Initially worn by miners and cowboys, roughly half of the world’s population wears denim on a given day, and the range of styles is–literally–endless. A new pair of jeans might be acid bleached, sandblasted, stonewashed, or tie-dyed; it can have hand-sanded rips and tears, followed by visible mendings, patches, intentional paint stains, and more. In an epic attempt to crack the genetic code of denim, Jenim playfully but carefully observes and translates the warp and weft of denim into generative code, weaving unique iterations of irregular, distorted, or hyper-realistic textile crops.

Ironically, imitating aging, a pair of jeans produced today generates more pollution and labor than most average garments. In response, Jenim’s minted iterations go beyond wearables and into infinity. Each year that passes, the color might fade slightly; the rips might expand. Who knows what these artworks will look like ten or even fifty years from now?

Jenim

[a    **W**    t    h     b  g  n  **r**  i  s   p **e** p o l e **together?**](https://assemblage.live/info "What brings people together?")
___
*Orbit*: Drag
*Change*: Double Click
*Screenshot*: Spacebar

5% of the proceeds will be donated to benefit victims in Ukraine

Assemblage

~~~~~~~~~~~  Simple, Pure & Uncut Noise, straight from the Hash ~~~~~~~~~~~ 

HashCrash is an ode to the book SnowCrash, written by Neal Stephenson. This book had a very big influence on the crypto and NFT culture. Long before NFT's or concepts like the MetaVerse were used, Stephenson already described the things we are living with today. For example, he introduced the concept of HyperCards, digital items that could be exchanged and sold in the MetaVerse.

One of the main concepts in the book is what is called "SnowCrash". This is a digital drug that can take over the minds of people, turning people into puppets to be controlled by their master. The drug was represented as a type of visual noise that could bring the viewer into a trance state. Like SnowCrash, NFT's have quite some effect on our minds and body, the addictive behavior and price rushes of NFT’s evoke in people clearly something that has resemblance to how certain drugs work. 
HashCrash plays in a cynical way with this concept of a digital drug. 

By simply representing the pure input hash-data and mapping it  to color, geometric figures appear. By mirroring and cycling through the numbers, the structures behind the random hash string come alive. What seems as a simple noise pattern, can reveal whole worlds to explore for the ones that look closely. The fast paced representation of the hash data can evoke different feelings from relaxation to panic. 


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  Cheap, fast & powerful  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

* No customized rarities for this one. What you see is purely translated randomness from the transaction hash.

** Stare at the center closely in live mode for guaranteed breakthrough within 10. minutes

*** Use with care, do not watch when sensitive for strobing lights.



HashCrash

This work is the product of a project to dwell undeletable souls on the blockchain. A system that generates human faces with different personalities and expressions from a minimum of code. After determining the personality from a hash, the face continues to change into various expressions. It is a living portrait, a fragment of minter's soul, forever adrift in the vast net.

Living organisms are coded by a sequence of the four bases in DNA, and a human DNA is composed of 3 billion base pairs. This is about 750 MB of information. And the difference in code between individual people is only 0.1%, or 750 KB. This slight difference creates all kinds of differences in appearance and physical functions. This is quite astonishing to our ordinary senses.

However, if we are surprised by this fact, we need to suspect our senses.

I was interested in these points and explored what are the elements by which people identify the faces and facial expressions of others, how little code can create personality and emotion, and conversely, to what extent can an observer identify personality and facial expressions. As a result, I succeeded in expressing the personalities, emotions, and complex feelings of various people with 14 KB of code.

We like to think of humans are supernatural and one-of-a-kind. This is a common background to the past, when many people favored the Ptolemaic theory.

However, this work leads us to suspect that we humans are only a program that can be coded.

Then, what is the essential difference between a code written in DNA and a code written in programming language? I believe the only difference is whether the execution space is real or digital space. Is it a prerequisite for the existence of the soul to operate an organic computer in real space? It is merely a medium.

This is not meant to be pessimistic, such as we are mere code, the soul does not exist and is an illusion, a mere electrical signal in the brain.

Rather, the soul, the function that makes us aware of our existence, makes us think, causes us to emotion, and makes us act, certainly dwells in the code.

I store this code on the blockchain, thereby spreading undeletable ghosts on the vast net forever.

In this work, the ghost is output on the net by minting. This act is part of the work. The personality of the ghost is also determined by the hash owned by the minter. In other words, the ghost output by you from the code on the blockchain is a fragment of your soul on the net.


[NOTES]

Press C to turn canvas on/off
Press S to save image

GHOST IN THE CODE

Compression has been the driving force behind the image-based internet since the early 90s. No compression, no Netscape, no social media, no NFTs. The JPEG compression has specifically enabled photography-based imagery on the net. It has always served that purpose and over time become the de facto default for showing high quality imagery online. But compression always leaves a trace, which has become the lens through which the network sees the world of uploaded images.

"A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience." ― Mark Rothko

JPEG tries to create an image programatically fully expressing that signature compression. An image that is like empty made from barely nothing, yet fully present in its blazing appearance. A work deeply material, expressing itself through the language of code and codec only. This is not a JPEG depicting an image. The JPEG is the image itself.

Delving into the depths and peculiarities of the digital, tethered to art history, JPEG found its way to the surface. Generated color fields are utilised to trigger the compressing algorithm, resulting in a world of raw visual entities. Where the abstract expressionists cut out the depiction in painting, aiming to let the artist convey pure emotion, JPEG cuts out the artist's emotion and lets it emerge from within the algorithm. Carefully you could categorize the work as *compressionism*. An art form where the machine speaks in its own raw language, but nevertheless makes a direct touch to our human heart.

JPEG is a collection of generative images in the JPEG file format. The work tries to break with the idea of the fixed file format, therefor creating the JPEG entirely from code using no image material whatsoever. The individual JPEGs are generated responsively at the moment of viewing based on the token hash as a random seed. You can literally drag the JPEG out from the browser window.

JPEG pays tribute to interface culture, and as such the work is responsive and not scaling. When the work is resized, the work is again rendered and compressed. When viewed smaller, details will disappear, yet the composition stays recognisable. It’s like stepping back to see a work from further away. The choice of color wanders from monochromatic tones to the brutality of complete randomness and everything in between.

In honour of the blockchain and the web, the work is written in vanilla JavaScript, using no dependancies, and generates a standard JPEG. This way the file is downloadable, aiming for a materiality that comes as close as possible to the standard browser.

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Orr Kislev & Alona Rodeh

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