Bright Moments

Vrtigo Las Luces (Vertigo the Lights)  takes inspiration from long exposure photos I take in Buenos Aires. Its made with several particle systems following two simple attractor systems. These particle systems are modified and tuned to compose the final images. In a way, it aims to reflect the unpredictability, the spontaneity and speed of the city.

Vertigo Las Luces #50

Noctilucent Mementi is a generative chronicle that encapsulates 5 years of Martin Lukas Ostachowski's travels and work with clouds in crypto art. Each artwork is a location-specific memento, forming a visual timeline of the artist's development, milestones and travels between 2018 and 2023, spanning 4 continents and 11 countries.  The term 'noctilucent', means 'luminous in the dark' and references high, invisible clouds. 'Mementi' represents the artist's curated visual memories. In MLO's words, "Noctilucent clouds are invisible memories, glowing when revisited." For MLO, clouds serve as a medium for speaking about the way that we transform and preserve intangible presences, both through personal memory and through digital wallets. In this, his first serial collection, MLO celebrates 5 years of artistic evolution since the creation of his first cloud artwork in September 2018.

An illustrated breakdown of the series: https://mlo.art/news/blog-posts/new-collection-noctilucent-mementi/.

Noctilucent Mementi by MLO.art

Noctilucent Mementi is a generative chronicle that encapsulates 5 years of Martin Lukas Ostachowski's travels and work with clouds in cryptoart. Each artwork is a location-specific memento, forming a visual timeline of the artist's development, milestones and travels between 2018 and 2023, spanning 4 continents and 11 countries.  The term 'noctilucent', means 'luminous in the dark' and references high, invisible clouds. 'Mementi' represents the artist's curated visual memories. In MLO's words, "Noctilucent clouds are invisible memories, glowing when revisited." For MLO, clouds serve as a medium for speaking about the way that we transform and preserve intangible presences, both through personal memory and through digital wallets. In this, his first serial collection, MLO celebrates 5 years of artistic evolution since the creation of his first cloud artwork in September 2018.

Over the last 5 years, MLO has come to be known as "the cloud artist." He began tokenizing his art in June 2018, and has since become a formative figure in the cryptoart movement, making fundamental contributions to the cultural understanding of the medium. His early works use geometric minimalism and artistic data visualization to investigate and educate about the potential meanings of blockchains and tokens. With the piece "Cloud Seed Phrase Visualization" (September 2018), he arrived at a mode of translating data into metaphor that has since become the spine of his practice. In his words, "I find the analogy to clouds particularly intriguing, as we store only the rights to assets in our digital wallets while the actual digital assets remain permanently on the blockchain; the digital assets therefore remain intangible much like clouds in the sky." 

Clouds have personal weight for MLO as someone whose life has been defined by movement and transition. Born in Poland, raised in Germany, emigrated to Canada, and traveling constantly, he has lived in more than 33 different places through the years. For him, clouds are both an emblem of transience and a constant companion. In MLO's art, the distributed nodes that constitute a blockchain become a symbol of hope. This living cloud maintained by shared belief harbors the possibility of continuity for an individual identity through the fragile impermanence of physical locations. 

An illustrated break-down of the series' influences, underlying references and numerology can be found [here.](https://mlo.art/news/blog-posts/new-collection-noctilucent-mementi/)

A Sovrn Curated release.

Noctilucent Memento #101

Bright Moments Flex

Materia Moda is a more intimate reflection on maker/coder/model. There is a fashion sub-theme that runs throughout the collection, playing with notions of beauty, the viewers gaze and the models agency as engineer/technician. In curating this collection I was searching for moments of heightened, albeit paradoxical, tension between more obvious notions of beautygrace and gesture of the modelto less obvious onescrumbling, disintegrating, fragmented, complex surfaces and chaotic technology.

Materia Moda #22

EmProps MemberToken

"Onism" is a term coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, used to describe a frustration or sadness derived from the awareness of how little of the world we will experience in our lives. 

It comes from thinking about unfulfilled experiences, and extends to thoughts about how small and finite we are relative to the realm of all possible experiences/outcomes. As someone who once thought he would have a lifelong career as a painter, this idea resonates with me deeply, and it feels doubly relevant in the context of my relationship with AI and generative art.

ONISM is a project I've been working on passionately and circuitously for more than a year. I've tested dozens of versions of this algorithm and thousands of outputs, and I like to think it has evolved over time, but it certainly has not been a linear process.

Over that time, a lot of personal emotional history has become calcified in these works. So much of this project is about the regret and longing that's inextricably tied to art-making for me (and many of us)  all the paintings I wish I'd made but never did. The time I never afforded myself, the sacrifices I never made, the places I never went.

It's also about the impossibility of conceptualizing infinite possibilities  infinite possible outcomes, infinite possible selves. And of course it's about the exciting/perplexing idea that these digital images that I've created at double-arm's-length, via two separate generative algorithms, can feel so expressive and authentically imbued with emotion. 

But the beauty in all of it, in the end, is that I actually do get to make all the paintings I wish I'd made but never did. 

And I can keep making more and more of them, thanks to the magical, iterative power of this Long-Form AI paintbrush that I'm lucky enough to hold in my hand.


...


ONISM is a Long-Form AI project created with two generative systems: a generative script written in p5.js and a prompt-based AI process via Stable Diffusion. The p5 script outputs an image, which is fed into Stable Diffusion as an img2img input. Both processes incorporate pseudorandom weighted variables that make the outcomes dramatically varied, completely unpredictable, yet deterministic.

