This piece began as a formal study in composition using simple layered shapes, but when I started experimenting with animation it took on a life of its own. The final work visualises in form, colour, and motion the tension between social conformity and self-expression. At times all of us are required to keep ourselves under control, so that we can live and work together without having to negotiate a thousand tiny idiosyncrasies. Other times we are free to act as wild as we like, but even within this freedom we often find ourselves expressing different kinds of alignment and harmonisation. Negotiating our lives involves finding a balance between these forces: conformity and harmony on one hand, and expression and freedom on the other. As long as we share space with others, we must always think about how our actions fit in with those of the people around us.

LIA has been making [generative software art since 1995](https://www.liaworks.com), and her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. This piece extends her signature process of overlapping simple shapes in complex ways, applying a new quality of motion to paint and re-paint the composition, forming hypnotic, shifting patterns of movement and stillness.

*Instructions*
Animation runs automatically - click/tap to pause and unpause

WARNING:
This art work may potentially trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy. Viewer discretion is advised.

Being Yourself While Fitting In

Pointila explores what happens when you combine the meticulous dots reminiscent of Pointillistic painting techniques with the channelled randomness of generative art, whilst also examining how subtle changes in parameters can paint similar forms in different styles.

Pointila is designed for display and interaction. Clicking on a live mint will trigger an animation loop between the primary and secondary palettes, click again to pause. Press 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 on your keyboard to change glitch state. Press S to download a high resolution print.

Pointillism emerged from a collision of art and science in late 19th century French painting. Developed by Georges Seurat, his appeal to science, rigour and order built upon the broken brushstrokes of the Impressionists, as painting began to reckon with the emergence of the new technology of photography. Unbeknownst to Seurat, this response to one technology would foreshadow another – that of digital displays and pixels.

Rigour and order was manifest in the distinct dots of colour that give Pointillism its name. From a distance, the eye mixes these dots into vibrant, luminous scenes. This optical mixing bears a striking similarity to the way pixels work to display images on screen for us today.

“It’s done mechanically?” was a question posed at an 1894 Neo-Impressionist exhibition. The answer then was no. Pointila is both more and less mechanical than the Pointillist work that provoked the question. More, in that the hand of the artist has been replaced by the work of the computer – an extension of Seurat's efforts to remove the free hand of the artist. Yet less, with the ultimate position of each of the millions of dots decided randomly, unknown to the hand of the coder.

The Pointila algorithm first divides the canvas into columns. It then traverses the canvas dropping dots along those columns. From just a handful of layers, landscapes emerge. They take on a variety of forms: from rolling plains and steep canyons to jagged peaks and dreamy moors. Some are sharp and tense, others hazy and ethereal. They are coloured with handpicked palettes and animated with bold glitches – a nod to the shared optics of Pointillism and pixels.

Subtle changes in initial parameters give rise to similar landscapes painted in different styles. Faint echos, perhaps, of the different styles we see from Seurat in the numerous studies related to his masterpiece Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte.

Pointila

“little boxes on the hillsides, child” is a series of abstract suburban cityscapes powered by a program of LIA’s own design and development. Over the 25 years of her artistic career, LIA's working process has typically involved as much intuition as it does engineering skill, and this piece is no exception. Growing from an initial Processing sketch by way of the artist's careful selection of angles, transparencies, and line weights, a virtually infinite sequence of house-like forms appears and disappears. LIA conceives of her practise as a conversation between her own fluid concepts and the formal precision required of software code; when accidents or bugs appear, they are often treated as a part of this conversation and incorporated into the final work. In this piece the “cheeky blue” and “cheeky red” features arise from a bug in calculating the colour spread, and have been retained for their aesthetic contribution to the images. Taking inspiration from the song “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds, this piece is a contemplation of houses and cities. The cyclical relationship between the construction of homes, the lands and environments they have replaced, and the ecosystems that will eventually replace them is echoed through an infinite production of geometric compositions. “little boxes on the hillsides, child” is the successor of “little boxes on the hillsides, mother”, presented in the exhibition “Synthetic Imagination” at bitforms gallery San Francisco, October 2–November 15, 2021. The NFTs minted on Art Blocks are the children of the “mother” work: brilliantly colourful, they are rendered in stillness as an artifact of the mother program's generative output, whose ancestry can be activated on the Art Blocks website by pressing the 'a' key to reveal the animated process behind the production of the still image. Dutch auction starting at 5Ξ and decreasing every 5 minutes to 0.2Ξ (5→4→3→2→1.5→1.25→1→0.75→0.5→0.4→0.3→0.2), 25% of sales over 0.2 ETH will be donated to charity (5% to the Processing Foundation, 20% to COTAP - Carbon Offsets To Alleviate Poverty).


little boxes on the hillsides, child

Heavenly Bodies is built out of love for the skies and gratitude to the land. The land has always been home to us, steady ground underneath our feet lending itself to finding roots, family, and community. Our homes are as varied as the lands around us, but the common thread of land runs between us, the base need for being grounded. It connects us to each other, and to ourselves. The ground, in its stability, also supports the potential for more: the absence of limits, the open expanse of the possible. The ground gives us a home from which to reach, to strive, to learn to become more than we are. The sky invites us into a future that stands upon the solid shoulders of the past, giving us the tools we need to navigate our way into the unknown. To be human is to love both these things: the steady known, and the uncertain unknown. As we find our footing, the land will always welcome us home, and the sky will always beckon us beyond: to reach, to dare, to go further.

Heavenly Bodies

Computational sigils for a digital altar. Patterns emerging from the vibrations of sound waves, seen but not heard.

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