*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

Those structures suddenly appeared, yet they don't talk to us. Yet.

Messengers

In this collection, each mark on the digital canvas is made by text of the algorithm that created it. When viewing Symbol 1, you’re viewing its code – logic becoming art.

If you look closely at an oil painting you may see brushstrokes. If you look closely at an iteration of Symbol 1, you'll see snippets of the code that generates the piece itself: text from for() loops repeated over and over; the Random() function itself weaving through the piece; and the hash code, like an artist signature, displayed on the bottom right.

Organic and mechanical forces have long been in tension in art and architecture. Art nouveau's floral  curves vs. art deco's industrial geometry, Jackson Pollock's declaration “I am nature” vs. Andy Warhol's confession “I want to be a machine,” etc.

This conversation continues in generative art. One collection might appear surprisingly organic, as if crafted by hand; another might appear strictly computer generated, showing the expressive power of machines.

Symbol 1 joins this conversation, offering another way to synthesize the natural and the mechanical. Just as a crashing ocean wave could be explained mathematically by the forces that generated it, an image in Symbol 1 appears almost chaotic while revealing the logic that created it.

About the title: Symbol 1 is a term from First Principles, a chapter in The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847) by George Boole, a founder of modern logic. For Boole, “symbol 1” represents “the Universe comprehending every conceivable class of objects, whether actually existing or not.”

Symbol 1

Ode to Penrose is a celebration of the natural beauty of aperiodic tilings, especially of the ones discovered by Sir Roger Penrose. These tilings lie at the intersection of complex mathematical problems and gorgeous visual aesthetics arising from finite amounts of simple objects.

This project introduces novel ways to use Penrose tiles. Unlike in traditional deterministic usage of these tiles, stochasticity plays a very important part of the script. Randomness can affect things like the total amount of the tiles used, their orientation, coloring, and size. Familiar patterns can be witnessed in some outputs and yet they are completely absent in others. Despite this, perhaps surprisingly, each output could be completed into a traditional Penrose tiling without erasing any lines.

Ode to Penrose

This series explores color in layered intersections. The unique hash determines the procedure of each traversal; endpoints, divergences, elevations, and color immersion. Left click or press any key for coruscation.

Art Blocks Presents

Arcadia #238

Zachariah Watson

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