Beatboxes are fully immersive, virtual reality, audiovisual generative art on the Ethereum blockchain. Beatboxes consist of 841 generated unique rooms where you can fully immerse yourself with any virtual reality device. You can also enjoy them from your pc in a more conventional way. Beatboxes are our second experimental piece of art, following the successful release of Unigrids. The goal with this collection was to create an environment where you can escape your reality for a moment and enjoy your unique piece of art while stimulating the most senses possible. You can open your eyes inside your unique art piece and explore by looking around and listening as you enjoy something you own. In live view use arrows to move around and spacebar to start the music and animation. Visit beatboxes.io to browse all Beatboxes more easily, Have fun! *note that Beatboxes are using aframe which is currently not optimized for ios mobile and safari browser. 

Beatboxes

~~~~~~~~~~~  Simple, Pure & Uncut Noise, straight from the Hash ~~~~~~~~~~~ 

HashCrash is an ode to the book SnowCrash, written by Neal Stephenson. This book had a very big influence on the crypto and NFT culture. Long before NFT's or concepts like the MetaVerse were used, Stephenson already described the things we are living with today. For example, he introduced the concept of HyperCards, digital items that could be exchanged and sold in the MetaVerse.

One of the main concepts in the book is what is called "SnowCrash". This is a digital drug that can take over the minds of people, turning people into puppets to be controlled by their master. The drug was represented as a type of visual noise that could bring the viewer into a trance state. Like SnowCrash, NFT's have quite some effect on our minds and body, the addictive behavior and price rushes of NFT’s evoke in people clearly something that has resemblance to how certain drugs work. 
HashCrash plays in a cynical way with this concept of a digital drug. 

By simply representing the pure input hash-data and mapping it  to color, geometric figures appear. By mirroring and cycling through the numbers, the structures behind the random hash string come alive. What seems as a simple noise pattern, can reveal whole worlds to explore for the ones that look closely. The fast paced representation of the hash data can evoke different feelings from relaxation to panic. 


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  Cheap, fast & powerful  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

* No customized rarities for this one. What you see is purely translated randomness from the transaction hash.

** Stare at the center closely in live mode for guaranteed breakthrough within 10. minutes

*** Use with care, do not watch when sensitive for strobing lights.



HashCrash

Using single Cyrillic character typography with an inspiration from Soviet era punch cards, technology and mentality to some extent, _Such A Lovely Time_ is part of an ongoing obsession of creating visual complexity from the most basic shapes while retaining a sense of order in appearance. This sense of structure is something that holds true to most of us individuals, communities, nations. However disorganised or frail one may be on the inside one often makes a substantial effort to appear structured, ordered. In other words our orderliness stems from the perception of that very orderliness.

The themes explored in my work are often a bi-product of my echoic memory in which I often pick up on background movie dialogues and tend to remember them by associating a colour and feeling to them. This in turn becomes an artistic direction, drawing inspiration from the sets, colours, location, time period, soundtrack, language and so on. The soundbite and evoked emotions guide the exploration and creation process.
More often than not the line from the movie becomes the title for the piece, as is the case for _Such A Lovely Time_.

_Such A Lovely Time_ has a number of simple traits that when combined create intricate compositions.
- Three different styles (Grid, Punch Card and Mixed) set the foundation.
	- The Grid style is based on a simple grid of elements with varying levels of density.
	- While the Punch Card style is essentially also a grid, it has a different rhythm to it, at times very sparse with isolated clusters, at other times those clusters and elements are connected together almost resembling sheet music. In some instances the Punch Card can be very dense almost to the point of saturation.
	- The Mixed style is a blend of the two aforementioned and introduces a higher degree of variations and somewhat unexpected results.

- There are 16 palettes, each one of them named after a city. The colours are extracted from personal travel photos to those cities before being fine tuned.

- The Cyrillic glyph is the centre piece of the composition, sometimes bold and in the foreground, at times fragmented and sometimes even hidden, as if an invitation to the viewer to look closer and explore the many layered details.

- The other traits that make up the piece may have less depth in their meaning but add to the overall amount of graphical variations.

Each iteration of _Such A Lovely Time_ is a generative attempt at technical aesthetics.

Created by petitsapin (Dominique McKerl Dautheribes).

Such A Lovely Time

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

Paths is an animated journey across various subterranean and aboveground environments. To fully experience the project, you need to see it in high resolution with a capable GPU. Make sure that your browser uses your dedicated graphics card if any, and that you get a good frame rate. Control keys: 1-4 (change speed), 9 (fill aspect ratio), 0 (original aspect ratio), space-bar (play/pause)

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Paths #317

Darien Brito

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