"Organized Disruption" uses a circle packing algorithm to position and scale objects on a plane in an organized pleasing composition. A series of weighted probabilities determines how this composition is disrupted by picking 1 of 3 forms... squares, spheres (slight elevation off plane), rectangles (extreme elevation off plane). Probability also determines 1 of 9 color sets (some colors being harder to acquire), and 3 possible color animations (slow, medium, fast). Each seeded token hash "might" unlock a collection of mouse interactions... proximity object displacement, proximity scale up, proximity scale down, proximity object mutation, proximity object rotation. All minted compositions include "mouse + click + drag" to rotate the system. All minted compositions can press the "s" key on your keyboard to "save" an image.

Organized Disruption

🐺🐵🐶🐺🐱🦁🐯🦒🦊🐻🐰🐹🐭🐗🐷🐮🦝🐨🐼🐸
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

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zoologic (zō- ə- ˈlä- jik) - relating to the properties and vital phenomena exhibited by an animal, animal type, or group.
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Why do animals evolve into different species? Why do they evolve to look or behave one way, and not another? Why do some animals have a few children, while others have many? What makes some animals better at surviving than others?

Zoologic is an exploration of these questions, and of forces that drive the evolution of life. It's a cellular automaton where small creatures ("crobes") compete for survival in a shared space, as their traits and reproductive strategies drift over time. Population dynamics and r/K selection theory play a role in their gradual evolution into new forms.

Life for the bacteria-like crobes is a simple affair. Each explores their world — a hexagonal grid  — according to their own pre-coded movement strategy. Each step requires a little bit of “energy,” the fuel that powers movement. Running out of energy means a crobe can’t move, but more energy can be obtained by consuming the only available food source — other crobes! Crobes can detect their neighbors within a couple of spaces, identify them as predators or prey, and react according to their needs.

Crobes consume each other for resources, then use those resources to reproduce -- but not perfectly. Each reproduction introduces new mutations, causing traits to change and new behaviors and appearances to emerge! The crobes’ neural nets learn over time, and only the fittest survive, making Zoologic an example of a neuroevolutionary algorithm. As neural nets are trained, they can be saved, loaded, and battled, shared with others. Train your crobes locally and compete with friends! Each output includes a fully on-chain, pre-trained neural net that has been generatively modified at the time of mint to give each set of crobes their own unique personality.

Key controls: [A] Fullscreen (press a second time for edge-to-edge animation), [H] Help menu, [I] AI menu, [Space] change color palette, [D] Toggle Dark mode, [F+#] Adjust framerate, [X+#/arrows] Adjust detail level, [N] restart animation with different random seed. Please see Help menu for a more comprehensive explanation of available controls and settings, including some intended for improved presentation for longer periods of time.

Zoologic

Timepiece is an exploration in objective and subjective time. Each Timepiece is a dynamic figure with different graphic and kinetic characteristics that give it a unique personality — from calm and subtle to fast and playful. The piece is a clock that runs in real-time, and the form is generated by the positions of the clock hands, which appear when clicked and reveal the underlying mechanics of the piece. The thumbnail of each piece reflects the time it was minted (in UTC). 

Timepiece

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 #70

Jacob Gold

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