I feel like an imposter. Pseudo-anonymous as *ippsketch* while maintaining an engineering career and family life. I live on the edge of two worlds, immersed in self-doubt. Leaning into each space, I bring a part of each world with me, but wonder if what I bring is enough. I question my identity while learning to embrace it. Art, after all, is made by ordinary people. And I wonder, does anyone really know what they're doing?

*Imposter Syndrome* is an expression of my seeming dual existence and my feelings of not being enough in many aspects of life. But I do not mean for this to be entirely prescriptive to the work and often see other interpretations and meanings myself, such as anytime I straddle the edge of something new, when I'm on the fence and making a decision between two directions of my life, or if I consider the shadow or light I cast in the spaces and people around me. These pieces move me differently from day-to-day.

This work leans into minimalism. As trends in generative art push toward the visually complex and highly technical, I find my current focus on simple composition and compelling structure. I'm also drawn to broken symmetry, which echos my dual artist/engineer life and is also what I consider to be a visual representation of generative art - design and order on the one hand, random variation within constraint on the other.

Color palettes echo those used in *Bent*. Simple and bold colors with stark black and white support. Pieces are rendered in a default poster size (3:4), but are also adaptive to screen size so that they can fit any display. The work can be interacted with by pressing the number keys 1, 2, 3, 4 to see the steps of construction.

Imposter Syndrome

DIVERGENCE
Divergence, a never-ending abstract motion work, reacts to audio and touch inputs.  Dive into stacks of deterministic layers to explore emerging patterns, and fine-tune the audio reactivity to your preferences.  

You may wish to use the controls to wander within Divergence until the aesthetic feels right to you, or complements your audio input.  Navigating the art in this way gives a tangible window into my artistic process.  My aesthetic is influenced by the music I listen to as I code. I enjoy experimenting and looking for the art in the algorithm.  This can mean playing with overarching ideas, but also making many small changes until I find consistent visual appeal over a range of outputs.  

Divergence exhibits animations changing over time in expanding, textural layers.  It elaborates on concepts I’ve developed in previous works: my approach to color in phase; linear motion in Parade; interlacing lines and expansion/contraction in Kaleidoscope; and the noise textures of Sift.  Newly explored is continuous animation with touch and audio inputs, which affect the viewing position in time and space.  

A common quip in the Art Blocks community is that motion art has a penalty. Many enjoy a final product that is printable to frame at home.  As technology advances, I believe it is equally important to create work that can only exist on a screen, and is unique to digital art. Larger displays are catching up to the artistic space and becoming more accessible, but I also want my work to be approachable immediately.  Keeping the code lean and performant allows it to run well on a range of screen sizes and processor powers, from mobile devices to multi-story displays.  There has been discussion that a body of motion work takes a long time to sift through, as it needs to be viewed live.  In consideration of this, I made Divergence immersive, rather than a static experience. I want the extra time spent with it to be fun and entertaining.  

Usage: Navigate left/right to traverse the timeline; navigate up/down to travel through the layers and expand/contract the patterns.  Please see “Display Notes” for further instructions (user input, audio reactivity, url parameters).  Accessibility is important to me, so Divergence accepts inputs from touch, keyboard, mouse, and gaming controllers with an analog stick.  

*Photosensitive seizure warning: These artworks contain flashing colors and moving patterns.

Divergence

Darwin’s Orchid wasn’t discovered by Darwin, but he correctly hypothesized that its long blooms, up to a foot and a half tall, coevolved with a moth with a very long tongue—just long enough to extract its nectar. This flower embodies the great variety of and fascination with the orchid family. Orchids come in all shapes, sizes, colors, textures and scents—perhaps this is why they’ve entranced cultures dating back well over five millennia, becoming symbols of virility, beauty, peace and prosperity in the process. Named “Cattleya” after my first rare orchid, this work is my Ode to Orchids—a mystical flower that brings me endless delight.

Read more about my [inspiration & process↗](https://bensnell.medium.com/7c943673d54f)

*Notes:*
*— This project is intended to be run on modern devices, operating systems and browsers. Older ones may yield undesired or undefined behaviors.*
*— This script includes a modified version of [glsl-fast-gaussian-blur](https://github.com/Jam3/glsl-fast-gaussian-blur), licensed under the MIT License (MIT) Copyright (c) 2015 Jam3.*

Cattleya

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zoologic (zō- ə- ˈlä- jik) - relating to the properties and vital phenomena exhibited by an animal, animal type, or group.
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Why do animals evolve into different species? Why do they evolve to look or behave one way, and not another? Why do some animals have a few children, while others have many? What makes some animals better at surviving than others?

Zoologic is an exploration of these questions, and of forces that drive the evolution of life. It's a cellular automaton where small creatures ("crobes") compete for survival in a shared space, as their traits and reproductive strategies drift over time. Population dynamics and r/K selection theory play a role in their gradual evolution into new forms.

Life for the bacteria-like crobes is a simple affair. Each explores their world — a hexagonal grid  — according to their own pre-coded movement strategy. Each step requires a little bit of “energy,” the fuel that powers movement. Running out of energy means a crobe can’t move, but more energy can be obtained by consuming the only available food source — other crobes! Crobes can detect their neighbors within a couple of spaces, identify them as predators or prey, and react according to their needs.

Crobes consume each other for resources, then use those resources to reproduce -- but not perfectly. Each reproduction introduces new mutations, causing traits to change and new behaviors and appearances to emerge! The crobes’ neural nets learn over time, and only the fittest survive, making Zoologic an example of a neuroevolutionary algorithm. As neural nets are trained, they can be saved, loaded, and battled, shared with others. Train your crobes locally and compete with friends! Each output includes a fully on-chain, pre-trained neural net that has been generatively modified at the time of mint to give each set of crobes their own unique personality.

Key controls: [A] Fullscreen (press a second time for edge-to-edge animation), [H] Help menu, [I] AI menu, [Space] change color palette, [D] Toggle Dark mode, [F+#] Adjust framerate, [X+#/arrows] Adjust detail level, [N] restart animation with different random seed. Please see Help menu for a more comprehensive explanation of available controls and settings, including some intended for improved presentation for longer periods of time.

Zoologic

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 #425

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