All of this was built entirely within EmProps OpenStudio Beta.

ONISM is the first in a series of EmProps MemberTokens. Ownership of a MemberToken confers certain privileges, including a lifetime subscription to EmProps OpenStudio at the Basic subscription tier.

Emil Corsillo
ONISM
EmProps MemberToken #1
Long-Form AI via EmProps OpenStudio Beta
2688 x 3456 PNG
October 9th, 2023

EmProps MemberToken: ONISM #68

IYKYK

IYKYK / ABOSCH / 2023 
synthetic photograph generated from diffusion model trained on artist's custom dataset 
4400x4400 pixels RGB PNG  


artifacts

Artifacts mean many things.  

They are the products of humanity and of machine learning. They are also errors of perception and representation. At the end, they are traces of what has been and what might be  evidence of our majesty and fallibility.  

These _artifacts_ are an attempt to imagine a new token economy where both image and coinage can challenge tired histories. By harnessing the emergent potential of generative AI, they unearth the unexpected while hinting at human-machine cultures not yet discovered.  

Through a process of devoted iteration, we have inserted alternative histories into the complex of ancient and medieval money, thereby posing the question: what might images of pregnancy, of family, and of domesticity mean when minted onto currency?  

Our tokens tell simple stories of private lives but the identities of their subjects remain unknown. _artifacts_ exist in a space of contested histories, displacing value from established, patriarchal power and situating it in our homes. In doing so, they ask the collector to join in the creation of new meanings.  

artifacts  
Ana Maria Caballero & Alex Estorick  
Long-Form Generative AI  
Edition of 100  
EmProps OpenStudio  
1920x1920 PNG  
Sep 26, 2023

Token #36

Ana Mara Caballero - stem

stem 

2023, MP4, 1080 x 1080, 0:14 seconds.

stem is the first micro poem from Petal Book, a three-part leider cycle written by Ana Mara Caballero for Refraction, inspired by Louise Glcks The Wild Iris.

Taking Glcks oracular, anthropomorphic voice as a point of entry, Caballero explores our relationship with mortality, with words, and with each other, in a series of pithy, cutting poems written in the language of flowers. 





stem

because you cut 
me
 
now
you have 
 
to water 
me 


Ana Mara Caballero - stem 9/1537

Token #8

LOOK, TOUCH, OWN.

LOOK, TOUCH, OWN.  
The First 300 Touches.

Beauty is programmable. 
The body is an interface. 
The artist invites you to touch hers. 

Private Previews: 
London - Annka Kultys Gallery 
Los Angeles 
New York City

Final Performance: 
Final Performance and final artwork revealed during Art Basel Miami 2023.

Blockchain Integration: 
ERC-721, numbered tokens.  
Arweave storage. 
Dynamic NFT: Metadata update will reveal final artwork during Art Basel Miami. 
Each artwork will be a 1/1, creating 300 unique pieces in total. 

Look, Touch, Own: The First 300 Touches.  #32/300

Crumbling Yet Climbing

In the realm where art breathed life, a masterpiece unveiled itself with a name that whispered of ethereal connection: Twin Echoes. This captivating creation brought forth a portraits that stirred the depths of the soul.

Twins, entwined in a delicate dance, leaned upon each other as pillars of strength. Against a backdrop of dynamic motion, their shared vulnerability became a symphony of trust and resilience. Their bodies merged, forming a tapestry of harmony, where the boundaries of individuality blurred into unity.

 

Lost on horizon  
The precipice of transformation  
Where anticipation vibrates  
Uncertainty coils  
Reaching out to touch


Fresh lessons every single day  
Pure and bitter, pleasant and dreadful  
Memories created to keep us  
Running with our souls  
Feelings for every misstep

Safety whispers behind  
The unknown beckons from beyond 
The misty cloak of doubt  
Worn with a spring of fear

One step, one moment  
And all world changes  
The wind rises  
Darkness fades like spiral strands  
Arms spread like the wind 
To reach the sky

Amidst this turbulent existence  
Assurance of survival needed  
That no matter what occurrence  
Always will there be for his aching heart  
A shoulder to lean on.  
  2022

Original poem written by Jennifer Philip  and performed by Patrick Nwachukwu  original painting & animation by Patrick Nwachukwu

Twin Echoes

Interferences

An insomniac"s self-portrait on the digital frontier, where inner demons dance in a transformed data ether.

Fusing photography with the digital avant-garde I give life to an inner world of surreal distortions.

Through the interplay between visual aesthetics and digital interferences, I explore the boundaries of reality and virtuality. 
These unique, forward-thinking compositions celebrate the fusion of traditional art with digital innovation,  
inviting the viewer to immerse themselves in a journey where imperfections and anomalies become the very essence of artistic expression.

Insomnia

The Promise

Translation: Mother Earth

Responsible for agriculture and earthquakes, as well as marriage and fertility. She is the salvation of creation.

Tellus Mater

Token #79

TRYST

TRYST explores the moments and the non-moments, the loves, the losses, and the in-between that make up the lives of the people of Brooklyn. A set of three lyrical and arresting short stories, TRYST offers a glimpse into the poetic and expansive inner lives of the people we walk past every day.

Offered as a collection of 100, each edition comes with an original cover by artist Alexandria Sofija. 

Cosmic Communications

Cosmic Communications is a series of looped videos generated with code. It is an exercise in restraint and order of the visual field in motion.