*Arcadia* is a homage to the fridge-worthy landscape art of our youth. Childhood techniques of creating art are re-imagined by the scribbles of a nostalgic, computer-assisted mind.

**Spacebar**: Skip animation and load final image (useful when rendering in high resolutions)
**Up arrow**: Speed scribbles up (default speed is the highest)
**Down arrow**: Slow scribbles down

Arcadia

Bloom is a story about a flower and its life cycle. Each leaf and petal's shape, location, and variations (color, opacity, shading, contrast, and more) are uniquely generated based on the token's hash. Over a period of time determined by the hash (weeks, months, even years), each element of the flower will break away and float to the floor, ultimately becoming a pile of leaves and petals. The dynamic evolution of this piece  is meant to be a reminder of the fleeting nature of life. Memento Mori.
Dutch auction starting at 2Ξ and decreasing every 5 minutes to 0.25Ξ (2->1->0.75->0.5->0.4->0.35->0.3->0.25).
25% of sales over base price will be donated to the charities included on our website.


Bloom

Generative music in 40-140 bytes on-chain. ByteBeats are miniature functions that synthesize audio (and video) via bitwise operations (&^|<<*+/%>>). Because bits form groups in powers of 2, 4/4 beat-driven music emergently self-organizes. Each function in this drop is itself randomly generated, grouped into six families of composition and four families of visualizers. Some ByteBeats loop, some generate new patterns indefinitely. Some are for headbanging, some are for climbing forever through oceans of phase cancelation. (Instructions: click to play ...)

♫ ByteBeats

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

What do you see when you close your eyes and your retinas still burn from computer screen light?

Art Blocks Presents

Arcadia #145

Zachariah Watson

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Renders Game

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