*the spring begins with the first rainstorm* is my merger of earthly patterning and digital dynamics, seeing both organisms as collaborators in an effort to erase the human hand and glimpse into an environmental portal.

My inspiration comes from falling in the fountains of the Louvre as a child and sneaking past the guards to enter the glass temple dripping and squishing with each step – from Sigmar Polke’s dispersion paintings – from Joseph Beuys and Bas Jan Ader – from Aldous Huxley and John Muir – from the plentiful and the barren – from the joy of discovery and the fear of what could unravel.

I started with the pattern variable, this movement was first created by dragging large paintings through the ocean until my brushstrokes disappeared and the earth becomes the composer. The movement that emerged is akin to light fracturing through water, the bark of trees, or the skin of reptiles. When redacted into visible pixels it harkens to traditional screen-printing and a web 1.0 dream. When the patterns start multiplying, they become portals to elsewhere, while also signifying a system trying to ‘learn’ the movements of the earth. I see the ‘hibernal’ as blizzards, ‘maelstrom’ as dreams of the deep water and the ‘arboretum’ as lush gardens. The palette variable is meant to mirror lavish watercolor washes while the smokey ribboning represents the winds. In totality, I hope is to blur many lines – constructed and broken down, calming and fearsome, aspirational and apocalyptic.


*The Genesis Edition*

The first 48 mints shall receive this special edition collection, which includes:

* A unique print of the minter’s piece, printed on archival Hahnemühle German etching paper, mounted on 16” x 12” (40.6 cm x 30.5 cm) maple board, signed and titled on verso.

* A serpentine rock I collected near 34.744145603, -119.98518572 (including a maple presentation stand).

* A limited edition visual compendium chronicling the conceptual theory of the work, signed and numbered.

Please visit the [project website](https://thespringbegins.io/the-genesis-edition) for more details about the Genesis Edition.

Controls:

p - for a high resolution (6000 x 7200 pixels) printable version
s - to save the image as a png file

the spring begins with the first rainstorm

When thinking about community, we could observe the differences and things in common. There is a purpose for us to be together. It influences our behavior, identities, and choices. The diversity of shapes, colors, and combinations in this work is the metaphor for how we are connected and how these connections influence a complex web, which is represented here in this form that resembles a beehive. Bees have an enormous sense of community, a behavior essential for their survival. In this work, a single feature can radically alter the perception of form as a whole. The work contains eight possible shapes: random, stars, hexagons, triangles, arrows, trapezoids, diamonds, and flags. These shapes can be arranged following a random flow, rotating, or pointing to the center. Moreover, they can vary in size, spacing, and color. The color palettes correspond to edition groups. As a generative artwork, beauty arises from a mixture of all diversity. Charity: 25% of initial sales were donated to Lanchonete<>Lanchonete lanchonetelanchonete.com - promoting greater justice and social well-being for children and family members living nearby Providência, first Favela in Brazil.

These shapes are nothing more than rectangles and lines.

And yet...

There is a concept in painting called 'pentimento', the presence of earlier forms or images that have been painted over. These could be changes that the artist made deliberately, or mistakes that they were able to cover. Sometimes as the paint fades, the pentimenti will be revealed, but often they will remain unseen.

The challenge is to recognize the pentimenti that influence the canvas, but cannot be found there even at the base layer. These are scattered throughout the years of the artist's life.

'Thoughts of Meadow' is a generative system that distorts a chess-like grid into complex shapes. Many of the outputs give the illusion of immense three-dimensional structures using simple geometric principles. It is an attempt to represent the concept of 'pentimento' through the rendering process. Each layer builds upon the complexity of the previous one but also covers it. If you look closely through the gaps in the grid, you can see the incremental changes that took place.

In that sense, this project is a reminder for myself of where I'm from, an incredibly small town called Meadow, and the gratitude I feel for the years I spent there. The first layer of my life's pentimento.

As always, I doubt this project would exist without the work and observations of Vera Molnár. Squares were certainly made for her, I just appreciate being able to borrow them once in a while.

Thoughts of Meadow

Adorable and purrfect, these carefully bred kitties express a wide range of emotions and personalities. They live entirely on-chain and they just love receiving pets.

CatBlocks

How can intent be communicated when ideas are filtered through a pseudorandom number generator? Simply looking at the output does not make it clear whether a stroke is placed on the canvas because of a decision by the artist or by a roll of the dice. The artist’s hand is more present in the process than the result; they choose the algorithms, tune the parameters, and prune the features. As I experimented with my code, I held a particular idea in mind, but I was uncertain how it would finally manifest. I pursued a visual composition that made me feel a certain way, and the visuals I landed on communicate my feeling better than anything I can put into words. Through Curved Air is about the challenge of communication. Regardless of the medium, I can never be certain that the message I intend to send is the message that is received.

Through Curved Air takes inspiration from musical minimalism, where repetition is used to highlight changes in rhythm and harmony. Every output is created by repeatedly copying a single shape. Each copy only has meaning in relation to the other shapes nearby, and that meaning changes with the context around it. Delicate structures form and are subsequently obscured by further layers, and though they may be hidden, they still affect the perception of the final image. Clicking on the canvas will start or stop the looping mode, where the image is recreated in a slightly different way. New facets are exposed as the composition changes yet remains the same. Just as I spend my days trying to share my inner experience through my art, Through Curved Air uses each shape and each loop and each token hash to attempt to create a common feeling between myself and the viewer.

Through Curved Air also takes inspiration from the paintings of Joan Mitchell. I was drawn to her expressive strokes, vibrant colors, and use of negative space, all of which come together to give a more intense feeling of looking at a landscape than just looking at a painting of a landscape. Her energetic marks clearly communicate that there is a human being behind the art. The marks of generative works are often similarly representative of the underlying process, but instead of drawing focus to the artist behind the piece, they draw attention to the algorithm. To convey human emotion in the way I intended, I had to use a subtler algorithm.

The technical tools to convey this emotion are tools I have been consistently developing in my practice. I love making generative art because I can design a system where I understand how all the components work, but they can still come together to produce a result that surprises me. The algorithm behind the compositional variation in my earlier works Coquina and Primordial is one I continued to evolve, and it rests at the heart of Through Curved Air. In fact, I pushed it further than ever, using it to create the individual shapes that form the building block of each output. This emergent variation permeates the work and results in surprising images that more closely resemble paintings than anything I made previously. I believe the potential for surprise is key to conveying emotion through code. When the possibility space of the algorithm grows too large to understand, the mind wanders to the person behind the algorithm. Perhaps the human element is the struggle to understand, or the struggle to be understood.

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