Inspired by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. Made with an interest in color theory and a love for color in general.

Dot Grid

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.

JPEG

Using single Cyrillic character typography with an inspiration from Soviet era punch cards, technology and mentality to some extent, _Such A Lovely Time_ is part of an ongoing obsession of creating visual complexity from the most basic shapes while retaining a sense of order in appearance. This sense of structure is something that holds true to most of us individuals, communities, nations. However disorganised or frail one may be on the inside one often makes a substantial effort to appear structured, ordered. In other words our orderliness stems from the perception of that very orderliness.

The themes explored in my work are often a bi-product of my echoic memory in which I often pick up on background movie dialogues and tend to remember them by associating a colour and feeling to them. This in turn becomes an artistic direction, drawing inspiration from the sets, colours, location, time period, soundtrack, language and so on. The soundbite and evoked emotions guide the exploration and creation process.
More often than not the line from the movie becomes the title for the piece, as is the case for _Such A Lovely Time_.

_Such A Lovely Time_ has a number of simple traits that when combined create intricate compositions.
- Three different styles (Grid, Punch Card and Mixed) set the foundation.
	- The Grid style is based on a simple grid of elements with varying levels of density.
	- While the Punch Card style is essentially also a grid, it has a different rhythm to it, at times very sparse with isolated clusters, at other times those clusters and elements are connected together almost resembling sheet music. In some instances the Punch Card can be very dense almost to the point of saturation.
	- The Mixed style is a blend of the two aforementioned and introduces a higher degree of variations and somewhat unexpected results.

- There are 16 palettes, each one of them named after a city. The colours are extracted from personal travel photos to those cities before being fine tuned.

- The Cyrillic glyph is the centre piece of the composition, sometimes bold and in the foreground, at times fragmented and sometimes even hidden, as if an invitation to the viewer to look closer and explore the many layered details.

- The other traits that make up the piece may have less depth in their meaning but add to the overall amount of graphical variations.

Each iteration of _Such A Lovely Time_ is a generative attempt at technical aesthetics.

Created by petitsapin (Dominique McKerl Dautheribes).

Such A Lovely Time

Small grids, large grids, grids within grids, some colors, lots of colors, inward motion, outward motion. 🌹 The work is responsive, it will adapt to any screen size and resolution.

Dive

Gen 3, the third and final installment of the Gen-Trilogy series, uses word combinations to create unexpected phrases. The phrases play with meaning, or the idea of it,  while characterizing identities relating to blockchain and NFT culture in a fun and abstract way. Gen 3 continues an emerging trend of parsing the minted token's hash in order to produce a deterministic image or animation. For each Gen 3 minted, 40% of the proceeds are donated to a non-profit organization called EveryShelter whose mission is to repurpose waste products into useful materials designed to help people in need. More information can be found at https://everyshelter.org/

Art

Company

Learn