Divisions creates playful abstract compositions that can go all the way up to eleven.

Style

Border

Divisions

Slice

Recursion

Palette

Decoration

*Erratic : irregular in performance, behaviour, or attitude; inconsistent and unpredictable*

One’s harmony with the world can become severed while experiencing stress. Feeling lost or confused within a clouded mind, struggling to call upon a creative muse, defending your self-worth against creeping doubts, and projecting flashes of anger towards others. This torrent of bubbling turmoil can sustain by fixating on the moments of chaos, past, and present. Continuing to feed the storm in this way ultimately will lead to burdensome strife and a ravaged mind.

As a nascent artist working to hone my artistic abilities and establish myself within a historical art movement, I have often experienced stress along my journey. This collection captures these internal struggles as fragmented waves of colour arranged across a spectrum of relative calms, chaotic bursts, and winding paths. Each piece reflects a unique sense of uncertainty.

My intent for Erratic was to challenge myself to create a purist’s form of generative art, wherein a set of randomized values are shaped to be used directly as inputs into an instruction path that is consistent in execution and does not use branching conditionals as a means of achieving variety in composition, colour or form. By actively rejecting predetermined features in favour of shaping a domain that is acted upon consistently, I felt I could achieve occurrences of uniquely identifiable emergent design that I otherwise may not have discovered. The work begins with a euclidean coordinate space intended to render a smoothed half-torus which is then randomly mutated through progressive iterations of translations, rotations, polar reflections, slices, twists, and distortions. This pattern of operations produces a nearly infinite set, shaped only by the defined input ranges, from which each piece will be minted. Any knowledge of the instantiated values before viewing could not lead to any reasonable prediction of what will be rendered.

Erratic

Andradite comes from the transposition of my Modo7 protocol into sculptures. Heavy brutalist shapes that come together to create dark monolithic structures half way between sculpted objects and troglodytic architecture. The name of the script comes from the andradite, a stone which crystallizes following cubic patterns and can be found in deep dark color. The gradient backgrounds create depth and mood and recall the way they showcase the stones in professional mineral photographs.

Andradite

An asterism is a pattern created by a collection of stars and the lines that mentally connect between them. Unlike constellations, they are a more general concept that can refer to any identified pattern of stars. The viewer is the one who draws in the sky and gives meaning to his creation. Asterisms in an interactive generative project that invites you to draw, name and save forever your own asterism. Through a generative algorithm, the script gives you the sky as a canvas where you can unfold your imagination as many times as you want based on the Token ID hash from the minting process. To be a user is to be a creator. LEFT CLICK to create stars │ Use the MOUSE WHEEL to zoom in and out │ TYPE to write a title │ BACKSPACE to delete │ DELETE to delete all the text │ ENTER to save the file.

Asterisms

Compression has been the driving force behind the image-based internet since the early 90s. No compression, no Netscape, no social media, no NFTs. The JPEG compression has specifically enabled photography-based imagery on the net. It has always served that purpose and over time become the de facto default for showing high quality imagery online. But compression always leaves a trace, which has become the lens through which the network sees the world of uploaded images.

"A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience." ― Mark Rothko

JPEG tries to create an image programatically fully expressing that signature compression. An image that is like empty made from barely nothing, yet fully present in its blazing appearance. A work deeply material, expressing itself through the language of code and codec only. This is not a JPEG depicting an image. The JPEG is the image itself.

Delving into the depths and peculiarities of the digital, tethered to art history, JPEG found its way to the surface. Generated color fields are utilised to trigger the compressing algorithm, resulting in a world of raw visual entities. Where the abstract expressionists cut out the depiction in painting, aiming to let the artist convey pure emotion, JPEG cuts out the artist's emotion and lets it emerge from within the algorithm. Carefully you could categorize the work as *compressionism*. An art form where the machine speaks in its own raw language, but nevertheless makes a direct touch to our human heart.

JPEG is a collection of generative images in the JPEG file format. The work tries to break with the idea of the fixed file format, therefor creating the JPEG entirely from code using no image material whatsoever. The individual JPEGs are generated responsively at the moment of viewing based on the token hash as a random seed. You can literally drag the JPEG out from the browser window.

JPEG pays tribute to interface culture, and as such the work is responsive and not scaling. When the work is resized, the work is again rendered and compressed. When viewed smaller, details will disappear, yet the composition stays recognisable. It’s like stepping back to see a work from further away. The choice of color wanders from monochromatic tones to the brutality of complete randomness and everything in between.

In honour of the blockchain and the web, the work is written in vanilla JavaScript, using no dependancies, and generates a standard JPEG. This way the file is downloadable, aiming for a materiality that comes as close as possible to the standard browser.

Art Blocks Presents

Divisions

Michael Connolly

About Divisions

Michael Connolly

Algorithmic edition of 500

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Erratic

Owen Moore

Andradite

Eltono

Asterisms

Falko

JPEG

Jan Robert Leegte

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Art Blocks Presents

Divisions

Michael Connolly

About Divisions

Michael Connolly

Algorithmic edition of 500

Additional details

.css-1n7p6r6{fill:var(--color-primary);transition-property:background-color,border-color,color,fill,stroke;transition-timing-function:cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1);transition-duration:200ms;margin-right:16px;}Filter (0)

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More in Art Blocks Presents

Erratic

Owen Moore

Andradite

Eltono

Asterisms

Falko

JPEG

Jan Robert Leegte

Art

Company

Learn

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