A track. Some vehicles. An endless chase for lovers of loops.

24 Heures

_There are no artifacts. There are only interpretations._

Glass is about the illusion of simplicity that cocoons us in our everyday existence. A glance at Glass may suggest a foam of bubbles or pebbles under clear water. But on inspection, these simple pictures dissolve. Instead of disks one finds stacked panes of translucent glass, intersecting and overlapping. There is dissonance between fine-scale chaos and the harmony of the aggregate. In Glass, two levels of reality -- panes of glass and the foam of bubbles -- are brought close together in scale, so that our oversimplified impression yields a palpable disquiet.

What appears simple is often anything but. Consider a standard wooden desk. To our eyes, it looks solid and continuous, but we know that it is made of atoms, tiny electrons orbiting nuclei. And these subatomic particles are themselves not like miniature solar systems, but creatures of quantum mechanics, stranger than we can imagine. The vast difference in scale between the atomic and the macroscopic hides this complex reality, but fundamentally it is the same phenomenon shown here.

Glass continues my exploration of emergence. While in previous work I explored how simple systems can create complex, emergent forms, here the interest is in the converse: how coherence is often deceptive, masking a complex underlying reality.

Glass draws on the aesthetic of Shin Hanga artists Hiroshi Yoshida and Kawase Hasui, and abstract expressionist Sonja Sekula. In live view, Glass has ambient motion: the shadows evolve, imperceptibly slowly.

The following variations & controls are possible. You may need to click on the canvas before they are active. For a high-resolution output, use the pixel density controls. For example, on a standard laptop, an image saved at pixel density 5 will be approximately 3200 x 4000 pixels, and therefore suitable for printing at ~ 11" x 13" at 300 dpi.

Variations (require redrawing):

f -- fit-to-screen on/off
o -- outline on/off

Controls:

s   -- save as png
spacebar  -- pause/unpause ( useful to reduce CPU load in Live mode )
b -- border on/off ( useful for printing )
1-9  -- set pixel density (default=2 on retina displays)
+/-  -- increase/decrease pixel density

Glass

*🔈 Click anywhere to start the soundtrack 🔈*


***Race Condition*** is a racing game where you're flying through space at rapid speeds and see colors and shapes swoosh by. 


The game-objective is straightforward: you accelerate and try and stay on the road, if you miss a jump or a turn, you crash! The script determines the properties of your spaceship, acceleration, handling and max speed, as well as the map layout, including difficulty, color composition, and available power ups.


Once the series has been fully minted, a highscore of all the mints will be created on [racecondition.art](https://racecondition.art). The winners in each category will be awarded an additional Race Condition Winner NFT. The categories include but are not limited to fastest spaceship, most difficult level, easiest level, worst acceleration, and worst max speed.


In *Race Condition*, the winners are not determined by your driving skills, but by something outside of your control, the properties and features of your mint. Is your level more difficult than the others? Is your spaceship faster? Whether you are a winner in one of the categories is not really up to you, so enjoy the ride and race without pressure! 

**The Controls**
⬆️ or **W** to accelerate
⬇️ or **S** to decelerate (and cancel Nitro)
⬅️ or **A** to drive left
➡️ or **D** to drive right
**Space** to jump
**N** to activate Nitro
**M** or ⬇️ **S** to stop Nitro
**ESC** to open settings

Shortly after loading, the spaceship will start to race the map by itself in *self-driving mode*, where it can't crash. As soon as you press a key on your keyboard, it switches to *driving mode*.

**The Levels**
Race Condition has 21 different map generating algorithms, each with their own set of challenges and difficulty rating. The algorithms take into account the playability in combination with the difficulty and try to strike a good balance between the two. Each mint gets a difficulty rating and that determines which map pool is used for the creation of the level. The easy ones requires next to zero effort whereas the hard ones require a lot of skill in driving. The Easy Medium Hard means that it can select map algorithms from the complete pool.

**The Music**
The music is generated by first selecting a scale from a set of 14 predefined ones, combined with two oscillators / synth configurations, and spread across an imaginary step-sequencer, where the hash determines which steps should be activated or not, how long the sequencer should be, what BPM it should be, and when it step into the next phase of the step-sequencer, which results in some very nice chip-tune repetitive tracks. 

**Notes**
On mobile, the spaceship accelerates automatically and you turn left/right by tilting your device. You need to grant permission for this to work, if you decline, the spaceship will drive by itself in *self-driving mode*.

Race Condition

Don't fight it. Just respect it. Made by Dmitri Cherniak with Javascript and GLSL.

The Eternal Pump

Aithérios explores the notion of ethereality as seen through the transformation of our thoughts and memories.
Thoughts that emerge from our foggy inner state coalesce and become concrete by our minds. At the same time, memories that were once so tangible to us fade into the recesses before their eventual oblivion. Thoughts and memories share an intimacy within the labyrinth of the mind, sometimes they work together to cover ground beyond the horizon of what is understandable.


Art Blocks Presents

24 Heures #49

Alexis André

More in Art Blocks Presents

Glass

Eric De Giuli

Race Condition

Jonas Lund

The Eternal Pump

Dmitri Cherniak

Aithérios

Jorge Ledezma

Art

Company

Learn