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

Fake Internet Money is not legal tender, and may not be redeemable or exchangeable with other parties or markets following its initial offering. The Artist is not a licensed or registered money transmitter in any district, state, or country. The Money is not a financial security. The Artist makes no claims of adding any further value to the project. Owners of The Money have no reasonable expectation of profit. Any marketing statements made by The Artist should not be taken as investment advice. The secondary market value of The Money may be highly volatile, and The Artist makes no guarantees regarding its liquidity or stability relative to any crypto or fiat currency. All value derived from The Money is entirely subjective. All code is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License, and is provided without warranty of any kind. In no event shall The Artist be held liable for any damages arising from the code or resulting tokens. The typeface is derived from Shippori Mincho B1, which is licensed under a SIL Open Font License. 30% of proceeds were converted to real money and donated to Give Directly. 

Fake Internet Money

Sentience

### Good job, Computer. Do that some more.

To what degree can we teach a computer to make a painting? One that resembles creation from the imperfect hand of a human. Here, the computer attempts to hide itself from the viewer in the details, such as inconsistent borders or uneven layers of paint. Intentional flaws that a human might make unintentionally.
Good, Computer is an exploration of not only how small cumulative inaccuracies create complete images, but also the forms and harmonies that those images evoke.

Consider the following:

***A set of 4 colors is to be considered -- singly as "actors," together as "cast." They are to be presented in 4 different arrangements -- as "performances."***
***Although they remain unchanged in hue and light, in "character", and appear in an unchanging outer frame, the "stage", they are to produce 4 different "scenes" or "plays," each to be so different that one and the same set of colors will be seen as 4 different sets, presented by 4 different casts.***
***And all this can be achieved mainly through changes in quantity which result in shifts of dominance, of recurrence, and consequently of placement.***
***The essential question: which group of colors is ready to lose its identity as a cast?*** 
***-- Josef Albers***

We can answer this question simply by asking ourselves why we're drawn to some arrangements more than others. In doing so, we consider not just tone, but also quantity, intensity and weight in order to form new relationships between the colours. And as such the viewer gives each image their own subjective personality.

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Good, Computer

In the year 3075 of the Second Nuclear Age, a laboratory of an unknown race of aliens was discovered on the planet Vtolmr while drilling a well of molecular oil. Its presumed purpose is to study genetic mutations of races from neighboring planets. During the laboratory investigation, 512 silicon impressions with DNA of different alien species were extracted. Modern methods of quantum analysis do not allow the deciphering of the data obtained. At this point, their value is purely aesthetic. But that may change in time.

Press 1 to 9 - change the pixel density
Press "s" - save the image

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Augury #85

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