đ¨ with Blocks: Spotlight on Art Blocks drops - Phototaxis (Reas) & Democracity (Generative Artworks)
Artwork Title: chicago - sienna natural and cobalt blue (1992); Artist(s): Jean-Pierre Hebert
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In this edition, we bring our attention to two notable Art Blocks drops in the past week.
With so much news & near-term noise in the NFT art market day-to-day, we feel there is not enough attention or discourse on the artworks themselves & artists' creation process, which is why we dedicate more coverage on the artwork & artists in this issue.
Let's dive in!
Art Blocks Playground spotlight: Phototaxis by Casey Reas
For some new to the generative art genre, Casey Reas is a prominent pioneer & educator of generative art over the past two decades. He is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and holds a master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Media Arts and Sciences. With Ben Fry, Reas created the Processing language in 2001 - Processing is an open-source programming language and environment for the visual arts.
Let's turn to Phototaxis which was released on Sep 21 under Art Blocks Playground and is Reas' second Artblocks collection after CENTURY, released as an Art Blocks Curated collection earlier this year.
Context for Phototaxis
From his introduction essay on Phototaxis, Reas explains how Phototaxis is an extension of another set of works - Path and Tissue prints - that began 20 years earlier. The Path prints were the first works Reas exhibited in a gallery as a solo artist. They were shown at the inaugural group show at the bitforms gallery in New York in fall 2001.
Artwork Title: Path 00 print exhibited at the bitforms gallery in New York in November 2001. Artist(s): Casey Reas
Reas: Late in my time studying Media Arts and Sciences as a graduate student at MIT, I found my way into an Artificial Intelligence class taught by Rodney Brooks. In that class, I was introduced to the book Vehicles written by the neuroanatomist Valentino Braitenberg.
The ideas in this short, but profound book, were the origin for the Path and Tissue prints that I created 2001â03.
He continued working with the Tissue software and prints. The simulated bodies or "vehicles" represented by "growing" graphic lines in Phototaxis are a continuation of the ideas explored in Path and Tissue.
(Must check out these prints from Path and Tissue here and here.)
Braitenbergâs âvehiclesâ are minimal, simulated bodies that have behaviors similar to living organisms. Through writing code, I interpreted these organisms as software machines for drawing.
Each line in these drawings inscribe the history of one software organism; its coordinates at each state of the simulation are connected together. One color is used to represent each of the four different types of simulated organisms. The color decreases in brightness when the organism move slowly to map high- and low-energy areas. The black-and-white versions of the drawings compress the differences between the organisms into a unified surface.
A few novel concepts accentuated in Phototaxis
First, the "line drawings" produced by the vehicles or software organisms are visually captivating. Each line in these drawings inscribe the history of one software organism. Some look like flowing wisps of hair, or living organisms like jelly fish. Others depict mesmerizing currents like magnetic fields.
Reas wrote, "I first approached visualizing Braitenbergâs machines through software. Transferring their behavior from diagrams to computer code required making many decisions about the precise distance between each sensor, the speed of each vehicle, and if there should be any perturbations on their simulated surface...
After many preliminary studies, I decided to represent each vehicle as a thin graphic line connecting each vehicleâs most recent locations (coordinates)...The motion of each vehicle type is controlled by changes to the simulated environment."
On top of hauntingly beautiful visuals, we see novel concepts accentuated in this collection of generative art.
1. Focus on visually representing & experiencing processes
Reas is principally interested in the construction of the generative process in Phototaxis, and how they can be made visible to be experienced by viewers.
This is an important distinction to highlight among a growing body of Art Blocks work to-date. In many generative work, visual representation appears to be focused on the end result and not in articulating the process. Phototaxis' focus on visually revealing how the process evolves is a novel concept. Reas explains using a minimal representation of line drawings was a conscious decision to help viewers experience the process' development.
Reas: As I claim the core of my work is creating processes and not images, I need to think carefully about how the process is represented.
I chose to work only with the minimal representation of the line to hopefully expose the process without imposing extraneous visual decoration.
2. Art form evolving continually
What's also groundbreaking in this collection is that the generative process can run continually such that the art form evolves and delights viewers over-time.
Beyond the first 1000 iterations in the first minute, the viewer can interact with the piece with a control so that the generative work can continue to develop for minutes or even hours. The results at different times are varied and some become delightfully layered and almost three-dimensional.
The below pieces show two of the pieces first (left-side) after the initial 1000 iterations and (right-side) a visual snapshot after having the process run for several hours.
Artwork Title: Phototaxis; Artist(s): Casey Reas
Reas wrote: Because the software implementation of MicroImage is continually in motion, it is impossible to look at the precise forms that emerge from the interactions between the vehicles and their environment...
