*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

Variant Plan (F01Y20) is an exclusive generative art commission for Variant Fund by Jeff Davis. Each work in the series contains a randomized hash string that determines a unique layout and color placement for the plan. Every plan is unique and all logic for the artwork is stored immutably on the Ethereum blockchain.

Variant Plan

Pathfinders is an interactive generative drawing project. The script sets color palettes, brush textures, a unique avatar, and assorted start screen layouts from token data. When viewing Pathfinders, left-click the starting image to erase your canvas and watch the deterministically chosen brush trail across the screen. When you are satisfied with the output, left-click again to pause, right-click and save your image, then share your results with others.

Pathfinders

_There are no artifacts. There are only interpretations._

Glass is about the illusion of simplicity that cocoons us in our everyday existence. A glance at Glass may suggest a foam of bubbles or pebbles under clear water. But on inspection, these simple pictures dissolve. Instead of disks one finds stacked panes of translucent glass, intersecting and overlapping. There is dissonance between fine-scale chaos and the harmony of the aggregate. In Glass, two levels of reality -- panes of glass and the foam of bubbles -- are brought close together in scale, so that our oversimplified impression yields a palpable disquiet.

What appears simple is often anything but. Consider a standard wooden desk. To our eyes, it looks solid and continuous, but we know that it is made of atoms, tiny electrons orbiting nuclei. And these subatomic particles are themselves not like miniature solar systems, but creatures of quantum mechanics, stranger than we can imagine. The vast difference in scale between the atomic and the macroscopic hides this complex reality, but fundamentally it is the same phenomenon shown here.

Glass continues my exploration of emergence. While in previous work I explored how simple systems can create complex, emergent forms, here the interest is in the converse: how coherence is often deceptive, masking a complex underlying reality.

Glass draws on the aesthetic of Shin Hanga artists Hiroshi Yoshida and Kawase Hasui, and abstract expressionist Sonja Sekula. In live view, Glass has ambient motion: the shadows evolve, imperceptibly slowly.

The following variations & controls are possible. You may need to click on the canvas before they are active. For a high-resolution output, use the pixel density controls. For example, on a standard laptop, an image saved at pixel density 5 will be approximately 3200 x 4000 pixels, and therefore suitable for printing at ~ 11" x 13" at 300 dpi.

Variations (require redrawing):

f -- fit-to-screen on/off
o -- outline on/off

Controls:

s   -- save as png
spacebar  -- pause/unpause ( useful to reduce CPU load in Live mode )
b -- border on/off ( useful for printing )
1-9  -- set pixel density (default=2 on retina displays)
+/-  -- increase/decrease pixel density

Glass

“little boxes on the hillsides, child” is a series of abstract suburban cityscapes powered by a program of LIA’s own design and development. Over the 25 years of her artistic career, LIA's working process has typically involved as much intuition as it does engineering skill, and this piece is no exception. Growing from an initial Processing sketch by way of the artist's careful selection of angles, transparencies, and line weights, a virtually infinite sequence of house-like forms appears and disappears. LIA conceives of her practise as a conversation between her own fluid concepts and the formal precision required of software code; when accidents or bugs appear, they are often treated as a part of this conversation and incorporated into the final work. In this piece the “cheeky blue” and “cheeky red” features arise from a bug in calculating the colour spread, and have been retained for their aesthetic contribution to the images. Taking inspiration from the song “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds, this piece is a contemplation of houses and cities. The cyclical relationship between the construction of homes, the lands and environments they have replaced, and the ecosystems that will eventually replace them is echoed through an infinite production of geometric compositions. “little boxes on the hillsides, child” is the successor of “little boxes on the hillsides, mother”, presented in the exhibition “Synthetic Imagination” at bitforms gallery San Francisco, October 2–November 15, 2021. The NFTs minted on Art Blocks are the children of the “mother” work: brilliantly colourful, they are rendered in stillness as an artifact of the mother program's generative output, whose ancestry can be activated on the Art Blocks website by pressing the 'a' key to reveal the animated process behind the production of the still image. Dutch auction starting at 5Ξ and decreasing every 5 minutes to 0.2Ξ (5→4→3→2→1.5→1.25→1→0.75→0.5→0.4→0.3→0.2), 25% of sales over 0.2 ETH will be donated to charity (5% to the Processing Foundation, 20% to COTAP - Carbon Offsets To Alleviate Poverty).


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Arcadia #205

Zachariah Watson

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