Feral File  The Experiment

Yoshi Sodeokas animations are what psychedelic visuals look like in the 21st Century. They are informed by past liquid light shows and video feedback aesthetics, but uniquely of our time in the way he folds in glitches and loops. In Into the Nothingness Yoshi starts with a very mundane setting, a first person view of typing on a laptop, and turns that into a never-ending spiraling out of nested realities, an infinite trip on just a small dose of Sodeoka. Rick Silva

Into the Nothingness AP

LIA is an original, shes created generative art with code and released it online since the 1990s. Through the aughts, teens, and twenties, she has continued to explore performance, animation, sculpture, and drawings created with her custom software. Her early work was a strong influence for me personally  it helped motivate me to learn how to code back in the 1990s. Cube_1997 is an iconic work for that moment in LIAs work. When a2p was launched in 2019, it didnt support generative software, so LIA converted her code to the video you can watch here. When Feral File was launched in 2021, software artwork was supported so work like LIAs could be seen the way the artist intended. Casey REAS

Cube_1997 was never lost. Its creator, LIA, brought forth its existence in 1997 using the power of her mouse and her keyboard and her will (and some electricity, too); it had failed to sufficiently please her at the time and, after just a few years, she abandoned it, and it lay, forgotten, in a folder within a folder, at a dark corner in the furthest reaches of her realm of ancient backups. But things that are only forgotten are not actually lost; things that are only hidden can be found once more. It has been 22 years since Cube_1997 was forged and, even if many things have changed meanwhile, many things are still the same: a pixel is still a pixel, black is still 0x000000, white is still 0xFFFFFF, and LIA still loves both black and white with all her heart. Like love letters to a former self, Cube_1997 was rediscovered and recovered, and brought into the 21st Century with much care and love. Sadly, not all things can be preserved in such a transition, and what was once a fully living and breathing application, capable of generating an infinite number of images forever (albeit at a somewhat shabby resolution of 640480), can, today, only manage 24 seconds in one sitting  but for that 24 seconds, Cube_1997 shines forth in glorious 1080p. Damian Stewart, writing about LIAs work on a2p in 2019

LIA debuted new work on Feral File in the first exhibition, Social Codes, in March 2021. 

Cube_1997 #6

Sabrina Ratts work has an anti-matter quality. Architecture and landscapes behave like light and liquid; solid structures flicker, flow, flex, break apart, and reconfigure. She combines the warm nostalgia of video synth textures with the hard edges of 3D modeling. Aliqua feels like a touch interface for an extraterrestrial technology, a particle accelerator made out of glass and fueled by alpenglow. Rick Silva

Aliqua #4

Bright Girls

Bright Girls is an NFT collection of 100 unique videos. This is one of JAPANESE CONTEMPORARY collections curated by Bright Moments.

Luminous Girl

PSY15

1080 x 1920 pixels, 300 frames, 30 fps, mp4, Kazuhiro Aihara, 2023

PSY15_055

Waterfalls Series 2

Waterfalls Series 2 #6

Cult

Every flower field hides dark ghosts.

6000x6000px.
April 2023

Mantras for Artists

Mantra #49

W[ ]RLDS

An Auspicious Amulet of Radiant Decay. 

This Amulet embodies the spark of transformative life-force, accessible only through disruption, mishap and misadventure. An ode to the continuing history of expressive error-generation and creative interference in digital glitch, video and media art. The majority of what you see in this artwork, shouldnt be happening, shouldnt even be possible, and yet, it is. Each bearer of an Amulet will carry this same otherworldy power with them.




Tech & Concept:

These amulets were created from digital feedback and off-label, black-magic interaction with display errors and system glitches in After Effects. The coloured enamel of the Amulet is pure digital video feedback. The metal body of the Amulet marks the bounds of the After Effects composition. Everything outside of the metal area shouldnt exist, is not under my control, and is being generated through purposeful interaction with display glitches, across multiple layers, up and down the processing chain. 

In the same way early glitch and video artists were (mis-)using commonplace and analogue tools of their time, I was curious to see if I could provoke a contemporary, and artistically unfashionable, digital video tool, into behaving with similar self-determined unpredictability. Making it a living collaborator in the artistic process; one to be coaxed and harmonised with, rather than controlled.  Thinking about a future where todays overlooked everyday workhorse tools are retro relics, with their own aesthetic appeal and potential for creative insight. A technical and philosophical challenge, which uncovered these Amulets.  


Error Amulet  Radiant Decay #1/20

 means super star in Japanese. It represents one of my super stars combing AI and Generative Art. I created an image with Midjourney and custom ASCII with TouchDesigner (node based software for visual coding). In the ASCII, there are letters of super star.

