Since the dawn of humanity, the Moon's phases have fascinated humans, influencing any number of activities on Earth including ocean tides, seasons, harvests, migrations, hunting, crime, sleeping, sex, and has inspired countless works of art. The first lunar calendar, dated to 32,000 BC was discovered, drawn on animal bone in caves. It's believed hunters during the last Ice Age used these portable lunar calendars to anticipate the behavior of different animals like Mammoths. Since then, our Moon has been imprinted across all our ancient and modern cultures, even becoming the system from which our Gregorian calendar evolved from. In the present day, investors in crypto have used the Moon symbolically. 

What does it mean for all of us in crypto to be so ahead of our time, all while using the same metaphor of the Moon for the various measures of success and individual goals we collectively share in crypto? And how will the future appreciate our ambitions and perseverance within the present moment's growing pains on our way to mass adoption? These are some of the questions that Gazers ask.

On the surface, Gazers function as a lunar calendar, algorithmically synching closely with Moon phases in the sky, joining the blockchain with one of humanity's longest running lineages in art. Gazers seeks to create a community of collectors celebrating the change of our perceptions that happen over time, our collective goals in crypto, and our love of color theory, astronomy, and generative art. 

What we are building in blockchain and NFTs will primarily be for the benefit of the future. As such, this artwork was designed to pace itself and speed up its frame rate over time, scaling into anticipated advancements in technology that will steadily allow the artwork to run at faster speeds while at larger scales. Each NFT starts out with the assignment of a date from the past 20 years. These dates correspond to events that happened under particular New Moons that shaped my path as an artist. This is the Origin Moon trait and how Gazers is in part a conceptual self portrait. 

Starting from the Origin Moon, each New Moon that arrives will speed up the potential animation of the NFT. For example, an NFT with a 20 year old Origin Moon might run at 20 frames per second, appearing as an animation. But one with an Origin Moon fresh from the sale will run closer to 1 frame per second, appearing more like a slowly evolving painting. Every moment, the frame rate of the artwork speeds up fractionally, indecipherable to our eyes. Stacking these advancements over time creates a generational evolution of experience. There is something undeniably beautiful about everything speeding up within our lifetimes, but the Moon, high above us, continues to carry on at the same meandering rate of 29.53 days in each cycle. Much like these blockchain technologies and NFT markets, this artwork was designed to be collected by the present, but appreciated in a greater sense than we can even imagine by the future. 

I created Gazers to be like a living artwork, to be lived with, and to not only have the artwork evolve over time but also the appreciation and experience of viewers. As I coded the work, I imagined it hanging on the wall of collectors, a fixture in their physical space. Collectors might spend a moment admiring their work, walk away for a couple hours, and then come back to be delighted, noticing the most subtle of shifts. Each layer of the work consists of pattern designs. With the passage of time, the thickness of the layered lines pulse and the direction a design moves will advance or rotate, changing our perception of color in the most subtle and optical of ways. Each day at midnight, each layer receives a new set of rules in terms of how to rise or shine over the next 24 hours. The result is color that rises and sets, echoing the change of light in our sky.

My use of color has consistently been what I've been best known for across my 20 year artistic career. In all my work until now, I've made all the color and design choices as I've painted as a human in the moment. But in Gazers, I designed a complex system around color theory as I understand it, joining my talent for coding with my vision for color. 

Many NFT collectors of my work might be familiar with the additional experiences some of their NFTs unlock at my website. Rather than use a Gazers NFT to unlock a website, I decided this time to create rendering modes that unlock within the code over time. These additional modes of viewing are intended to help a collector better understand the architecture of their artwork's design and also benefit from greater enjoyment of it. The addition of these experiences should present an additional benefit to HODLing for some. 

Every 29 and a half days, we reach a Moon phase called the New Moon. This is when the dark side of the Moon is fully visible and no sunlight is reflected from the lunar surface back to Earth. In Gazers, each New Moon phase creates a New Moon design. In this artwork, the hash seed creates color theory and design rules. These rules are deterministic and dictate all the moons that will generatively be created into infinity. Time reveals our moons. Pairing time with deterministic generative code creates the ephemeral moment. We can all agree that looking at the Moon in the sky never seems to be the exact same experience twice, nor the exact same from different locations. I wanted to echo this nature in Gazers and emphasize the urgency and rarity of our present moment and how an artwork can capture this. 

As individuals, we all have our own version of the Moon and what reaching it means. Just as our goals change over time, often subtly, sometimes dramatically, so will our moons, creating a visual representation that might coincide with what's changing inside of us. In crypto, we are all ahead of our time. We are all gazers. And we are all waiting for our next Moon.

Gazers

Genesis: Generative System. A block hash string is interpreted into a visual composition using a set of algorithmic rules. Compositions may contain grids, gradients, lines, shapes, and colors that harmonize with each other. Each mint is one of a kind and designed to stand-alone. Limited Edition.

Genesis

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

**Cargo** is a series of abstract paintings created with animated pixels that are constantly moving without ever repeating. It is painting new patterns on the fly in between macro and micro compositions with a duality of different rhythms and continuous synchronicity. The focus is alternately drawn to detail, then distracted by movement elsewhere and caught up in the overall picture. This rhythm turns the visual complexity into an active experience.

ASDF: “My work should offer individual ways of interpretation, or even allow one to find some self in it. It wants to inspire some thoughts about dynamics and systemics and also just mesmerize the audience, capture them in a little fantasy, or just for a brief moment in a state of satisfaction.”

