Beatboxes are fully immersive, virtual reality, audiovisual generative art on the Ethereum blockchain. Beatboxes consist of 841 generated unique rooms where you can fully immerse yourself with any virtual reality device. You can also enjoy them from your pc in a more conventional way. Beatboxes are our second experimental piece of art, following the successful release of Unigrids. The goal with this collection was to create an environment where you can escape your reality for a moment and enjoy your unique piece of art while stimulating the most senses possible. You can open your eyes inside your unique art piece and explore by looking around and listening as you enjoy something you own. In live view use arrows to move around and spacebar to start the music and animation. Visit beatboxes.io to browse all Beatboxes more easily, Have fun! *note that Beatboxes are using aframe which is currently not optimized for ios mobile and safari browser. 

Beatboxes

Woop Woop! Run for your life! Kai-Gen are attacking!
Fresh from the underground and ready to smash your city, these mutant beasties come unique and fired up. No polygons or texture maps here, just sweet ray-marching magic living right on-chain. When you're ready, press the 2 key on your keyboard to bring them to life. But be forewarned, animated Kai-Gen are hungry AF and will eat old GPUs like jellybeans. A modern-day PC/Mac desktop is highly recommended, then hit that 2 key, if you think you can handle it...
Key 1 = Still, Key 2 = Animated. Let's GOOOOO!

Kai-Gen

The algorithm that was built for Getijde (Dutch for 'Tide') was meticulously designed. It's the result of spending most of the year cooped up inside four walls with a strong desire to escape. Countless hours were spent perfecting details to guarantee that each mint will be of high enough quality to be exhibited on screens and in print.

Getijde

Many things in the world are perceptible but not visible. Some things we can only feel, but not understand. Some things touch us and move us deeply, but not physically. We can only confirm some things through experience.

Qi is believed to be part of everything that exists as a "life force" or "spiritual energy" that pervades the natural world. It cannot be seen, but in some paintings, the artist creates the flow of Qi to present a vivid world. Artists use Qi to show the presence of life in their artwork, and it’s also believed to be a metaphor for the energy that powers our body and spirit.

Metaphysics is a generative system to simulate an organic world, to make the audience feel the Qi. Every single object is gradually deformed, shifted, and rotated in an attempt to find a pattern in the chaos that describes the workings of the life force and constitutes a living entity. It is inspired by the fluent Tai Chi movement, Cloud Hand. It develops with organic rotations and movements, like practicing Tai Chi on the canvas which makes the generative system alive.

That movement composes this piece, and once we feel the invisible vital life force by the physics of the algorithm, could we say it is a process of metaphysics?

This project uses p5js.

Press [S] to download a high resolution jpeg.
Press [A] to see the slow animation.
Press [R] to download the animation.
Press [B] to switch border/borderless mode.

Metaphysics

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 #48

Jacob Gold

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