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.

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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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Friendship Bracelets

Thoughts of Meadow

Masonry

Foliage

Exhibition: 3291

Loom

Two Mathematicians

These shapes are nothing more than rectangles and lines.

And yet...

There is a concept in painting called 'pentimento', the presence of earlier forms or images that have been painted over. These could be changes that the artist made deliberately, or mistakes that they were able to cover. Sometimes as the paint fades, the pentimenti will be revealed, but often they will remain unseen.

The challenge is to recognize the pentimenti that influence the canvas, but cannot be found there even at the base layer. These are scattered throughout the years of the artist's life.

'Thoughts of Meadow' is a generative system that distorts a chess-like grid into complex shapes. Many of the outputs give the illusion of immense three-dimensional structures using simple geometric principles. It is an attempt to represent the concept of 'pentimento' through the rendering process. Each layer builds upon the complexity of the previous one but also covers it. If you look closely through the gaps in the grid, you can see the incremental changes that took place.

In that sense, this project is a reminder for myself of where I'm from, an incredibly small town called Meadow, and the gratitude I feel for the years I spent there. The first layer of my life's pentimento.

As always, I doubt this project would exist without the work and observations of Vera Molnár. Squares were certainly made for her, I just appreciate being able to borrow them once in a while.

This system represents the love I feel for generative art. It also represents the effort of remembering that the simplest methods produce the most alluring results. Generative programs can give you art if that's what you look for, but they can also give you worlds, and questions about the ones that live in them.

An excerpt from a sailor that saw one of these worlds:

"I looked across the sea and glimpsed a city. An impossible place that just as quickly disappeared, as if it had been plucked from another dimension and placed briefly on the horizon to taunt me. In an instant I knew, or felt, three absolute truths, given to me by whatever force brought the city into sight and took it again. The first was that I could never reach it, and should I dedicate the rest of my life to contesting that fact, I would only ever find the water and land of my own world. The second was that in the city there lived someone I could love for the rest of my days. The third was that this someone had glimpsed out their window a ship unnatural to them, and felt the same three truths as I."

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I feel unmeasurable appreciation to anyone that supports this project. Charitable donations will be made to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital thanks to you.

Each layer is built organically square by square which are then deformed at their corners. There are chances for countless variations through tighter density, symmetry, deformation strength, and color. There is even a chance that the inhabitants will architect the impossible and reach for another canvas, breaking free of their own border.

Eric Davidson

Thoughts of Meadow

Masonry

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