## The Concept

Ad Extremum Terrae explores visual storytelling in a form of generative art. The project tells a story of the tragic end of all existence in a distant universe, long since forgotten. Any given individual output depicts a passing moment, captured during the final breath of each dying world. The once peaceful landscapes were torn apart, deforming and reshaping their natural geometries and thus the reality itself in a surrealistic fashion.

Each image is drawn to vaguely mimic a pencil-like texture. Firstly to remind of something familiar and subsequently emitting a peculiar and eerie feeling. Did this event happen and was it witnessed by a carbon-based life-form?

The project invites the viewer to ponder the different scenarios of what might have transpired in the past that lead the universe to its doom. Although one interpretation can be deciphered from the partially corrupted transmission below, it is not necessarily the true explanation.


The only thing that is known, is that all life ceased to exist in this ancient universe long time ago. Its tale lives on, but only as a memory and as a reminder to us all that life can be fragile and fleeting, albeit beautiful and precious.

## The Story

*”If anyone listens .. …. recording …. ….. ….. .. a warning …. …. will happen .. your world. We didn’t …. …. .. our universe, ……. we drained … ….. resource ….. .. couldn’t sustain … life …. any longer. The great collapse .. moments away … this will .. … end .. our story. Do not …… our mistakes. Most importantly … …. prevent ….. …. ……… ….. world .. … ……. ……… at any cost. This is our final transmission.”*

Just as the transmission ends, a sudden flash of dreamlike images flashes through your mind, leaving a vivid imprint. These were the final moments of an ancient, distant and long forgotten universe. The rush is too much to handle and you faint. You wake up and immediately start looking for the recording but it's gone. You remember everything as clear as day, but was it just a dream?

## The Details

There are several main scenes, which depict the specific stage that the end has advanced to. The predominantly or entirely black and white and the muted palettes give a sense of silence and solitude. Meanwhile other palettes disturb that calmness. Some palettes remind of colors in nature, but most are chosen and used in unnatural manner touching the style of expressionism.

Pressing "s" saves a screenshot at any point during the rendering. Pressing "p" pauses and unpauses the rendering. Pressing up or down arrow increases or decreases the drawing animation speed.

Ad Extremum Terrae

Brushpops is a generative system inspired by Roy Lichtenstein’s iconic work, where a random hash determines the composition of a series of abstract brush strokes. Lichtenstein’s original work has separated the brushstrokes from their original context, and now we take another step in the same direction, and separate the artist from the work. The artist has to relinquish control, and set the work free, where only some loosely-predetermined rules and a hash number will determine the actual outcome. The Brushstroke was detached from the painting, and it’s now detached from the artist as well.

Brushpops

- Click and drag (dont forget realease) to find new combinations. Go to the center to close the interference. Go to the edges to open it.
Double click change mode (Auto - Tactil )

INTERFERENCES is about reordering the elements, altering the parts that make up the shapes and identifying the possibilities of color ordering.
Here, the variability is found in the subtle, seeking to challenge the sensitive vision of the viewer, generating displacement effects, or simply proposing a minimal visual design.

Interferences is an excuse to return to color theories from the Bauhaus and Latin American cinetics artist, that made up the artistic avant-garde of the 1950s. From there, the project seeks to continue developing on the relative characteristics of color: those situations in which our experience of the color changes according to the context. How to use color? It's not what colors, but how colors are used that define artists.

The instability appears as a game in the work on the form, breaking out the circle as a standard of harmony and perfection. How far can you continue to recognize a shape? It is this instability that suggests movement, like a photograph of a moment in the sequence, waiting to be completed.

What characteristics does the work of art of web3.0 must have? That was one of the questions that motivated this work. There could be several answers, but I think one of them would definitely have to do with the possibility of change: is not a jpg, is not a .mov: it is a piece of software that you can touch and modify, find new possible outputs and play with variability.

Interferences is a project of #purevisibility: there is no message. There is experience.

Interferences

pseudomods is a visual study on eurorack modular synthesizers, and other histories of control surfaces. abstract panels open to interpretation, possessed by an outside knob-fiddler.

pseudomods

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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Through Curved Air #16

Jacob Gold

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