*Your Story* is a book like no other.

It's the story you always wanted to read,
the story you always wanted to create.
Any story you want.
*Your Story* is your imagination projected within the pages, 
to tell a story today, 
and another tomorrow.

---

### The idea:

I was playing with a dot on a canvas, when I recognized the first symbol.
In the end, writing is not different from drawing.
So I generated another. And another.
That's how I realized that I had discovered a new language. As a writer, I knew what I had to do:
let this language tell the stories it wants.

Characters in modern alphabets are symbols that, over thousands of years, we aligned on in order to comunicate in written form.
Most people can tell which character represents what in the alphabet they're most familiar with.
There is no room for imagination anymore in the characters themselves. It's all up to the combination of them.
So we form words, sentences, chapters, books.

But imagine now a language that no one understands.
Every interpretation of it is valid: there is no wrong answer. 
Anyone reading it is perceiving a different story, creating a different story.
It's *your* own choice.
You can decide to change the story at every reading. Or keep a piece of it consistent. Collaborate with others to create a new story.

*Your Story* is giving back full imagination to *you*.

---

### How it works:

I wanted *Your Story* to look like a book, and all pieces of the algorithm follow this aesthetic direction.
The aspect ratio is set to √2:1, as most of the paper sizes available worldwide (ISO 216, ISO 217 and ISO 269).
Two set tokens (first and last) are the cover and the blurb. 
The remaining tokens form the interior, using token ID to determine whether the page is left or right and the respective margins.
The hash is used to determine the aesthetics of the page: the character style, the type of page (chapter header, illustration, normal text), the presence of notes, and highlights.
All character styles have clear differences between them, and occasionally they are all mixed together.
*Your Story* is not meant to be a single alphabet, but rather an exploration of the imagination. Different character styles may evoke different thoughts.

Your Story

When does a work stop being the representation of our world and become art?
Can we appreciate a work of art without measuring it with our space-time parameters?
In Time Atlas 🌐 the link with our Earth shaped over millennia through the urbanization process is explicit.
Time Atlas 🌐 uses geo-referenced city data intensively and displays it randomly in geographic areas, showing the current time of each city, whether it is currently exposed to the sun, at night or at dusk by changing the reference color palette . There are over 200 cities collected in its monumental internal archive, each with its own latitude and longitude values, UTC and DST time, number of inhabitants.
Each instance shows a square of our land, the cities arrange you in a grid that respects the distances in proportion. The background rotates to the current value of seconds which is the same all over the world. It is potentially composed of 8 geometric elements that can be present with different probabilities.
City clocks can be of 4 different shapes; the length of the pendulum that rotates with the time of the seconds is composed of 5 elements that combine randomly but the length of the pendulum corresponds to the number of inhabitants of that city.
The elements of the composition can be turned off and on again thanks to these keys:
[c] toggle cities
[w] toggle watches
[b] toggle background
Finally, there is the Written Circles variation. It takes up a past work of mine with the same title and in my initial idea it had to be the only aspect of Time Atlas 🌐. The salient feature of the Written Circles display is that it does not have a rotating background but, for each city, the crown of minutes is proportional to the number of inhabitants, therefore interesting moiré effects are obtained in superimposition. 

Time Atlas 🌐

Blaschke Ballet is a reflection on movement, color, and mathematics - a juxtaposition of graceful motion and precise calculation. Observe the elegant ballerinas as they leap through the complex plane, the space between them constantly collapsing and reassembling.

Blaschke Ballet

Disobedience to the rule, precarious balance of eccentric forms, crystallization of a fertile tension between virtual and material reality. 
Here: none of that, whatever it means. 

_D-D-Dots_ is an attempt to abandon all intellectualization and to learn to play again. As Schiller argued, "Man is human only when he plays", because that is when creative imagination is completely unleashed.

In this perspective, our focus shifted from the final result to the acts that generate it. Disregarding any specific purpose, we lost ourselves in stacking, assembling, colouring simple shapes, and then again destroying and rebuilding, just like we used to do in childhood. Fun and discovery in the process were the purpose. 

While playing, the idea of network with its nodes and connections became stronger and stronger, but only in its broadest sense. It could evoke the image of branched-chain amino acids as well as the prototype of a boardgame, or even the complex structure of an entire city, whose elements converse and exchange flows of any kind. The continuous oscillation between abstract and figurative corresponds to the continuous oscillation of meaning, just as it happens in the playful dimension.

We keep interpreting these images differently every time we look at them. In any case, once "work" is done its author disappears, or at least no longer matters. So, what do _you_ see there, instead?

D-D-Dots

**FOCUS** is a 1000 image meditation, and it is my second release of Zen-inspired generative art, following [Ensō](https://www.artblocks.io/project/34).

This algorithm can produce images that are elegantly minimal, as well as images featuring complex patterns that explore visual illusions and artificial space. Inspired by the Zen art tradition of doing more with less, the limited palette consists of black, white, and five colors. This both constrains possible outcomes and allows the creation of unique perceptual interactions. Except in extremely rare scenarios, each token can provide a wide variety of visual experiences through its interactive features: use up and down arrows to adjust the pattern recursion factor, left and right arrows to adjust the midpoint count, ‘h’ to hide or show the central shape, and ‘s’ to save. FOCUS is best viewed live and full screen.

FOCUS has a free-to-claim, 100% on-chain, companion generative art project called deFOCUSed. It's a free gift to my collectors. (Thank you!) [More Info](https://matto.xyz/project/defocused/) | [Claim Site](https://defocused.matto.xyz/)

Art Blocks Presents

FOCUS #398

Matto

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