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

Series Two of the popular 70s Pop. Here we're cruising down Lake Shore Drive in our shag carpet lined Chevy van, with sweet custom airbrushed art on the side. Barbarella meets Saturday Night Fever 🌈🕺 in tiny code form.

70s Pop Series Two

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

Maps for Grief explores the hyper-connected existence, filled with individuals who share common intents, ideals and feelings, but tend to live their sentiments in isolation. Its compositions oppose areas of fluid movement and immobility, revealing the structure of the piece itself: two interacting force fields that dictate the direction, as well as the strength – or absence – of movement.

On the keyboard: Press A to have the lines gently animate. Use the 1/2/3 keys to inspect the fields that make up each iteration.

Maps for grief

“Pieces of Me” is an exploration of the diverse elements that make us who we are. Even though our pieces are of different shapes, colors, sizes and different in number, we all share the form of what it is to be human. We are our pieces and we are also the form.

Art Blocks Presents

Augury #101

LoVid

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