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

24 Heures

Breathe You is an interpretation of the bond of love with another being, an unbroken circle full of light and color, together, still or spinning through this universe as time pushes forward with every shared breathe, in and out. Relax, stare, sync your breathing with the motion, become hypnotized and feel the love. This is the first work on Art Blocks to use only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Chase Mints: Special versions may exist named Birth, Death, Rainbow or Golden. One or more might get minted or might not. Catch one if you can.

Breathe You

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

Karma, the original algorithm of Indian thought. Action, inaction, randomness, will -- all are ground in its maw to determine the manifest shape of the next moment. The past makes the present, and shall do so in the future.

But what one sees is the eternal present, and from there, the past is only the fading imprint on memory, an imprint that leaves us with the perception of pattern, as gratifying as it is mystical. The past's fading, thus, is a necessity.

Interaction:
Click/Hold anywhere to start drawing. Press the 'down arrow' to clear the canvas.

KARMA

CELLS was initially inspired by the very particular shape of neurons. I then gave free rein to my creativity and explored many of the aspects of these shapes (size, branches, form, colors, style, position, addition of elements, effects, and other surprises) to allow CELLS to generate a large number of very different variations. All parameters are set based on the unique transaction hash.

Art Blocks Presents

24 Heures #111

Alexis André

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