Rapture

Rapture is a series exploring magical seals overflowing their boundaries, gradually dissolving into the surroundings. It is imagined as abstract iconography for a fictional mystic religion. Rapture is the conclusion of a system I have been working with and perfecting over several years and it is the first time that it is presented completely autonomous. The series consists of computationally heavy art pieces, with calculations happening while the seal shake to contain its powers. 25% of the proceeds from this project will go to the preservation of the Ecuadorian rainforest Bigai through Randers Rainforest Wildlife Foundation.

Proclivity

Flow

Intensity

Bias

Allegiance

Seal

Timing

Support

Forces

Chromatism

Alignment

Backdrop

Phase

Gemstones

Topaz

Ruby

Sapphire

Emerald

Rhodolite

Amethyst

Spiromorphs are procedural roulette figures that investigate aesthetic relationships between form, symmetry and rotary motion. Variations are plotted using chained circles that overlay periodic continuous curves on an empty universe. The dynamic engine generates emergent morphologies of different colors and types while producing irregular yet harmonic forms. Charity: 5% of sales will be donated to National Alzheimer’s Foundation, a nonprofit organization helping families who suffer from neurological diseases.

Spiromorphs

*Erratic : irregular in performance, behaviour, or attitude; inconsistent and unpredictable*

One’s harmony with the world can become severed while experiencing stress. Feeling lost or confused within a clouded mind, struggling to call upon a creative muse, defending your self-worth against creeping doubts, and projecting flashes of anger towards others. This torrent of bubbling turmoil can sustain by fixating on the moments of chaos, past, and present. Continuing to feed the storm in this way ultimately will lead to burdensome strife and a ravaged mind.

As a nascent artist working to hone my artistic abilities and establish myself within a historical art movement, I have often experienced stress along my journey. This collection captures these internal struggles as fragmented waves of colour arranged across a spectrum of relative calms, chaotic bursts, and winding paths. Each piece reflects a unique sense of uncertainty.

My intent for Erratic was to challenge myself to create a purist’s form of generative art, wherein a set of randomized values are shaped to be used directly as inputs into an instruction path that is consistent in execution and does not use branching conditionals as a means of achieving variety in composition, colour or form. By actively rejecting predetermined features in favour of shaping a domain that is acted upon consistently, I felt I could achieve occurrences of uniquely identifiable emergent design that I otherwise may not have discovered. The work begins with a euclidean coordinate space intended to render a smoothed half-torus which is then randomly mutated through progressive iterations of translations, rotations, polar reflections, slices, twists, and distortions. This pattern of operations produces a nearly infinite set, shaped only by the defined input ranges, from which each piece will be minted. Any knowledge of the instantiated values before viewing could not lead to any reasonable prediction of what will be rendered.

Erratic

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

How can intent be communicated when ideas are filtered through a pseudorandom number generator? Simply looking at the output does not make it clear whether a stroke is placed on the canvas because of a decision by the artist or by a roll of the dice. The artist’s hand is more present in the process than the result; they choose the algorithms, tune the parameters, and prune the features. As I experimented with my code, I held a particular idea in mind, but I was uncertain how it would finally manifest. I pursued a visual composition that made me feel a certain way, and the visuals I landed on communicate my feeling better than anything I can put into words. Through Curved Air is about the challenge of communication. Regardless of the medium, I can never be certain that the message I intend to send is the message that is received.

Through Curved Air takes inspiration from musical minimalism, where repetition is used to highlight changes in rhythm and harmony. Every output is created by repeatedly copying a single shape. Each copy only has meaning in relation to the other shapes nearby, and that meaning changes with the context around it. Delicate structures form and are subsequently obscured by further layers, and though they may be hidden, they still affect the perception of the final image. Clicking on the canvas will start or stop the looping mode, where the image is recreated in a slightly different way. New facets are exposed as the composition changes yet remains the same. Just as I spend my days trying to share my inner experience through my art, Through Curved Air uses each shape and each loop and each token hash to attempt to create a common feeling between myself and the viewer.

Through Curved Air also takes inspiration from the paintings of Joan Mitchell. I was drawn to her expressive strokes, vibrant colors, and use of negative space, all of which come together to give a more intense feeling of looking at a landscape than just looking at a painting of a landscape. Her energetic marks clearly communicate that there is a human being behind the art. The marks of generative works are often similarly representative of the underlying process, but instead of drawing focus to the artist behind the piece, they draw attention to the algorithm. To convey human emotion in the way I intended, I had to use a subtler algorithm.

The technical tools to convey this emotion are tools I have been consistently developing in my practice. I love making generative art because I can design a system where I understand how all the components work, but they can still come together to produce a result that surprises me. The algorithm behind the compositional variation in my earlier works Coquina and Primordial is one I continued to evolve, and it rests at the heart of Through Curved Air. In fact, I pushed it further than ever, using it to create the individual shapes that form the building block of each output. This emergent variation permeates the work and results in surprising images that more closely resemble paintings than anything I made previously. I believe the potential for surprise is key to conveying emotion through code. When the possibility space of the algorithm grows too large to understand, the mind wanders to the person behind the algorithm. Perhaps the human element is the struggle to understand, or the struggle to be understood.

Through Curved Air

Art Blocks Presents

Rapture

Thomas Lin Pedersen

About Rapture

Thomas Lin Pedersen

Algorithmic edition of 1000

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Spiromorphs

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Art Blocks Presents

Rapture

Thomas Lin Pedersen

About Rapture

Thomas Lin Pedersen

Algorithmic edition of 1000

Display notes

Additional details

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Spiromorphs

SAB

Erratic

Owen Moore

Wabi Sabi

Kazuhiro Tanimoto

Through Curved Air

Jacob Gold

Art

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Learn

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