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

Dot Grid

Wabi-sabi, an ancient Japanese aesthetic sense, refers to finding beauty in imperfect and lonely things.
Life is irrational and ephemeral. 
Peace and happiness are illusory, built on a fragile balance. 
Wabi-sabi is an immersion of the quality of loneliness within ourselves that accepts various nuances to be beautiful, through a sophisticated lens.
This work attempts to store the compelling concept of Wabi-sabi on the blockchain as the code dynamically generates brushstrokes based on motifs of Shodo (Japanese calligraphy)

Wabi-sabi begins with a deliberate movement in which an ink-soaked brush is plopped down onto the paper, causing the ink to splatter.
Thereafter, a unique algorithm assists in drawing brushstrokes. 
The various forms that emerge from the balance of lines that are straight or curved, regular or irregular, strong or slight, complex or delicate, with varying speeds analogize a person’s will through the brushstrokes. The bleeding, scratching, and splattering of ink lend the modelling even more complexity. Wabi-sabi does not impose precision in creating Shodo strokes. You may notice how the colors always bleed in the same direction, which is impossible to generate in our physical reality. This is because even if the brush is impregnated with multiple hues of ink, the bristles rotate as the brushstrokes are drawn. It may also generate three-dimensional patterns, a feature that is absent in physical practice, offering the impression of depth, as if brushstrokes were drawn arbitrarily in space. This is achieved by controlling the focus.

A key feature of each artwork is that it can be edited. A piece of art is usually completed by the artist and presented to the viewer. I intended to make this work as imperfect as the concept of Wabi-sabi, which can be infinitely edited by the viewer. This is impossible with conventional NFTs, with generated image data uploaded to a server. Such is the luxury in art created with on-chain generative art by code.

For each composition, the blank space as the foreground and background is a conscious and elemental choice in this work.
Wabi-sabi is to accept the lacking. Some artworks can have much of the space as blank, which may seem odd but is consistent with the narrative. Digitally native art often takes full advantage of the computing power to lay out complex patterns across the entire canvas. Wabi-sabi is minimal as a contemporary take on that trend. Through the bleeding and scratching of ink in each brushstroke along with the blank space represented in this work, we welcome imperfection. Conceptually, contrasts between movement and stillness, strength and weakness, audacity and delicacy, complexity and simplicity, vividness and fadedness reveal a melancholic beauty.

The search for beauty through imitation and slight modification, and the exploration of the techniques used to create traditional or innovative shapes, is akin to the training in Shodo. 
Simply said, you cannot do it well the first time. The Japanese word for Shodo ("do") means "road". It is by travelling down the long road involving hours of training and exploration, that the sensitive concept of Wabi-sabi may be understood.

The underlying intention is to facilitate partaking in the process of the artist's exploration. The viewer is the artist and the artist is the viewer, sharing a sense of camaraderie that lives forever on the blockchain

[NOTE]
-Move the mouse over the left edge of the canvas and press the Edit button. 
-To edit, press the ‘S’ key
-To save the image press the ‘R’ key.
-To redraw, modern hardware and browser hardware acceleration is recommended. The Chrome browser on a desktop with a high-end GPU is optimal. On iOS, the best experience is available on iOS 12 or later.

Wabi Sabi

The mid grey chiseled computer interfaces of 1997 have always reminded me of sculptures created in bas-relief, a technique going back to the stone carved petroglyphs that is as ancient as humankind's first steps in making art. The combination of illusion and tactility found in these interfaces shows our longing to have the computer experience to be part of the material world. Therefore it comes as no surprise that the programming language of Ethereum is named 'Solidity'. The blockchain is software, yet it behaves and feels like hardware.

🪨

Window pays tribute to interface culture, and as such, the work is responsive and not scaling. When the work is viewed on a smaller scale, details will disappear, yet the composition stays recognisable. It is like stepping back to see a work from a distance. The work can also increasingly reveal more details when made larger. As a result Window will keep unfolding in the future as resolutions will grow.

The work follows standard window interactions. Double clicking or tapping the title bar will toggle between full browser and windowed view. On a laptop or desktop in windowed view, you can drag and resize your Window as you please. When made tiny, it makes for a nice profile pic. Clicking or tapping the background will cycle through three different background colours.

Window comes in seven latent colours and both in Windows Classic or Mac Classic style.
With the feature ‘Latent colour’ I look at the invisible steps within the procedure of a generative artwork. I love the idea that the script has chosen to feature a colour, but in a later step could fail to make it to the composition. By showing the colour as a feature, I try to extend the visual work with deeper invisible layers of the generative process.
Check the features to see what colour is seeded.

In honour of the blockchain and the web, the work is written in vanilla JavaScript, using no dependancies, and generates standard HTML DOM aiming for a closer feel of the user interface.

Window

AlphaModica explores the nature of our reality, helping us ground ourselves at a time when the answers aren’t so clear. The primary shapes in this work are known as Modica bands and are inspired by particle physics and string theory. Each mint produces a completely unique form for the bands drawn from several possible types, each with a deeper meaning. The bands are further customized by dozens of parameters that are uniquely derived from the token hash making each mint 100% unique. 

The background is a tangent field computed from angles in the foreground shapes. It represents an energy field permeating the universe. This unusual arrangement -- a background created by the foreground was done to hint at questions of causality. 

Colors for the foreground shapes are selected from twenty hand tuned color palettes. The background palette is seeded by the foreground but also has elements that are produced by the field itself. This combination of hand selection and random generation speaks to questions of choice in the universe and asks the question of how even under high randomness there can be symmetry, and connectedness.

Danooka, the artist behind AlphaModica is a technologist and metaverse based artist. Danooka’s previous NFT projects includes the successful RIBONZ trilogy. 

A portion of the mint proceeds will be allocated to support Girls Who Code.


AlphaModica

Himinn is a painterly cloud study exploring light, color, and the generative composition of clouds in the sky. The algorithm creates natural forms and the illusion of ever-changing atmosphere through carefully structured layers of color and shape. Himinn means “a sky”, and it has been incredibly fun to paint the skies with code.  


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