Renders Game is a note to myself on creativity.

I will often believe strongly in an idea, yet, once realised, and I'm confronted with the reality of the output, it leaves me unsatisfied.

So I take it apart, find a detail that I love, and grow something new from that tiny piece. It's a constant process of discovery. Eventually, I'll find a result that feels right — but only once it's staring back at me.

The name of this piece is a tongue-in-cheek nod to Orson Scott Card’s 1985 science fiction novel, *Ender’s Game*, as well as to the countless outputs I’ve produced during this creative process. In the book, Ender trains relentlessly. Only once he's completed his final exam (what he believes to be another simulation) does he discover that it was actually real — the final battle to save humanity.

In my own creative process, most of the steps along the path likewise feel like practise, with the satisfaction of achievement only revealing itself after the work stares back at me, complete.

This has been one of my longest running creative processes to date, having been re-written and re-conceived many times over.

It's worthy of the name.

## About

This piece treads a balance between the abstract and the literal.

The generative structure draws inspiration from cubism - procedurally generated curves of various complexity are grown, layered, intersected, and then broken into fragments of constantly shifting scale. 

Painting each fragment in turn reveals an abstraction of the original curves and lines, viewed through the algorithm's interpretation.

Each fragment is illustrated using prominent, simple lines - a nod to the literal. These are rendered using ink-like outlines and bold, loose colour application. It draws inspiration from contemporary ink illustration, balanced against the natural precision of digital tools. Not completely organic, yet not completely digital.

## Keys:

Number keys 1-4 - Debug views
Number key 5 - Re-render from seed
s - Download rendered image

Renders Game

Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing #118 instructs executors to connect randomly-placed points with straight lines, on a continuous surface of wall. Art Blocks Project #118 imagines that seminal artwork executed on complex, algorithmically-generated walls.

LeWitt Generator Generator

AlphaModica explores the nature of our reality, helping us ground ourselves at a time when the answers aren’t so clear. The primary shapes in this work are known as Modica bands and are inspired by particle physics and string theory. Each mint produces a completely unique form for the bands drawn from several possible types, each with a deeper meaning. The bands are further customized by dozens of parameters that are uniquely derived from the token hash making each mint 100% unique. 

The background is a tangent field computed from angles in the foreground shapes. It represents an energy field permeating the universe. This unusual arrangement -- a background created by the foreground was done to hint at questions of causality. 

Colors for the foreground shapes are selected from twenty hand tuned color palettes. The background palette is seeded by the foreground but also has elements that are produced by the field itself. This combination of hand selection and random generation speaks to questions of choice in the universe and asks the question of how even under high randomness there can be symmetry, and connectedness.

Danooka, the artist behind AlphaModica is a technologist and metaverse based artist. Danooka’s previous NFT projects includes the successful RIBONZ trilogy. 

A portion of the mint proceeds will be allocated to support Girls Who Code.


AlphaModica

*For everyone that should still be there.*

*For everyone that went through hell and came back.*

*For everyone that stood on the sidelines, helpless.*

*For everyone that fights, day in and day out.*

We all deal with unexpected events in different ways - you can never be ready for the worst. What happens to the soul when you get too close to the end? How will you perceive the crossing to whatever awaits?

Will you be alone?

Or will you see the souls of the other *Departed?*

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*Departed* deals with the uncertainty of life, feelings of helplessness and how we might be losing touch with our humanity when everything is online, when you are not allowed to see your relatives, when you are not allowed to be with them - even at the worst of times, when you can not even know what is happening. *Departed* is a representation of what the people close to me might be going through.

An experiment in composition that pushes everything I do to new extremes (with familiar elements), *Departed* works around creating various layers with different centers of interest, from colours to shapes, textures to frame.

Departed

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)

Art Blocks Presents

Paths #415

Darien Brito

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Mitchell F. Chan

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