*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

UltraWave 369 reflects our deep longing for unity, belonging and understanding of the universe. 369 units of light seeking enlightenment, traveling to their source... A balancing act between order and chaos. ** Best viewed in livemode and fullscreen ** 

UltraWave 369

Scoundrels are a limited edition of on-chain generative pixel art characters tokenized on the Ethereum blockchain.
This ragtag bunch of thieves and misfits are perfectly capable of relieving anyone of their most prized possessions.

Scoundrels

**Nära explores the connections that make us human.**

Nära (close or near in Swedish) is a celebration of friendships and relationships throughout our lives. How some of them are small, fleeting and ephemeral while a select few become lifelong bonds. The work examines the intricate graphs that are formed by these connections. Graphs are all around us and have existed for as long as we have been human. From early settlements of hunter-gatherers and nomadic tribes to the internet of today. It's all graphs.

Nära allows the viewer to explore and experience these graphs as a metaphor for the organic, organised chaos that is life. Shapes connect from one node in a graph to the next, sometimes spilling over, doubling down and creating layers of intricacy. Imperfection is embraced and Nära exposes the chaotic and unpredictable elements of life. 

The artistic vision of Nära is to highlight and expose graphs in a tactile manner that allows the viewer to see the whole graph, but also engage with the details and texture.  In doing this, Nära attempts to bring a novel contribution by pushing the boundaries of graph representation and introducing an emotional dimension to this oftentimes rigid and scientific discipline. By treating graphs as a metaphor for relationships in life, they become an integral part of the concept and an important artistic tool. 

Nära takes inspiration from the De Stijl movement in reducing the world into a deliberate expression in its smallest form and builds upon the use of shapes imbued with meaning in the works of Hilma af Klint. These ideas are expanded on by accepting that what is deliberate must also relinquish some control through the pseudo-randomness of generative art. This invites reflection on the balance of control and chance in our lives. 

_Through Nära, you are invited to reflect on the connections in your own life and on the significance of the relationships that define us as human beings._ 

To interact with the script:
- Press 's' to save.
- Add the following to the URL:
  - pd=x, where x is a number to control the resolution via pixel density (useful for rendering high resolution stills)
  - rs=x, where x is a number to enable and control the rendering buildup animation.

Nära

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.

Art Blocks Presents

Through Curved Air #44

Jacob Gold

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