Sterling Crispin

The Curated Collection includes projects that have been selected by Art Blocks’ Curation Board for their world-class innovation, technical rigor, and aesthetic beauty.

curated

This collection comprises projects screened and selected by Art Blocks and embodies our standards for artistic creativity, conceptual rigor, and technical achievement.

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This is the place where we tinker. What lives here is free of theme or architecture but the one common strand is that these projects all grant us delight.

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The Art Blocks × Pace collection includes boundary-pushing generative projects by select Pace artists developed in partnership with Pace Verso.

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Through an exhibition program that extends across galleries globally, Art Blocks × Bright Moments showcases and launches the work of acclaimed natively generative artists.

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Flourish is the notebook of an algorithmic architect. 

This speculative fiction presents an alternative timeline for architectural ornamentation, drawing inspiration from the late 1800s and early 1900s. By referencing historical precedents, Flourish produces designs that exist between the past and present, striking a balance between tradition and innovation.

Flourish’s logic uses a linguistic structure that treats simple shapes like an alphabet and arranges geometry into phrases, establishing and dissolving symmetries. This logic is similar to a formal grammar system with rules that describe how words can be combined to form sentences. As a very simple example, a rule for the English language might be that a noun phrase can be followed by a verb phrase. So, a person dances, a cat sleeps, a bird sings. In the context of Flourish, pentagons can be subdivided into triangles, which can be enclosed by circles to create complex patterns. As geometry is combined and rearranged, the linguistic-like structure of the image changes, which also changes the next possible sets of geometric operations.

The palettes reflect various eras and mediums, invoking the feeling of aged archival drawings, woodblock prints, freshly inked illustrations, blueprints, and photocopies. The images resemble photographs of drawings rather than the drawings themselves, creating the impression of a carefully archived collection of artifacts that document a history just now coming into existence.

In my own history, I spent many years filling notebooks with abstract flowing drawings using very fine pens while studying painting and drawing. I would start by making one small curved mark, and then make thousands more while following the natural rhythm that my hand and wrist made. The density of marks and careful variations of spacing gave the drawings a meditative quality. Flourish's fine flowing lines draw from this meditative practice, imbuing each image with a sense of careful attention and intention.

The best architecture is a harmony of the natural and the constructed. And so the fine detailed marks are meant to feel natural, and to build up the constructed geometries with an emergent natural foundation.

Manipulating the arrangement of primary shapes to create complex patterns is a hallmark of both generative design and traditional architectural design. Flourish exists somewhere between this relationship. Rather than taking the historical path of contemporary parametric architecture, with its large sweeping forms and sci-fi aesthetics, Flourish creates an alternative history, a revivalist rebirth of the roaring twenties for the 2020s.

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Prints on archival paper will be made available at a later date.

A percentage of profits from the primary sale will be donated to the Hawaii Community Foundation's Maui Strong Fund to support Maui residents affected by the wildfires.

Flourish

Neophyte MMXXII is my ode to the computational beauty of nature. Generative plants grow from nothingness, bloom, fade away, and regrow anew. Each NFT produces a unique species of simulated plant life, and new varieties within that species arise over time. 

The emergent qualities of the genetic code cause Neophyte to ebb and flow between stability and unpredictability. Long term observation is rewarded, as the longest cycles take several hours to complete. These qualities combined, result in artworks which may be cyclical and relatively stable, or may never repeat themselves. 

Neophyte MMXXII is the culmination of an artistic inquiry spanning ten years, five software development environments, and a dozen artworks. If you’d like to learn more about this history, please visit my website.


A note to collectors: 

Collectors of the first 25 editions to be minted may request a signed 19.5x12" (50x30cm) printed circuit board artwork commemorating the release of Neophyte MMXXII at no additional charge. See @sterlingcrispin on Twitter or sterlingcrispin.com for more details.

Neophyte MMXXII is released under the NFT license 2.0, so collectors are free to make prints of their token, and commercialize them within limits. See the NFT license for details.

Sterling Crispin

Flourish

Neophyte MMXXII

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