Exploring the interaction of four parent colors.

Color Study

Series Two of the popular 70s Pop. Here we're cruising down Lake Shore Drive in our shag carpet lined Chevy van, with sweet custom airbrushed art on the side. Barbarella meets Saturday Night Fever 🌈🕺 in tiny code form.

70s Pop Series Two

In this collection, each mark on the digital canvas is made by text of the algorithm that created it. When viewing Symbol 1, you’re viewing its code – logic becoming art.

If you look closely at an oil painting you may see brushstrokes. If you look closely at an iteration of Symbol 1, you'll see snippets of the code that generates the piece itself: text from for() loops repeated over and over; the Random() function itself weaving through the piece; and the hash code, like an artist signature, displayed on the bottom right.

Organic and mechanical forces have long been in tension in art and architecture. Art nouveau's floral  curves vs. art deco's industrial geometry, Jackson Pollock's declaration “I am nature” vs. Andy Warhol's confession “I want to be a machine,” etc.

This conversation continues in generative art. One collection might appear surprisingly organic, as if crafted by hand; another might appear strictly computer generated, showing the expressive power of machines.

Symbol 1 joins this conversation, offering another way to synthesize the natural and the mechanical. Just as a crashing ocean wave could be explained mathematically by the forces that generated it, an image in Symbol 1 appears almost chaotic while revealing the logic that created it.

About the title: Symbol 1 is a term from First Principles, a chapter in The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847) by George Boole, a founder of modern logic. For Boole, “symbol 1” represents “the Universe comprehending every conceivable class of objects, whether actually existing or not.”

Symbol 1

a floating spawn has appeared ... this site hosts a garden of spawns ... each generated from a unique seed that determines varying conditions for how they're made.

spawn

Wabi-sabi, an ancient Japanese aesthetic sense, refers to finding beauty in imperfect and lonely things.
Life is irrational and ephemeral. 
Peace and happiness are illusory, built on a fragile balance. 
Wabi-sabi is an immersion of the quality of loneliness within ourselves that accepts various nuances to be beautiful, through a sophisticated lens.
This work attempts to store the compelling concept of Wabi-sabi on the blockchain as the code dynamically generates brushstrokes based on motifs of Shodo (Japanese calligraphy)

Wabi-sabi begins with a deliberate movement in which an ink-soaked brush is plopped down onto the paper, causing the ink to splatter.
Thereafter, a unique algorithm assists in drawing brushstrokes. 
The various forms that emerge from the balance of lines that are straight or curved, regular or irregular, strong or slight, complex or delicate, with varying speeds analogize a person’s will through the brushstrokes. The bleeding, scratching, and splattering of ink lend the modelling even more complexity. Wabi-sabi does not impose precision in creating Shodo strokes. You may notice how the colors always bleed in the same direction, which is impossible to generate in our physical reality. This is because even if the brush is impregnated with multiple hues of ink, the bristles rotate as the brushstrokes are drawn. It may also generate three-dimensional patterns, a feature that is absent in physical practice, offering the impression of depth, as if brushstrokes were drawn arbitrarily in space. This is achieved by controlling the focus.

A key feature of each artwork is that it can be edited. A piece of art is usually completed by the artist and presented to the viewer. I intended to make this work as imperfect as the concept of Wabi-sabi, which can be infinitely edited by the viewer. This is impossible with conventional NFTs, with generated image data uploaded to a server. Such is the luxury in art created with on-chain generative art by code.

For each composition, the blank space as the foreground and background is a conscious and elemental choice in this work.
Wabi-sabi is to accept the lacking. Some artworks can have much of the space as blank, which may seem odd but is consistent with the narrative. Digitally native art often takes full advantage of the computing power to lay out complex patterns across the entire canvas. Wabi-sabi is minimal as a contemporary take on that trend. Through the bleeding and scratching of ink in each brushstroke along with the blank space represented in this work, we welcome imperfection. Conceptually, contrasts between movement and stillness, strength and weakness, audacity and delicacy, complexity and simplicity, vividness and fadedness reveal a melancholic beauty.

The search for beauty through imitation and slight modification, and the exploration of the techniques used to create traditional or innovative shapes, is akin to the training in Shodo. 
Simply said, you cannot do it well the first time. The Japanese word for Shodo ("do") means "road". It is by travelling down the long road involving hours of training and exploration, that the sensitive concept of Wabi-sabi may be understood.

The underlying intention is to facilitate partaking in the process of the artist's exploration. The viewer is the artist and the artist is the viewer, sharing a sense of camaraderie that lives forever on the blockchain

[NOTE]
-Move the mouse over the left edge of the canvas and press the Edit button. 
-To edit, press the ‘S’ key
-To save the image press the ‘R’ key.
-To redraw, modern hardware and browser hardware acceleration is recommended. The Chrome browser on a desktop with a high-end GPU is optimal. On iOS, the best experience is available on iOS 12 or later.

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