Computation is one of the most powerful tools for our age. It opens up a whole world of possibilities. Some people use its power to solve the mysteries of our universe through science. I’m using it to explore our relationship with beauty and perception.

“Miragem” *(Mirage in Portuguese)* is a generative project that requires your slow attention. It’s an exploration of rhythm, balance, and texture. Just simple elements in a coordinated dance, ruled by math and randomness.

**It’s an invitation for the eyes and mind to wander.**


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>> ## “Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye, it is in my mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.”
>> Agnes Martin

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*Please check the project website to know more about the composition and features.*

Miragem

I feel like an imposter. Pseudo-anonymous as *ippsketch* while maintaining an engineering career and family life. I live on the edge of two worlds, immersed in self-doubt. Leaning into each space, I bring a part of each world with me, but wonder if what I bring is enough. I question my identity while learning to embrace it. Art, after all, is made by ordinary people. And I wonder, does anyone really know what they're doing?

*Imposter Syndrome* is an expression of my seeming dual existence and my feelings of not being enough in many aspects of life. But I do not mean for this to be entirely prescriptive to the work and often see other interpretations and meanings myself, such as anytime I straddle the edge of something new, when I'm on the fence and making a decision between two directions of my life, or if I consider the shadow or light I cast in the spaces and people around me. These pieces move me differently from day-to-day.

This work leans into minimalism. As trends in generative art push toward the visually complex and highly technical, I find my current focus on simple composition and compelling structure. I'm also drawn to broken symmetry, which echos my dual artist/engineer life and is also what I consider to be a visual representation of generative art - design and order on the one hand, random variation within constraint on the other.

Color palettes echo those used in *Bent*. Simple and bold colors with stark black and white support. Pieces are rendered in a default poster size (3:4), but are also adaptive to screen size so that they can fit any display. The work can be interacted with by pressing the number keys 1, 2, 3, 4 to see the steps of construction.

Imposter Syndrome

Rituals combines generative music and generative artwork to create 1000 unique windows into a singular parametric universe. The music and art are crafted to infinitely evolve, giving collectors a subtly new experience upon each viewing. If left running, a single Ritual will continue generating music and art without repeating for ~9 million years. We invite you to hold space for yourself and enjoy a moment of mindful stillness. The first 200 were minted in real life at Bright Moments in Venice, CA, USA in September 2021.

Best experienced on modern equipment. Click to start.

Artwork by Aaron Penne (@aaronpenne), music by Boreta (@boreta), music system produced by Counterpoint (ctpt.co).

Rituals - Venice

Primordial presents forms as diverse as those found in the natural world. The emergent system powering Primordial is capable of generating this diversity but is hard to control. After the initial generation there is a curation step; forms must meet certain criteria or the algorithm replaces them.

The forms produced by Primordial are presented in a triptych, as comparing multiple outputs is fundamental to understanding a generative algorithm. Primordial attempts to generate triptychs where the individual forms are related, and the results can be surprisingly harmonious or discordant.

Once the triptych is finalized, click on one of the forms to redraw a previous image. Press s to save the entire triptych, or 1-3 to save an individual image.

Primordial

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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