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Rorschach meets Pareidolia.   Spirit Animal meets Mood Ring.
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What will be revealed about who you are --- who you become.
What do YOU see?

's' to re-render at print res
'f' to toggle force node positions
'v' to invert vertically
'd' to toggle progress bar

Latent Spirits

*Your Story* is a book like no other.

It's the story you always wanted to read,
the story you always wanted to create.
Any story you want.
*Your Story* is your imagination projected within the pages, 
to tell a story today, 
and another tomorrow.

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### The idea:

I was playing with a dot on a canvas, when I recognized the first symbol.
In the end, writing is not different from drawing.
So I generated another. And another.
That's how I realized that I had discovered a new language. As a writer, I knew what I had to do:
let this language tell the stories it wants.

Characters in modern alphabets are symbols that, over thousands of years, we aligned on in order to comunicate in written form.
Most people can tell which character represents what in the alphabet they're most familiar with.
There is no room for imagination anymore in the characters themselves. It's all up to the combination of them.
So we form words, sentences, chapters, books.

But imagine now a language that no one understands.
Every interpretation of it is valid: there is no wrong answer. 
Anyone reading it is perceiving a different story, creating a different story.
It's *your* own choice.
You can decide to change the story at every reading. Or keep a piece of it consistent. Collaborate with others to create a new story.

*Your Story* is giving back full imagination to *you*.

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### How it works:

I wanted *Your Story* to look like a book, and all pieces of the algorithm follow this aesthetic direction.
The aspect ratio is set to √2:1, as most of the paper sizes available worldwide (ISO 216, ISO 217 and ISO 269).
Two set tokens (first and last) are the cover and the blurb. 
The remaining tokens form the interior, using token ID to determine whether the page is left or right and the respective margins.
The hash is used to determine the aesthetics of the page: the character style, the type of page (chapter header, illustration, normal text), the presence of notes, and highlights.
All character styles have clear differences between them, and occasionally they are all mixed together.
*Your Story* is not meant to be a single alphabet, but rather an exploration of the imagination. Different character styles may evoke different thoughts.

Your Story

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.

Wabi Sabi

Generative music in 40-140 bytes on-chain. ByteBeats are miniature functions that synthesize audio (and video) via bitwise operations (&^|<<*+/%>>). Because bits form groups in powers of 2, 4/4 beat-driven music emergently self-organizes. Each function in this drop is itself randomly generated, grouped into six families of composition and four families of visualizers. Some ByteBeats loop, some generate new patterns indefinitely. Some are for headbanging, some are for climbing forever through oceans of phase cancelation. (Instructions: click to play ...)

♫ ByteBeats

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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