Through working with the software over a period of months, I exhausted the range of potential images created through each variation and I made eight prints from each software system to show the variation in each. The prints were made while working actively with the software by changing the environment and then exporting specific frames as geometry.
Looking at these prints displayed on a wall gives a distinctly different view of the software than can be gleaned from working with the realtime, interactive version.
Some of the audience were stunned with the discoveries from allowing the generative process to continue to run & evolve. What's very interesting is that the audience in a small way becomes a part of the process in enabling the process to pause/continue and in discovering varied outcomes at different points in time. It requires their participation and time to watch the artwork "grow".
One viewer commented, "So in a way, the true beauty of these pieces reveal themselves after ~6-12 hours. Thatâs pretty awesome. My thumbnail is just a bunch of whisps. I canât wait to run it all day and see what comes up."
Excerpts from Reas' interview on Art Blocks' discord live on-stage, Sep 21
Q: When you are working through the project, were there bugs in the code that you decided to keep and explore where they led?
A: Almost always. For me that's the process of coding..and having it evolve over a long period of time. My process typically is to save a lot of iterations of the code to make many iterations, and then go back through them over a period of months and kind of refine from there. There are always unexpected things happening.
Q: Do you find the change in perspective [in Reas' creative process for Art Blocks submissions] liberating?
A: What I find really exciting is...I think I have generated a hundred thousand of these [works] from the tight configuration we're launching today [for Phototaxis]. I always see something unexpected! ...But I've enjoyed working in this way, in (generating) batches of thousands and then tweaking the code (then repeat).
We hope Reas' comments on learning creative coding are encouraging to students of generative art. They speak to the necessary effort & time required to become proficient in coding as an art medium.
Q: Given your stature in the gen art community, do you have any advice for would-be generative artists just getting into this space?
A: Well for me, coding didn't come naturally and so I really struggled with it in the beginning. And the only way I was able to do it was to make my own images. I would make sketches and drawings and then I would realize those with code.
Just be patient with yourself. I think it could take years to become fluent with coding, as a way of thinking. I think it comes through making. I learned through doing and I think that's the best way to get into coding.
Art Blocks spotlight: In conversation with Generative Artworks on Democracity
In this section, we share our interview with Alex from Generative Artworks, the creators behind Art Blocks Factory collection Democracity that was released last week on Sep 16.
Generative Artworks is an artist duo based out of the NYC area. They gained a following on Instagram making generative art and discovered Art Blocks in February 2021, releasing their first project Empyrean in March 2021 and their second project Enchiridion in June 2021.
We find this collection intriguing in the following ways -
1) The range of cityscapes & their three-dimensional geometric forms represented are highly varied & forms often complex (for instance, there are 9 types of cityscape styles and 12 different color schemes).
2) Democracity used NFT as an art medium wonderfully as this piece of work is meant to be explored and played with by the viewer from different perspectives. The interactive rotating & zoom-in/out features allow the audience to study the work from multiple angles and distances. The weather elements are a wonderful addition.
3) There are groups or sets of pieces that can be formed & juxtaposed based on a variety of attributes - such as by weather conditions, light based on time-of-day, city-style, cloud type etc.
The still image thumbnails barely does justice for this collection however.
Artwork: Title: Democracity; Artist(s): Generative Artworks
Q: Tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into generative art?
Alex: Generative Artworks consists of two artists named Alex and Stephen. Weâre both based out of the NYC Metro area and met in college. We have always worked together on small projects and back in 2020 we were interested in working on another âsmallâ project and since we are both artistically inclined (Stephen is a musician, Alex was a musician and wanted to be an architect) we decided to work on making code that could create art. At that time we wanted to make an Instagram bot that would post the art every day, but we ended up doing it manually for a while and really began to enjoy it. From there we became interested in making 1 of 1 of X t-shirts with our art so people could feel like they own something unique, but production was too expensive, so we just kept chugging along with what we were doing.
Come February we found Art Blocks and were dumbstruck. This is our t-shirt idea! Without the t-shirts! We immediately knew this was the natural medium for generative art.
Ideas behind Democracity
We learn here about the initial inspiration for the project, and how some cityscapes in Democracity are a reflection of real cities we are fond of. More importantly, we love how the project offers freedom of interpretation to the audience, inviting viewers to craft their own stories around these cities.
Q: Democracity appears to be inspired by Henry Dreyfussâ 'Democracity', exhibited at the New York Worldâs Fair, 1939, is that right? Can you share with us your motivation for creating this fascinating collection of 3D cityscapes?
