*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

For as long as I can remember, I've always loved walking around the city. The crowds, the movements, the colors, the lights... As I grew up, I learned to explore the different corners, always on the lookout for new alleys to explore, the desire to discover again and again particular architectures, saturated spaces, paintings or stickers never seen before, frozen traces of passages in these anthills that are our cities.

Hōrō is an invitation to stop time to make room for exploration, observation and contemplation in scenes mixing the purity of architectural lines with the unpredictable movements of passers-by, where Jackson Pollock meets Anni Albers, and Hassan Massoudy meets Piet Mondrian. So many influences that mix to create an explosion of movement and send us back to physical, digital or spiritual wanderings, in which we can both get lost and find ourselves.

The Hōrō series proposes to explore representations of multiple flows through different abstract areas, while playing on a wide chromatic diversity rich with 55 palettes inspired by as many graffiti artists, urban calligraphers using color as a trace of their passages.

"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time." - Thomas Merton


On live view, press num keys [1-9] to redraw and export an up to 9x resolution version of the scene.


Hōrō, the Art of Wandering
Lionel Radisson | makio135

Hōrō

Woop Woop! Run for your life! Kai-Gen are attacking!
Fresh from the underground and ready to smash your city, these mutant beasties come unique and fired up. No polygons or texture maps here, just sweet ray-marching magic living right on-chain. When you're ready, press the 2 key on your keyboard to bring them to life. But be forewarned, animated Kai-Gen are hungry AF and will eat old GPUs like jellybeans. A modern-day PC/Mac desktop is highly recommended, then hit that 2 key, if you think you can handle it...
Key 1 = Still, Key 2 = Animated. Let's GOOOOO!

Kai-Gen

Staccato practices capturing space with elemental geometry. Positive and negative ground dissolve as the eye reads the rows and columns as if distinguishing sheet music. Rhythm emerges from the space between the shapes that tie them together.

The emergent forms of Staccato result from the perception of the collection of shapes as a whole.  High contrast monochrome rendering maximize this psychological effect as the eye groups similar shapes and patterns into subdivisions. 

The process of Staccato stems from letterpress printmaking experiments with decorative typographic material. The process involves filling the letterpress with decorative borders and shapes, inking by hand, pulling a print, inspecting the result, making a small adjustment and repeating.

Staccato

“mono no aware” is an exploration of change at the borders between existence and emptiness. Shapes and colors appear, twisting and fading gradually into new forms. The evolution of the system creates unpredictable and surprising emergent patterns, as deviations from neat symmetry quickly evolve into chaos. The animation is a cellular automaton running with no pre-defined end — but some patterns don’t have what it takes to survive indefinitely. That’s okay; not everything lasts forever (but the pieces will restart in this case).

[Click] to restart. The Level of Detail (LOD) on each animation can be adjusted using [Left Arrow] for less, or [Right Arrow] for more, to allow a customized visual experience and achieve the desired framerate for various devices. Note that while different LODs all follow the same animation rules, they may exhibit slightly different behaviors from each other due to size-dependent resonance — much as the same guitar string plays different notes at different lengths. Each token contains a family of several closely-related animations to choose from.

Art Blocks Presents

Arcadia #248

Zachariah Watson

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Hōrō

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Kai-Gen

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Staccato

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mono no aware

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