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

24 Heures

In the right hand, a pen can effortlessly reveal the most characteristic features of a person, inside and out. Following the twist and turn of the line, echoes of practice and repetition, the path becomes a walk through the recesses of a subconscious human mind. Total Strangers pays tribute to this time-honoured flight of the human creativity, generating a rogue’s gallery of faces from a continuous fluid line and a virtual pencil case of select drawing tools. We invite you to follow the line as it goes for a walk. Watch it unfold and give life a cast of unique characters, reflections of those around us.

[P] - Pause
[B] - Toggle transparent background
[F] - Performance-agnostic desired frame rate. Switch between 30 (default) and 60.

Total Strangers

Departing from generative art’s focus on the size and variety of algorithmic outputs, Coalition contains just 36 geometric creations. Every mint is composed of unique combinations of line, shape, and color, making them artworks unto themselves. However, just as significant as the individual mints is the larger series of which they are each a part. When viewed collectively as a 6x6 grid, the 36 tokens make up a larger, single artwork, the titular Coalition. Patterns and palettes that exist across different tokens come together seamlessly in the Coalition, allowing users to recognize their mint as an indispensable element of the coherent whole.

By highlighting the inextricable relationship between the single set and its 36 components, Coalition suggests that storytelling must play a vital role in the future of generative art. The medium’s current emphasis on long-form algorithmic exploration has come at the expense of narrative craft. While long-form algorithmic exploration has produced groundbreaking artwork and will continue to do so, our project urges practitioners and collectors to consider generative art’s capabilities outside of replicating the look of analog media. Instead of attempting a mimesis of old modes of production, Coalition foregrounds the stories about human experience that emerge when artists free their code from the burden of replicating paint and paper. We ask, does the “art” in generative art refer to the algorithm, or the outputs?

To encourage artists and collectors to value storytelling and limitation in their NFTs, Coalition doubles as performance art. While the set is limited to 36 mints, a 37th is available for purchase. The collector who buys the final token will find only an error message. The algorithm self-destructs after mint #35. Read about why we chose to do this [here](https://medium.com/@generativeartworks/from-reservation-to-coalition-the-stories-that-generative-art-can-tell-d5466e7ba15b).

There can be no avant-garde because everything has been done.
—Pedro Friedeberg

Coalition

_Libra_ functions as a manifesto that rejects digital art made from mimetic processes – the emulation of traditional analogue mediums and techniques. Such techniques are ubiquitous in digital art and arguably hamper the development of genuinely new aesthetics and new discourse for such a budding medium. 

Artists use digital mediums to mimic physical characteristics like brush strokes or textures of clay. It is not to say that these effects are not successful. Emulation of analogue artworks grants the digital work a natural, relatable and seemingly physical character. This use of the medium simultaneously distances the work from typical connotations of digital artworks being lifeless, flat, precise, and rigid. Perhaps this mimicry makes the work feel ‘finished.’ Digital techniques infiltrated painting in the 90s and early 2000s. At that time artists like Albert Oehlen and Jeff Elrod merged digital and analogue techniques to create a sort of ‘screen space’ on the canvas – something somewhere between a painterly space and a digital space. The Skarstedt Gallery, who originally presented Oehlen’s exhibition titled Computer Paintings, proclaimed that limitations in computers pushed Oehlen to ‘finish’ the paintings by hand – the paintings “required a human hand to enhance the final product.” That is to say that Oehlen augmented the digital works with an analogue technique. This is quite related to the current movement in digital art. Digital artists augment their works with emulations of analogue techniques. This observation raises the question: what does digital art look like when it does not emulate analogue art? Can such a work exist and feel ‘finished’?

To investigate such questions, _Libra_ generates imagery from first principles and default settings – two conflicting concepts that when brought together bring balance to the artwork. Each invocation of the algorithm directly uses the hash as the paintbrush: _Libra_ creates color-fields and blurs by placing the hash characters onto the canvas until it is sufficiently covered. Each character is initially recognizable as a letter or number – something we may all be familiar with. As the screen fills with more and more characters, some become unrecognizable and part of a larger system. Through these actions the hash is transformed into minute and carefully placed strokes that create illusions of light, space, and form that is unique to the screen space in which digital art lives. The remaining, recognizable characters ground our eye and act as a ‘staffage figure’ in a landscape painting. 

_Libra_ rejects traditional standards of aesthetics and beauty; Instead, _Libra_ embraces self-reflexivity and a contemporary definition of  kitsch – often a pejorative used to describe ‘low-brow’ or naïve artwork that is appreciated ironically or in a cult-like manner. In this series, a colored dot is dragged around the canvas both irrationally and without control. Drawing our attention in, this dot transfixes the viewer in an effort to shift the viewers’ attention from glancing at the work to a sustained look. These strokes are naïve and highly stylized – they embody the kitsch – and are mockingly-emulative of painterly marks and linework and grants the work a tone of self-reflexivity. Kitsch is obtained with drop shadows that create simple but satisfying _trompe l’oeil_ effects and fabricate a false sense of depth. Such an effect can be interpreted as humorous: this is an obvious and ironic representation of depth – it is totally fake and recognizable as fake on the flat digital display in which _Libra_ lives. 

Libra is a careful balancing act that creates form and color only to erase it.

Libra

Cosmodesias imagines a region not subjected to orthodox physical space-time conventions. Light trails navigate a multi-dimensional space warped and bent by mathematical formulas, producing imaginary volumes which become a humble reminder of the vast unknown surrounding us and our existence.

High res print version available for collectors at: 
https://proper-code.com/cosmodesias#{token_id}

Art Blocks Presents

24 Heures #105

Alexis André

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