Alex: Yep thatâs right! I was thinking back to a trip to Seattle and how the Space Needle was such an interesting piece of architecture that was created for the Worldâs Fair. From there I wanted to see if there was an equivalent in NYC and found the 1939 Worldâs Fair. After that I went down the rabbit hole and really loved how this Worldâs Fair pushed the concept of âThe world of tomorrowâ which is iconic for retro futurism.
...(con't) At this Worldâs Fair there were two different exhibits, one called Futurama and the other Democracity (https://www.1939nyworldsfair.com/worlds_fair/wf_tour/theme-7.aspx) which were dioramas of the city of the future. It was really funny to look at what people thought the city of the future would look like, it was this idealized form where everyone would drive everywhere and there would be no traffic and no people walking around!
Of course we know now that this type of city planning was catastrophic causing traffic and smog-covered cities where the streets donât feel safe to walk on because they are cities for cars not cities for people. They also didnât account for climate change and how their decisions would affect our lives many years later.
Democracity tries to show what todayâs society is actually like with a bit of a sci-fi twist showing industrial buildings right next to residential buildings (Houston) and floods that submerge the city (Venice/many cities in the US).
I brought this idea up to Stephen and he loved it so we started pursuing it. We then found Enchiridion was actually a really good basic algorithm for creating streets, blocks, and buildings so we carried over pieces of code from Enchiridion. Kind of like a blueprint for a city.
Q: The audience noticed a number of interesting attributes post-mint, some of them more rare than others -- such as weather attributes, light by time of day, color scheme etc..
How did you think about distributing or combining the attributes, as in do you intend for them to evoke different moods for the cityscapes? Did you have certain real cities in mind?
Alex: When distributing the features we tried to make it a stylized version of reality for effect, meaning not every city is raining or flooded, and it is raining more than 5% of the time which would be accurate for the NYC area.
This is so that when the whole set is viewed in unison you can easily pick out the different types and see the variety. Some cities we were inspired by were NYC, Houston, Tampa, and San Francisco.
A lot of these features are meant to create different moods. One that really sticks out to me (Alex) is a flood with sunset. This whole city has been flooded and these peopleâs lives are destroyed, but the sunset makes it look serene and beautiful. I think it demonstrates that the world doesnât need us and will go on without us.
Q: What aspects of the post-mint work or in your creative process for Democracity surprised or delighted you?
Alex: To tell the truth it has been a whirlwind of a release and we havenât gotten a chance to pick favorites, but every single one we have looked at so far we have been so happy with how it came out. One thing weâre really excited about is how well the weather effects have been received. Itâs really cool to see people making sets around falling snow or thunderstorms. We spent so much time on the weather and trying to make it look just right and be accurate physically so it is delightful to see that work appreciated even though it isnât the main subject of the piece.
Q: What ideas or themes would you encourage your audience to explore in each Democracity? For one it is so fun to inspect each Democracity from different angles & discover new perspectives.
These cities are meant to be explored and for your brain to craft stories around them. We give you an initial view which is meant to be symbolic of one personâs view of the city which could be close up, far away, angled left, angled down, etc;
however, this is not the only way to look at the city. We want you to pull out the zoom, re-angle the camera, and even flip between a perspective and orthographic cameral and see what that initial view ignored.
Did that view hide something? Did it highlight something? Which view do you like more and is there something symbolic about what it highlighted (Ex: a residential looking building surrounded by an industrial one or showing just one building of a gigantic flowing city)?
Create stories around your city and try to understand how daily life would go on in that city, even for cities that are flooded. What was lost when that city was flooded?
Artwork: Title: Democracity; Artist(s): Generative Artworks
âĄď¸â Enjoy these stunning GIFs captured by collectors of Democracity showcasing their cities -
Wanted to highlight how cool these @artblocks_io factory project Democracity by Generative Artworks look. the OS thumb nails just don't do these justice ! pic.twitter.com/oJ6oqkm76b
â VonMises (@VonMises14) September 18, 2021
Wait till you put them next to each other. pic.twitter.com/XG32MSdRHw
â Dojer (@theWinterDojer) September 18, 2021
For those interested in learning about the team's work & other collections, here is another write-up which talks about Generative Artworks' previous collection Enchiridion. You can follow the team on their Instagram account.
Notable art purchase
Description: Artwork generated by a GAN trained on thousands of landscape oil paintings.
Artist(s): Robbie Barrat
Title: AI Generated Landscape Painting #2, 2018, Edition 1 of 1
Last Sold: Aug-28-2021
Price: $1,094,625.71 (335.0Î)
Gallery: SuperRare
â See you around the block ~