20 artists. 20+ new artworks. Artist identities revealed on August 11.

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Grails IV

A collection of 25 AI generated quadrilateral artworks, each backed by two staked Ethereum locked in a smart contract. Given the accruing yield, the NFT's foundational value is in a state of perpetual growth. The owner has the option to burn the NFT at any moment, reclaiming the attached staked ethereum.

Lines of Division (/25)

Doomscrolling is a five second, 60fps looping animation modeled after the physical feeling of scrolling through a social media feed on a cell phone.
A digital version of the animation was created using Bens unique generative art framework written in Haskell. Each of the 300 resulting frames were meticulously copied in charcoal to paper, then photographed and sequenced to create a seamless looping, hand-drawn animation.

Doomscrolling

Here sits an unusually round cul-de-sac. It exists in no city or country in particular, sometimes occupying several places at once. It inherits an excruciating omnipresence, feeding from those who choose to submit to its unblemished faade. Some say it is the most circular object to ever exist, others argue that one cannot determine the exact roundness of any given cul-de-sac. Some residents have just arrived, maintaining their beautiful warts and scars; others have lived here for thousands of years. In the end, they will all be as smooth and lifeless as the asphalt that carries the burden of mid-size sedans and other senseless consumer goods.
The longtime residents of the characterless houses surrounding the freshly paved half-moon celebrate the absence of edges or other peculiarities. They have already been ground to gray matter and reshaped into something vaguely human. Their peaks and valleys melted into oblivion, an indeterminable beige paste used to build more luxury houses. Several windows open, giving a glimpse into the most unbearable mundanity imaginable and the brutal carving of skin that would eventually smooth every crevice remaining.

Around Again

"Epiphany"

I tend to work very intuitively. If I like it, it stays, if I don't, I try again. This is one of the greatest things about painting digitally. Versions and branching allow for a very new workflow. So the following interpretation never occurred to me while I was making the image. I want to make something like rich soil, that just about anything could grow in.
A quick take 
In plain view a cross is clear, with the center figure collapsing internally from spiritual malaise, as seen by the inward gestures of the whole body and shoulders and hands.  This would be us, having lost a key idea or vitality, some version of a Grail. The base of the cross would be the Knight who found the Grail at great time and expense. All pretense of wealth or station is gone, perhaps this humility has allowed him to find the Grail at all. But certainly he is in contrast with the other Knights.
The screen left figure is the Pious. The other Knight is skeptical. The Pious has bowed deeply and submits to the truth of the Grail. The Skeptic is standing, at the ready, and is armed. He's not too sure about any of this.
Another very clear device is the theatricality. The lens is VERY long. The shapes stack up very similar to a stage scene. I find this creates a formality that I might have done with symmetry a while ago. But now I really like the artificiality of the composition contrasted with naturalistic painting.

The Grail

A solitary female stands in a vibrant lush landscape, her expectant gaze fixed on the horizon, symbolizing our collective anticipation of the future. The world she surveys is an intriguing mix of clarity and obscurity, with a sky seamlessly merging the ocean's depth and the cloud's drift; is she waking from a dream?
The pervasive mist serves as a metaphor for an enigmatic yet undeniable future and the only way is forward.

A Woman in the Mist

"Goodbye Horses" is a meditation on the challenges that AI art potentially imposes on the role of the artist in society. If machines do a better job at painting than a human artist, does it make the act of painting obsolete? I perceive creating art (and painting in particular) to be more than a mere profession; its a form of deeply human expression that taps into the spiritual part of our very being and I would argue there will always be a place and need for it.
In the 1988 song "Goodbye Horses" by Q Lazzarus, we hear what appears to be a vague account of an argument with a disillusioned man who seems to think of life as being meaningless and futile ("All things pass into the night"). The song concludes with a reply from the narrator: "Goodbye horses, I'm flying over you." The horses are a nod to Hindu philosophy and represent the five senses with which we experience the materialistic qualities of the world, and flying over them is akin to aspiring to a more spiritual state of mind that goes beyond a purely rationalistic and finite world view.
In a similar way it could be argued that the act of creating art is an aspiration towards something that is of more than just practical and monetary value and the "sum of its parts", but that it taps into the spiritual part of the human experience. In the various depictions of the late medieval allegorical "Danse Macabre" theme, various personifications of death are depicted in attire representative of their status and profession, a nod to the universality of death.
In similar fashion, the jumping skeleton in "Goodbye Horses", which is carrying various artistic tools, is a representative of all artists. And, despite the gloomy outlook of his future, with his profession heavily challenged by rapid advancements of AI image creation, he doesnt succumb to a purely rationalistic world view, where painting in light of AI advancements seems increasingly futile. Instead, he is facing the situation with optimism, by "flying over the horses".

Goodbye Horses

Open Console

Gone are their worlds. Actions taken that silenced these places for a thousand years. The echo of distant cannons forgotten, the souls of their victims evaporated, claimed by the void. A new epoch now, a different era. 

Long after the cold and the dark came to claim everything, smoldering under the ashes of memory, we find the veins and arteries of their civilization. Clusters of roots, cavernous extensions of what they lost, that drive themselves deep into the earth. Potent icons of existential dread, of what is gone. Their meaning is unknown, but not unknowable. 

These RELICS will bring to light what we have forgotten, ancient memories of their catastrophe, so we can learn how not to replicate it.

RELICS #2

Studies on multiple moments in time at once: people that are physically present but mentally absent, and vice versa. Collection of 10 works.