This work is the product of a project to dwell undeletable souls on the blockchain. A system that generates human faces with different personalities and expressions from a minimum of code. After determining the personality from a hash, the face continues to change into various expressions. It is a living portrait, a fragment of minter's soul, forever adrift in the vast net.

Living organisms are coded by a sequence of the four bases in DNA, and a human DNA is composed of 3 billion base pairs. This is about 750 MB of information. And the difference in code between individual people is only 0.1%, or 750 KB. This slight difference creates all kinds of differences in appearance and physical functions. This is quite astonishing to our ordinary senses.

However, if we are surprised by this fact, we need to suspect our senses.

I was interested in these points and explored what are the elements by which people identify the faces and facial expressions of others, how little code can create personality and emotion, and conversely, to what extent can an observer identify personality and facial expressions. As a result, I succeeded in expressing the personalities, emotions, and complex feelings of various people with 14 KB of code.

We like to think of humans are supernatural and one-of-a-kind. This is a common background to the past, when many people favored the Ptolemaic theory.

However, this work leads us to suspect that we humans are only a program that can be coded.

Then, what is the essential difference between a code written in DNA and a code written in programming language? I believe the only difference is whether the execution space is real or digital space. Is it a prerequisite for the existence of the soul to operate an organic computer in real space? It is merely a medium.

This is not meant to be pessimistic, such as we are mere code, the soul does not exist and is an illusion, a mere electrical signal in the brain.

Rather, the soul, the function that makes us aware of our existence, makes us think, causes us to emotion, and makes us act, certainly dwells in the code.

I store this code on the blockchain, thereby spreading undeletable ghosts on the vast net forever.

In this work, the ghost is output on the net by minting. This act is part of the work. The personality of the ghost is also determined by the hash owned by the minter. In other words, the ghost output by you from the code on the blockchain is a fragment of your soul on the net.


[NOTES]

Press C to turn canvas on/off
Press S to save image

GHOST IN THE CODE

Pointila explores what happens when you combine the meticulous dots reminiscent of Pointillistic painting techniques with the channelled randomness of generative art, whilst also examining how subtle changes in parameters can paint similar forms in different styles.

Pointila is designed for display and interaction. Clicking on a live mint will trigger an animation loop between the primary and secondary palettes, click again to pause. Press 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 on your keyboard to change glitch state. Press S to download a high resolution print.

Pointillism emerged from a collision of art and science in late 19th century French painting. Developed by Georges Seurat, his appeal to science, rigour and order built upon the broken brushstrokes of the Impressionists, as painting began to reckon with the emergence of the new technology of photography. Unbeknownst to Seurat, this response to one technology would foreshadow another – that of digital displays and pixels.

Rigour and order was manifest in the distinct dots of colour that give Pointillism its name. From a distance, the eye mixes these dots into vibrant, luminous scenes. This optical mixing bears a striking similarity to the way pixels work to display images on screen for us today.

“It’s done mechanically?” was a question posed at an 1894 Neo-Impressionist exhibition. The answer then was no. Pointila is both more and less mechanical than the Pointillist work that provoked the question. More, in that the hand of the artist has been replaced by the work of the computer – an extension of Seurat's efforts to remove the free hand of the artist. Yet less, with the ultimate position of each of the millions of dots decided randomly, unknown to the hand of the coder.

The Pointila algorithm first divides the canvas into columns. It then traverses the canvas dropping dots along those columns. From just a handful of layers, landscapes emerge. They take on a variety of forms: from rolling plains and steep canyons to jagged peaks and dreamy moors. Some are sharp and tense, others hazy and ethereal. They are coloured with handpicked palettes and animated with bold glitches – a nod to the shared optics of Pointillism and pixels.

Subtle changes in initial parameters give rise to similar landscapes painted in different styles. Faint echos, perhaps, of the different styles we see from Seurat in the numerous studies related to his masterpiece Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte.

Pointila

THE SOURCE CoDE is a new techno-mystical framework that channels knowledge from source creation to our digital present. The medium of this knowledge is a set of unique 1024 “karma” cards minted in the Genesis phase of THE SOURCE CoDE. The Hash is a unique entity that drives all aspects of a single card.

THE SOURCE CoDE framework is based on 10 primitives, with each primitive representing a dimension of reality. Some cards have additional attributes that further empower the card holder. When you mint a card, an Intent is generated - the most powerful tool for navigating the endless possibilities in life.

Mint with purpose!

THE SOURCE CoDE

The Swing protocol is a composition generator that is set to generate both bold and elegant compositions. It works on a 3×2 grid where 7 different lines and an empty shape are randomly placed on the grid on 2 layers. The background is divided into 3 rows or 2 columns that can be filled with 9 different colors or stripes with different coefficients. The paper and the margin can be filled with 6 different colors. The protocol is finely tuned so that the interaction between all the elements always delivers a swinging composition. Dutch auction starting at 2Ξ and decreasing every 5 minutes to 0.15Ξ (2 → 1 → 0.75 → 0.5 → 0.4 → 0.3 → 0.25 → 0.22 → 0.2 → 0.18 → 0.15). 25% of sales over 0.25 will be donated to Juste Ici, a non-profit organization in France, focused on making art accessible to everyone.

Swing

In the right hand, a pen can effortlessly reveal the most characteristic features of a person, inside and out. Following the twist and turn of the line, echoes of practice and repetition, the path becomes a walk through the recesses of a subconscious human mind. Total Strangers pays tribute to this time-honoured flight of the human creativity, generating a rogue’s gallery of faces from a continuous fluid line and a virtual pencil case of select drawing tools. We invite you to follow the line as it goes for a walk. Watch it unfold and give life a cast of unique characters, reflections of those around us.

[P] - Pause
[B] - Toggle transparent background
[F] - Performance-agnostic desired frame rate. Switch between 30 (default) and 60.

Total Strangers

Artem Verkhovskiy x Andy Shaw

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.

presents

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.

explorations

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

artblocksxpace

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

artblocksxbrightmoments

At the shoreline, waves wash over the sand, sorting and tumbling the grains into troughs and valleys. Each wash of water alters the microcosmic landscape in an infinitesimal loop. Inspired by the unfathomable mathematics of this natural phenomena, we invite you to plunge into the purity of movement and transformation through the medium of ones and zeros. The palette and pixels are regulated by an algorithm designed to mimic the textures, colours and gradients of the high tide beach, while the edition of 745 reflects the number of minutes in a full tidal cycle. Keyboard controls: P=pause, F=fast forward.

High Tide

Aquatic Zen gardens. Rediscovering the childhood joy of exploring low tide microcosms. Motion and geometry inspired by the mathematical order inherent in everything that surrounds us.

Artem Verkhovskiy x Andy Shaw

@Artem Verkhovskiy x Andy Shaw

Total Strangers

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