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

*Your Story* is a book like no other.

It's the story you always wanted to read,
the story you always wanted to create.
Any story you want.
*Your Story* is your imagination projected within the pages, 
to tell a story today, 
and another tomorrow.

---

### The idea:

I was playing with a dot on a canvas, when I recognized the first symbol.
In the end, writing is not different from drawing.
So I generated another. And another.
That's how I realized that I had discovered a new language. As a writer, I knew what I had to do:
let this language tell the stories it wants.

Characters in modern alphabets are symbols that, over thousands of years, we aligned on in order to comunicate in written form.
Most people can tell which character represents what in the alphabet they're most familiar with.
There is no room for imagination anymore in the characters themselves. It's all up to the combination of them.
So we form words, sentences, chapters, books.

But imagine now a language that no one understands.
Every interpretation of it is valid: there is no wrong answer. 
Anyone reading it is perceiving a different story, creating a different story.
It's *your* own choice.
You can decide to change the story at every reading. Or keep a piece of it consistent. Collaborate with others to create a new story.

*Your Story* is giving back full imagination to *you*.

---

### How it works:

I wanted *Your Story* to look like a book, and all pieces of the algorithm follow this aesthetic direction.
The aspect ratio is set to √2:1, as most of the paper sizes available worldwide (ISO 216, ISO 217 and ISO 269).
Two set tokens (first and last) are the cover and the blurb. 
The remaining tokens form the interior, using token ID to determine whether the page is left or right and the respective margins.
The hash is used to determine the aesthetics of the page: the character style, the type of page (chapter header, illustration, normal text), the presence of notes, and highlights.
All character styles have clear differences between them, and occasionally they are all mixed together.
*Your Story* is not meant to be a single alphabet, but rather an exploration of the imagination. Different character styles may evoke different thoughts.

Your Story

Inspired by nature, executed by robots.

FLEUR is a tribute to the beauty and interrelation between nature and science that have amazed people for centuries. Exploration of mathematics as the language that explains the architecture of the physical world around us. Manifestation of what nature essentially is - complexity born from simplicity, beauty born from chaos, life born from matter.  Where does one stop and the other start?

Once painted, the canvas keeps evolving, living and breathing, capturing the little changes in the Universe overtime.

Check the features of your mint to see the story behind your FLEUR.

Fleur

## SL/CE (slice)
This artwork explores Suprematism and generative composition, attempts to fill some gap between generated and constructed artworks.
It achieves composition by slicing simple shapes into pieces by some rules and testing them against a "bad composition detector", then carefully selecting colors for shapes.

### Algorithm
Each iteration starts with selecting the simplest figure (circle, square, rectangles, trapezoid), then shape is placed on the canvas according to specific rules, cut along one or more "slice lines", after which the parts can be shifted, rotated or removed. 
The process is repeated several times for several starting figures, after which the resulting composition is obtained. 
Then an "Bad composition detector" function comes into play, and if the composition is considered "bad", the pseudo-random composition process is repeated with partially different inputs until a "good composition" is obtained, according to this evaluation function.

### Bad composition detector
Function that takes into account and evaluates the size of the figures individually, the total area occupied by the figures, distribution of the figures on the canvas, the balance of emptiness and fullness.
All of these parameters are used to find those outcomes that seem to me to work poorly. It turns out there is a piece of me in this code.

### Result
Looking at images, you can often see something in them, this effect is close to pareidolia, sometimes images works well as profiles pictures, and I am very pleased that I was able to achieve this.

### Extra
Each token is a unique generator with partially fixed parameters.
Click or tap at the bottom half of image to generate a new image.
Click or tap at the top half of image to toggle slideshow.

SL/CE

Hashtractors are a collection of generative renderings of various parametric equations commonly know as "strange attractors". These equations are at the heart of chaos theory; a branch of mathematics focused on the study of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. A selection of 29 different equations has been made for this collection. Hash data is used as their parameters.

Art Blocks Presents

Augury #59

LoVid

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