The image is re-creation of Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665) by Johannes Vermeer with arrangements in Midjourney. The master painters are always my super stars.

photoevaporation

Handcrafted with feedback loops. 800x450,  150 frames.

cogulos de sol

GridXreixng

Feral File  Chain Reaction

Sara Ludys Synchronicities plays with the idea of a collective psychic and visual space, and explores the aesthetics and materials of ephemerality. Collectors are invited to pick from a list of 100 time codes to mint an NFT corresponding to a clip from a 24-hour video shot by the artist, without having seen the video clip itself. The act of collecting, usually tied to an aesthetic choice, is thereby linked to a moment that intuitively resonates with collectors from afar, becoming a remote viewing exercise. As the time codes are minted, the matching video clips are positioned chronologically on a 4x6 grid corresponding to the 24 hours of the video, forming a structure resembling a multi-dimensional cube and viewable on a website. Collecting and minting the video clips thereby becomes a process of collectively revealing the unseen. The full-length video recorded by the artist over the course of 24 hours is a still-life scene subtly changing over time and involving appearing and disappearing ephemera in a cube-like environment. In Ludys project, synchronicity emerges on various levels: as an alignment of ephemeral objects over the time frame of a day and of transient moments imagined by collectors, as well as a temporal and visual space collectively constructed by a group of collectors.

[Please check the <a href="https://synchroniciti.es" target="_blank" class="link">synchroniciti.es</a> website for seeing the film evolve.]  

Synchronicities #5

LOVE, Fulfillment

LOVE, Fulfillment #1

Baby, Baby, Can I Invade Your Country

Hallucinated territories dont exist. These images show destructive machines, frozen in pixels as angular blades, slits, gratings; grids of depth and shadow on undulating abstract forms. But the machines have been bound by LIAs skill. Approachable, their threats are left empty. Neutered violence sleeps over different terroir and times, as beauty overcomes terror in the inevitable decay of power. Tomorrow only skeletons remain: memories of past beliefs; warnings against possible resurgence.

Baby, Baby, Can I Invade Your Country #1

FROGES

FROGES #13

Peter Burrs BOOM TOWN is a fictional neighborhood on the blockchain inspired by towns that live and die with the boom and bust cycles of speculation. Like most of Burrs works, BOOM TOWN is a richly crafted narrative world that is deeply evocative while remaining mysterious and restrained. Displaying the artists gift for creating images and environments that hover on the boundary between abstraction and figuration, they invite the viewer to fill in the blanks with their own interpretation, suggesting a story that is barely legible yet unmistakably present. Inspired by the tools and aesthetics of video games, Burrs compositions draw on generative dynamics and the complexity that emerges from simple, rule-based systems. Each of the eight works in BOOM TOWN follows a precise logic for generating the structures architecture, its ground and field, its shadows, planes, and colors. The resulting images are reminiscent of 8-bit video games and early computer graphics, as well as the flat diagrammatic quality of CAD architectural drawings.  Julia Kaganskiy

Feral File  BOOM TOWN

<em>The empty lot is the best piece of real estate in BOOM TOWN  a future garden rustling in the vacant breeze.</em>

Every one of the structures in BOOM TOWN represents a unique, living artwork comprised of 1,000 images that will change over time, evolving as a kind of durational stop motion animation over an undetermined period pegged to Ethereums block time  that is, the length of time it takes to add another block to the blockchain. Collectors receive the full set of images as part of their acquisition package and can browse or even create prints of the works past or future state, but they cannot make the work advance any faster or slower than block time. 

Burrs process blends traditional animation techniques with the affordances of generative algorithmic systems. Each work originates with intentionally unoptimized algorithms developed by Burrs collaborator, Dave Tandem, and follows a precise composition logic that dictates its form, ground and field, shadows, planes, colors, and weight. The software allows Burr to draw structures on a gravity-influenced canvas and to animate them changing over time. Burr is interested in highlighting the unique fingerprints of various software and in his practice often works across tech pipelines to weave these diverse fingerprints into a unique aesthetic, reveling in the compression and dithering that occurs through this approach. The final images are outputted into a custom framework built by Tandem that uses block time to advance their evolution.

EMPTY LOT #68

REFRACT PASS

The REFRACT Pass will act as the main point of access to RefractionDAO. It is an evolving NFT that will offer long-term, expanded utilities for our members.The Pass was created by Refraction using our generative art app, Generate. 1000 editions will be available, each with a unique gradient design.