While rotating and morphing, an undercover shape blends in with criss-crossing layers of color blocks.

WARNING: Contains flashing imagery.

Interactive Controls: 
Use the arrow keys (or WASD) to move the undercover shape around the screen
Press F to toggle on/off the flashing color blocks
Press R to toggle on/off the rotation of the shape
Press M to toggle on/off the morphing of the shape
Press C to center the shape on the canvas
Press B to return the shape to its beginning location
Press spacebar to toggle on/off all animations

Undercover

Attempts at perfection are destined to fail. This project embraces the impossibility of perfection in human execution and digitally simulates these imperfections.

In his abstract minimalist work, visual artist Wouter Kalis steers away from meaning. Horizontal black and white paper strips are placed on colored paper panels and one strip dictates the placing of the next. However, each attempt at perfection ends in failure. These mistakes have now become the signature of his work and contribute to the depth of content.

Digital representations of minimalist art can be executed to perfection but are less interesting to look at. In this project, artist Wouter Kalis and his son, software engineer Rosco Kalis, together attempt to recreate the human touch in digital art, the imperfection. 

The project displays computer-generated digital works similar to the physical works made out of paper. The colors of the digital panels are directly derived from the colors of the paper used for the physical work. The digital works can thus be reproduced using real paper. Please see the project website for details if you're interested in purchasing a handmade physical reproduction of your NFT.

Imperfections

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

There are many mysterious waves that surround us, from deep space signals to hidden radio stations. 'Unknown Signals' is a reminder of the fascinating world of radio waves that our eyes cannot catch. Click to stop/start the animation. Press the 'b' key to remove the foreground.

Unknown Signals

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

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