Augury is a festive collection ranging from vast sorbet-colored landscapes to dense pattern iterations.
 
Augury remixes frames from LoVid’s red, green, and blue (RGB) luminous moving image work. For over two decades, LoVid has been making audiovisual works using custom-built handmade analog video (and audio) synthesizers. In addition to moving-image media, LoVid’s outputs capture stills (frames) from generative video and incorporate these into digital collages, textile designs, wearable works, prints, and more. An essential part of LoVid’s process involves translating signals and experiences from one medium into another. This conversion/interoperability appears critical for living in an interdisciplinary, intermedia, intersectional mixed-reality world.

With Augury, LoVid continues exploring on-chain processes that are inspired by the mechanism and aesthetic of analog synthesis.This collection builds upon LoVid’s first analog video synthesizer-inspired collection: Tide Predictor. Each output in Augury grabs frames from the Tide Predictor algorithm (using a unique new hash) and arranges them on the screen based on a set of instructions, possibilities, and limitations.  The generative compositions in Augury are therefore both procedurally related to and visually reminiscent of quilting, tapestry pattern designs, and tactile weaving. They use visual elements that LoVid often employs in static works: mirroring and repetitive looping, abrupt changes in intensity and detail, overlapping recycled patterns, and a colliding playful mix of lines and signals buzzing in different directions. 

The rules applied in Augury are primarily set around placing variable levels of density on the borders, the edges of the work, creating a sense of dynamic movement and discovery. Focusing the viewer’s gaze outside the center encourages shifts in perspectives, literally and symbolically. Augury is inspired both by the ideas and aesthetics in the Pattern and Decoration (P&D) movement and Glitch art. 

P&D emerged in the 1970s as a response and challenge to a predominantly white male aesthetic that dominated the artworld and historically marginalized art forms and practices of women and people of color. P&D took a feminist approach by shifting the conversation around crafts and decorative arts, placing them on an equal canonic level with western-style paintings. Augury expands this conversation to generative art and challenges hierarchies and relationships to status, economy, and desire. 

Glitch art refers to artifacts that were created by machine error, intentionally or by chance. Glitch as an art form originally emerged as a response to and celebration of loss in signals “fleeting artifacts that momentarily offer a glimpse into the inner workings and complexities of storage, display, and communication technology” (Iman Moradi, 2009). In Augury, LoVid incorporates a color palette, textures, and shapes inspired by both digital glitches and inherently unstable analog outputs. Aesthetically and viscerally, Augury finds beauty in discarded marginal dysfunctionality. 

This collection’s title, Augury, refers to the practice of interpreting omens/predicting the future based on the behavior of birds. Complex systems and environmental signals inspire and require attention. LoVid’s Augury harnesses and embraces this chaos, the turbulent flow of data, to bring you a sweet and colorful feast for the eyes, food for thought and beyond!

Augury

Totem of Taste is all about the donuts. More than donuts, it is about taste buds.
It celebrates the delightful, sweet, and mysterious flavors that the tip of your tongue wants to remember but cannot disentangle.
In a bite, one sense ignites another.
On the palette, a color blends with its ethereal neighbor.
A point moves in tandem with millions of other points to reflect the monumental presence of food in our lives in real-time.
The donuts are made with strange attractors – dynamic systems that are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. The algorithm guides the trajectories of the points until they settle into deterministic shapes to naturally form textures.


[Minimal interaction involved. Press 's' to save to the current screen size.]

Totem of Taste

"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

Mazinaw is about the timeless struggle to express our humanity and communicate the ineffable. The title derives from Mazinaabikinigan-zaaga'igan, an Algonquin word meaning “picture” or “writing”, alluding to the dual nature of pictographs. 

Inspired by my encounters with neolithic cave paintings in Europe and indigenous pictographs flanking Canadian lakes, Mazinaw hints at etchings, drawings, and anthropomorphic forms. While Mazinaw draws on expressionists from Wassily Kandinsky to Norman Lewis, it takes abstraction one step further: each piece is constructed by the artist indirectly, via a generative code, allowing the emergence of new undreamt-of forms.

The 19 palettes are inspired by the natural world, but their roles are sometimes twisted: cerulean blue strokes appear over an ochre canvas, and green flashes of light hop across a gray expanse. I invite the viewer to spend time with each piece, finding their own order from chaos. Signed fine-art archival inkjet prints will be available for owners at a modest cost.

Note: Mazinaw is best viewed in large format (full screen), or printed. Each piece has infinitely fine details, some of which will only be visible in print. Mazinaw renders seamlessly in any aspect ratio; adjust the window size and shape as desired, click on the frame, and type 'f'. 

Controls:

 s   -- save as png
 spacebar  -- pause/unpause
  f   -- toggle square / fit-to-screen aspect ratio
   1-6  -- set pixel density (default=2 on retina displays)
   +/-  -- increase/decrease pixel density
   n -- enable/disable night mode
   p -- enable/disable pastel mode

Mazinaw

**sem·blance** (noun) – outward and often specious appearance or show.

Semblance explores experiences of the self as sculpted by context. At times, one can experience their private, most expansive self as their true self. In other moments, a performative cutout is needed to conform to one’s environment. Through its various manifestations, the work dwells on the tension between displaying the private self as a form of liberation, and amplifying the performative self as a form of suppression.

The collection draws inspiration from my childhood as an Indian-American growing up in Atlanta, where I felt pressure to conform to the cultural norms and expectations of those around me. This nurtured conflicting perceptions of my public and private identify – a dilemma depicted in Semblance through a reimagination of the weavings and textiles from my childhood home.

Each Semblance is a unique blend of color, diffusion, and environment. Its appearance is shaped by the suppression of a distinct focal point that dictates its context. Ultimately, the viewer is invited to toggle between the two states and explore that tension within themselves.

**–– Controls ––**

– **Press ‘m’** or **click/tap** to toggle between the selves. The output may take many seconds to load.

– **Press ‘s’** to save a .png.

Art Blocks Presents

Augury #19

LoVid

More in Art Blocks Presents

Totem of Taste

Hannah Yan

Organized Disruption

Joshua Davis / PrayStation

Mazinaw

Eric De Giuli

Semblance

rahul iyer

Art

Company

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