Cargo is the latest work in Kim Asendorf’s ongoing work series of pixel pattern animations. Starting with [monogrid](https://monogrid.xyz) in 2021, and [Sabotage](https://sabotage.kim) in 2022, both highly conceptual series, therefore visually very raw and unimaginable. Asendorf discovered various interesting details in these works, which eventually became fundamental in his artistic expression.

Cargo is a real time WebGL software written in JavaScript and GLSL. At its core is a flip-flop render buffer, also known as feedback buffer. That means the animation is alternately rendered in two different frame buffers. This technique allows the usage of the previous frame of the animation as an asset in the current rendering, which allows for a series of reactive animation strategies.

An initial image with variable structures and patterns is rendered and subsequently loaded into the frame buffer. A fragment shader is used to apply a set of animation algorithms that make the pixel move and a set of reset algorithms that constantly try to recreate the initial image. The final animation happens in selected containers and is always a combination of two algorithms, one from each set. By regularly animating and partially resetting the pixels, a wide range of movement patterns appear.

Cargo is a responsive and pixel exact artwork and it will fill the screen on any display size, thus changing the total amount of used pixels accordingly. This results in the fact that the detail level in the artwork is changing depending on the dimensions. The overall structure is consistently stretching the x and y axis independently. Single containers scale along the dimensions and offer more pixels to render the patterns at a larger representation compared to a smaller representation. This behavior leads to a brilliance, perfect pixels, a crisp rendering with nothing like compression artifacts.

This software includes the [simplex noise](https://github.com/jwagner/simplex-noise.js) JavaScript implementation by Jonas Wagner and the [cellular noise](https://github.com/stegu/webgl-noise) GLSL code by Stefan Gustavson.

Cargo

Our studio, Aranda\Lasch, was formed in the early 2000s to explore algorithmic systems and generative processes as a means to understand the world around us and make things within it. Whether encapsulated in physical or computational techniques, these processes act with their own degree of autonomy from our own biases and as a result, open up new ideas and sensibilities while dismantling traditional notions of authorship. They allow one to code the possibility of discovery and surprise into the creative process in a manner that can be widely shared and because of this transmissibility, algorithms frustrate the idea of a single author, inviting speculation on the shared nature of creativity. For this reason we have always understood our work to be a collaboration between each other, those who share with us and those who inspire us. 

Over the years, the studio has indulged in a number of obsessions. One is the conviction that history is a generative source with which to constantly entangle. Whether it is through stories, characters, techniques, or events, history acts as a medium active with properties that constantly reshape and transform our concept of the present. We look back to move forward, like hitching a ride. It is here that we encounter Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) and his masterpiece Melancholia I (1514) to inspire a deep dive into the process of engraving as a representational technique reinterpreted through the contemporary medium of code. By scratching metal away from a plate, an inversion of conventional drawing, engraving allowed a work of art to be reproduced and disseminated widely. In addition to the piece’s masterful delineation, its allegory resonates with us as well. In Dürer’s time melancholy was associated with insanity but also with creativity. In the engraving, the winged personification of melancholy -- the work is widely regarded to be a self-portrait of the artist -- is surrounded by the tools and elements of geometry. For Dürer, as for a handful of others who came before and after, who test the porous borders between art, science and religion, geometry is a vehicle for imagination, a shadow of the divine and a portal to the infinite. 

This work Primitives is a kindred meditation on infinity through an exploration of a novel geometric structure using algorithm and code, the tools of today's geometers and mystics, made visible through the anachronism of the engravers trade translated into pure 1’s and 0’s. Primitives grows through a single shape that can repeat and scale in specific ways that are never random, but rather tightly governed by geometric logics. It is about drawing infinity through a radical modularity; ordered but aperiodic. Unlike a regular crystal, whose molecular pattern is periodic (or repetitive in all directions), the distinctive quality of this quasicrystal is that its structural pattern never repeats the same way twice. Endless and uneven in aggregate, Primitive clusters can be described by the precise arrangement of a single modular part. As these small units aggregate together they form larger figures that themselves combine into ever larger movements, always a little bit different from any other. In this sense, quasicrystalline patterns have an infinite capacity to create and carry information. 

We are here because this is a medium for sharing in perpetuity. In the last couple of years, on the cusp of our third decade of practice, we have watched with awe and delight a renaissance in generative work as it's adopted by an entirely new generation around blockchain technologies. This inspired us to enter this new space with our own enduring questions of form and geometry, modularity and variability, historical continuity, and the thirst for endlessness. Primitives is what we selected as our primer into generative art on-chain because both the work and the medium grapple with these questions. 

Some Notes:
On the screen, Primitives is represented as a two-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional figure. Each invocation comes with a sequence of projections, or rotations, around this object. As Primitives spins, there are moments when its blocks snap into alignment with other blocks  revealing its underlying lattice and crystalline nature. Each projection can be saved as a high resolution image for printing. Primitives can also be saved in three dimensions as an .obj file for a variety of uses including the creation of a physical object through 3-d printing or fabrication. Below is a list of interface instructions:

'left' + 'right' arrow keys to rotate 
'up' + 'down' arrow keys to zoom in 
'g' regrows geometry 
'i' saves image 
'o' saves .obj

Thank you,
Aranda\Lasch
2022

Art Blocks Curated

Primitives #138

Aranda\Lasch

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