Quilted landscapes in homage to the desert. 51% of the minting sales proceeds from Patchwork Saguaros will be donated to the Nancy Rockland-Miller Scholarship fund, held by The Kent State University Foundation. To learn more, please check out my introduction blog post for the project: https://bit.ly/3tGPVd3

Patchwork Saguaros

_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

Ieva [iɛvʌ] is an algorithm that creates a shape in a specific sequence from a random point on the grid and smooths out its corners. Overlapping such shapes creates endless possibilities of combinations that will always remain balanced and aesthetically pleasing.

The title of this project is the name of the investigator who made a criminal case against me for making art. This name occupied a big part of my mind while working on this project. And I decided that it should be perpetuated in art.

You can do the "investigation" for Ieva (because she doesn't want to do it). To do so, you have to click on the art.

**Controls:**

- "click" = investigate
- "space" = automatic investigation

Ieva

*Your Story* is a book like no other.

It's the story you always wanted to read,
the story you always wanted to create.
Any story you want.
*Your Story* is your imagination projected within the pages, 
to tell a story today, 
and another tomorrow.

---

### The idea:

I was playing with a dot on a canvas, when I recognized the first symbol.
In the end, writing is not different from drawing.
So I generated another. And another.
That's how I realized that I had discovered a new language. As a writer, I knew what I had to do:
let this language tell the stories it wants.

Characters in modern alphabets are symbols that, over thousands of years, we aligned on in order to comunicate in written form.
Most people can tell which character represents what in the alphabet they're most familiar with.
There is no room for imagination anymore in the characters themselves. It's all up to the combination of them.
So we form words, sentences, chapters, books.

But imagine now a language that no one understands.
Every interpretation of it is valid: there is no wrong answer. 
Anyone reading it is perceiving a different story, creating a different story.
It's *your* own choice.
You can decide to change the story at every reading. Or keep a piece of it consistent. Collaborate with others to create a new story.

*Your Story* is giving back full imagination to *you*.

---

### How it works:

I wanted *Your Story* to look like a book, and all pieces of the algorithm follow this aesthetic direction.
The aspect ratio is set to √2:1, as most of the paper sizes available worldwide (ISO 216, ISO 217 and ISO 269).
Two set tokens (first and last) are the cover and the blurb. 
The remaining tokens form the interior, using token ID to determine whether the page is left or right and the respective margins.
The hash is used to determine the aesthetics of the page: the character style, the type of page (chapter header, illustration, normal text), the presence of notes, and highlights.
All character styles have clear differences between them, and occasionally they are all mixed together.
*Your Story* is not meant to be a single alphabet, but rather an exploration of the imagination. Different character styles may evoke different thoughts.

Your Story

Nucleus is a procedural crypto-art project, mathematics moves points around a nexus point like subatomic particles around a nucleus, forming accidental geometric patterns. The appearance and movement of each token is driven by a unique hash, no two are the same. Best viewed in motion as a live script.

Art Blocks Presents

Patchwork Saguaros #60

Jake Rockland

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