When does a work stop being the representation of our world and become art?
Can we appreciate a work of art without measuring it with our space-time parameters?
In Time Atlas 🌐 the link with our Earth shaped over millennia through the urbanization process is explicit.
Time Atlas 🌐 uses geo-referenced city data intensively and displays it randomly in geographic areas, showing the current time of each city, whether it is currently exposed to the sun, at night or at dusk by changing the reference color palette . There are over 200 cities collected in its monumental internal archive, each with its own latitude and longitude values, UTC and DST time, number of inhabitants.
Each instance shows a square of our land, the cities arrange you in a grid that respects the distances in proportion. The background rotates to the current value of seconds which is the same all over the world. It is potentially composed of 8 geometric elements that can be present with different probabilities.
City clocks can be of 4 different shapes; the length of the pendulum that rotates with the time of the seconds is composed of 5 elements that combine randomly but the length of the pendulum corresponds to the number of inhabitants of that city.
The elements of the composition can be turned off and on again thanks to these keys:
[c] toggle cities
[w] toggle watches
[b] toggle background
Finally, there is the Written Circles variation. It takes up a past work of mine with the same title and in my initial idea it had to be the only aspect of Time Atlas 🌐. The salient feature of the Written Circles display is that it does not have a rotating background but, for each city, the crown of minutes is proportional to the number of inhabitants, therefore interesting moiré effects are obtained in superimposition. 

Time Atlas 🌐

Rippling is a generative algorithm that recreates the impression of a raining day. It is a research for the balance between order and chaos. It is also a journey through time and light. Each token represents a different moment and space, creating a unique composition.

I took great inspiration from Impressionism, focusing on capturing the light of a moment. The highlights of the ripples are calculated with a simulated 3D water surface combined with a directional light in order to achieve the realistic look of the reflection. The result of this then serves as a base for laying the strokes on the canvas. Light plays an important role in our memory. Through the light and the colour we travel back to different moments and places in our memory.

The colouring of Rippling is inspired by the 24 solar terms of the Traditional Chinese Calendar. Each term represents a different period in the year. Rippling uses these terms to represent not only the time but also the memories of the season.

Growing up on a subtropical island, rain was a big part of my childhood. I can vividly recall those heavy showers in the afternoon of the summer. It washed out the agitating heat and calmed the world. With Rippling, I'm seeking to use a generative algorithm to recreate the feeling of a rainy day or night at different moments. And perhaps, it could remind you of the sound of the rain drops, the scent of the dirt after the rain or that moment the sunset peek through the heavy cloud ...

Rippling

Andradite comes from the transposition of my Modo7 protocol into sculptures. Heavy brutalist shapes that come together to create dark monolithic structures half way between sculpted objects and troglodytic architecture. The name of the script comes from the andradite, a stone which crystallizes following cubic patterns and can be found in deep dark color. The gradient backgrounds create depth and mood and recall the way they showcase the stones in professional mineral photographs.

Andradite

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

"Electriz" is a series of works that use digital cloud chambers to observe the traces of unidentified particles. When doing art creation, just like scientists discovering new particles, artists continue to draw interesting ideas from reality and fantasy to collide with each other, trying to find a unique existence at the moment of collision in the process of mixing ideas. The space in the work "Electriz" is divided into parts with different physical characteristics, which affect the movement, rotation, splitting, and annihilation of particles. It is an unpredictable experimental system with unlimited possibilities to explore the intersection of physics, mathematics, and art.

Art Blocks Presents

Time Atlas 🌐 #181

Paolo Tonon

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Yi-Wen Lin

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