to unruly, random structures. As each single component look chaotic alone, the repetition brings along a sense of intentionality, ultimately resulting in a complex, yet satisfying expression.

Archetype

The field is a work inspired by the current trend in image synthesis made possible by machine learning technology. The latent spaces (the algorithmic structures that make AI image synthesis possible) can be seen as a part of our human collective unconsciousness; a hyper dimensional field of unlimited outcomes, inspired by our human symbols and language.

Exploring this new type of space, it sparked the idea of exploring the algorithmic essence of my own artworks. What would the structure behind my creative processes look like? What if I could visualize the algorithmic structures of my own mind that produced my artworks in the past?

These questions led me to The Field, a multidimensional machine hiding in my subconscious.

# THE GENERATOR
The first step to reach The Field, was to capture the algorithmic structure behind all my artworks. By compressing several hundred artworks from HyperHash, EnergySculpture, UltraWave & HashCrash into a 64X64 matrix, a noise image has been created. This was done by adding up all these works together.

This noise image I call The Generator was the starting point to explore possibilities for the creation of a new work. This 64x64 matrix filled with noise data was embedded in the source of the piece and functions as the core of The Field algorithm.

# THE FIELD
The Generator is being transformed into a multidimensional field of colors and motion, called The Field. The motions of the field relate to natural processes of creation and destruction. The field is like a fluid, solid and gas-like structure at the same time. It goes from a noisy formless state to a solid material state and back.

The field is created in a few steps. First a 2d noise pattern is being created from The Generator. This 2d pattern is made by picking random points from the 64x64 matrix. This is the fundamental background of the Field.

The second step is to use this pattern to set the field in motion. By using the color data per pixel, movement is being initiated. The colors are in that sense multifunctional, on one hand it visualizes random colors extracted from The Generator on the other hand the colors are used to set the field in motion and showing the interrelationship between the colors in an extra dimension: time. This creates the 3D effects, but also creates the effect of lighting bouncing in the field.


# REGRESSION, DESTRUCTION & CREATION
The creation of the field felt for me like a form of regression. Reviewing the concepts of my previous work, thinking about what overlapped in terms of topics conceptually and design wise drew me back in time.

The main topic of this work represents is the cyclical nature of creation and destruction. By revisiting my old works and literally destroying them, this new work was created. In this way the work reflects on the causal relation between creation and destruction (what's created will someday be destroyed, something has to be created to be destroyed). A  universal essence of our causal reality behind all that is, a balance between forces, from light to dark, from warm to cold, from dry to wet, from finite to infinite.

This theme of creation and destruction is visible quite literally in The Field. Every mint of The field has a unique position in the field with color filtering added on top. The locations in the field are composed of  either creational vortices (expanding spirals) and destructional vortices(contracting spirals), a combination of the two in a balanced state (order) or a combination of the two in an unbalanced state (chaos). 

The positions and coloring are a combination of hand-picked settings by me and totally random settings generated by the hash input from the token.


# Extra
- By pressing the buttons a,s,w,d you can move through the field.
- By pressing L you can activate LavaMode.
- By scrolling you can zoom in and out.

**** BEST VIEWED IN FULLSCREEN LIVE MODE ON DECENT GPU. ****

The Field

Our lives are scattered across several time scales, and the meaning of every event that takes place depends on the time scale that we choose to define & observe them from. Yet we fail to fully comprehend this in our daily errands. Entretiempos is an artwork that reflects on this, based on an aesthetic that pays a tribute to the works of Sonia Delaunay, František Kupka and other painters from their era, recreated by the usage of intersecting rings that create a varied and rich space.

The work plays with the time scales by painting dynamically and letting the viewer pause the work, restart, set it to loop indefinitely, painting and vanishing in an endless cycle. And it can be set to be done at varying speeds, to appreciate what happens in between the time scales ("entre tiempos", in Spanish).

Also, there is a broader theme that I find of interest to explore from every work that I engage with. It has to do with the concept of what I call total cognitive space, or the total range of possibilities that can be expressed / achieved with a given scenario and set of conditions. In this case, I was interested in expanding my rendition of the works of Delaunay into a broader space. How does this approach scale with varying parameter ranges? Is the painting still interesting? Can it express something new? Connected to this, I am also interested in thinking about what emotions would mean for an artificial sentient being. We talk about artificial intelligence, but leave aside artificial emotions all too often. While artificial intelligences are indeed interesting, we fail to recognize the paramount importance of emotions in human behaviour. To this end, this work explores also the result of painting with machine-like precision vs. performing the artwork with a range of possible imprecisions. The perfection of the machine vs. the imperfection of the human, does it trigger different emotions in us humans? What will the reaction of a machine be whenever they develop a taste?

This work exposes features that deal with its time and space scales, background colour, background elements, the palettes used, certain colour accents that may happen (golden accents, b&w tones), the style used to draw the geometric shapes (fill, lines, outline), the degree of paint precision and other features that influence the final result. The user may download a PNG file at any arbitrary resolution at any step of the paint process using the commands provided for that. A brief list of commands is as follows. Please note that you need to click on the artwork first to make sure it will receive the typed commands:

p to pause/resume the work
r followed by y to enter the looping mode
d followed by +/- or any number from 1 to 9 to increase resolution
s followed by c to save current image
s+f to automatically save the final image when the system finishes painting
s+m to restart and save a sequence of images of the process
r+0 (zero) to reset all parameters and resolutions and restart
k at any time to define keyframes, then r+0 to restart the work and it will automatically pause at defined steps, or s+i and the work will restart and automatically save an image at every keyframe defined with k. Reload browser to reset.

There is an Easter egg hidden in every work.

For the full project description, inspiration and rationale, as well as the full list of features and controls plus a hint at the Easter Egg, please visit the project homepage at https://www.iillucid.com/entretiempos

entretiempos

The universe in which we exist is an ever changing ebb and flow of energies that coalesce into observable patterns of repetition and harmony. By practicing mindfulness one can observe their part in this universal flux and achieve a powerful sense of connection to the whole.

Click / Touch to begin the audio-visual experience.

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