Autoscope by Erik Swahn

In *Autoscope*, Erik Swahn returns to the theme of color as building material from previous series such as *Farbteiler* (2021), *Punktwelt* (2022) and *Funktor* (2023). His new series as a whole describes an abstract universe consisting only of color, with each piece depicting a different scene within that universe.

Whereas many of Swahn"s previous series have had objects as their motifs, *Autoscope* rather portrays places in the form of configurations of simple geometries. Mountains are implied through pyramids and cones, ocean swell through sine waves, and barren forests through arrays of cylinders. Some places are inhabited by primitive geometries moving through space.

In a number of different tableaux, rendered in perspectiveless projection, the series evokes a very reduced sense of place, or perhaps recollection of place, sometimes with parts of the images blurred or distorted. In some scenes, even parts of the geometries are subject to erasure. In contrast to this barrenness, each scene is rich in saturation, movement and animated intensity, pulling the viewer into a chromatic world of its own peculiar logic.

Click or press space to pause/play. Press left or right arrow to go back or forward 10 frames. Press esc to rewind to the beginning of the 60 second loop. 

Press "s" to save a PNG image. Press 4/6/8 to force the resolution to 4000/6000/8000 pixels height (note that different browsers have different canvas size limits). Press 0/1 to reset the resolution.

Specify a forced height by adding a parameter in the format &h=4000 to the URL and a PNG will be automatically downloaded.


Autoscope #333

JPEG by Jan Robert Leegte

Compression has been the driving force behind the image-based internet since the early 90s. No compression, no Netscape, no social media, no NFTs. The JPEG compression has specifically enabled photography-based imagery on the net. It has always served that purpose and over time become the de facto default for showing high quality imagery online. But compression always leaves a trace, which has become the lens through which the network sees the world of uploaded images.

"A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience."  Mark Rothko

JPEG tries to create an image programatically fully expressing that signature compression. An image that is like empty made from barely nothing, yet fully present in its blazing appearance. A work deeply material, expressing itself through the language of code and codec only. This is not a JPEG depicting an image. The JPEG is the image itself.

Delving into the depths and peculiarities of the digital, tethered to art history, JPEG found its way to the surface. Generated color fields are utilised to trigger the compressing algorithm, resulting in a world of raw visual entities. Where the abstract expressionists cut out the depiction in painting, aiming to let the artist convey pure emotion, JPEG cuts out the artist"s emotion and lets it emerge from within the algorithm. Carefully you could categorize the work as *compressionism*. An art form where the machine speaks in its own raw language, but nevertheless makes a direct touch to our human heart.

JPEG is a collection of generative images in the JPEG file format. The work tries to break with the idea of the fixed file format, therefor creating the JPEG entirely from code using no image material whatsoever. The individual JPEGs are generated responsively at the moment of viewing based on the token hash as a random seed. You can literally drag the JPEG out from the browser window.

JPEG pays tribute to interface culture, and as such the work is responsive and not scaling. When the work is resized, the work is again rendered and compressed. When viewed smaller, details will disappear, yet the composition stays recognisable. Its like stepping back to see a work from further away. The choice of color wanders from monochromatic tones to the brutality of complete randomness and everything in between.

In honour of the blockchain and the web, the work is written in vanilla JavaScript, using no dependancies, and generates a standard JPEG. This way the file is downloadable, aiming for a materiality that comes as close as possible to the standard browser.

JPEG #232

Chimera by mpkoz

Chimera is a mutation, its genetics a merging of past and present. 

New creative mediums almost always ingest those that came before. Pictograms and hieroglyphics turned into paintings, which eventually became moving images and photoreal graphics. Spoken words evolved into written text, eventually becoming complex screenplays, computer code, and a world of hyperlinks. Most mediums are not discarded, but combined or extended to incorporate new technology or ideas. 

When a new medium comes into existence, the capabilities of both the artist and viewer increase. The potential subjects within said medium can grow in complexity as well, some fully dependent on the medium that holds them. Other subjects are timeless, popping in and out of multiple movements and genres throughout history. An example of the latter is still life. From ancient carvings through contemporary art, scenes of commonality, beauty, and metaphor have persisted. Traditionally viewed as a type of technical practice or meditation (the bottom of the hierarchy of genres), some examples of still life have gone on to be among the most important works in art history. 

Chimera is a natural progression of still life. It is an old tradition in the very new medium of on-chain generative art, a movement that will have an enormous presence in the future. Chimera simultaneously reaches into the past while exploiting the capabilities of the present and seeks to represent a unique moment in time, a generation of art in between digital and physical realities, encapsulating where we came from and where we are going. 

NOTES:

Chimera is graphically intensive. Modern hardware is recommended. Ensure that your browser has hardware acceleration enabled.

The charitable portion of this release will be donated to various cancer research efforts.

CONTROLS:

A: Toggle animations
R: Toggle autorotation
C: Capture screenshot
H: Capture HD screenshot (CPU intensive) 



Thank you to all that participate in, share, or otherwise support this release. It means more to me than I can say.

Chimera #692

Chimera #220

SOUND MACHINES

Yoko Onos _SOUND PIECE V_ (1996/2024) is newly realized as a digital, on-chain interactive work. Ono transformed the traditional musical score into an instruction, simple written prompts that elicit everyday sounds  which are, in turn, revealed to be extraordinary: Tape the sound of friends laughing together. / Save it for a rainy day. Each time the piece is performed, participants can add their recordings, successively building an ever-evolving archive of sound.

SOUND PIECE V #20

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhursts _Play from Memory_ (2024) is a series of machine-generated works informed by Gunild Keetman and Carl Orffs Schulwerk, a set of music education methods and imitation games for children developed in the 1920s. Orff and Keetman hoped to teach children to improvise freely from memory, training them with instructions in the form of text prompts, mnemonic games, and graphic symbols. Herndon and Dryhurst created sixteen new machine learning models that produce fantastical orchestral / choral sounds and imagery of imaginary instruments, performances, and lessons. _Play from Memory_ highlights striking similarities between the ways in which Orff and Keetman aspired for children to learn music, and how we train machines to learn music today.

Play from Memory #20

American Artist and Tommy Martinez have produced a new generative interface that remixes a recording of their sound piece _Integrity Protocol/Lower Limb Lecture_ (2023/24). Viewers can explore and create new sonic textures by experimenting with the custom interface. The interface is based on an audiovisual work composed using synthesizers and poetic speech, centering on a disembodied voice American Artists own that evokes an empty personhood, or the lowest and least counted in society. Text captions scroll against a blue void, suggesting the blue screen of death appearing during a system crash. Credits: Tommy Martinez - Music and Web Programming American Artist - Lyrics and Video Ryan Howe - Recording and Mixing Kevin Ramsay - Mastering

Integrity Protocol / Lower Limb Lecture #20

DeepDreamERC721

The Portal

A platform for AI-generated art. 

https://braindrops.cloud/

BrainDrops

Something has gone terribly wrong. The portal at the bitGAN forge unexpectedly opened to an alternate dimension and 1024 alien creatures came flooding through. It is unclear why they have come or what they want. All we know is that they call themselves the podGANs.

spectral hexapod (795/1023)

Ornament is a generative on-chain NFT collection by Jan Robert Leegte

Licenced under [Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

Ornament

Ornament is swapping the actors. The frame becoming the content. Ornament is an on-chain deterministically generated SVG. No. 20 / 256

Ornament No. 20

Ornament is swapping the actors. The frame becoming the content. Ornament is an on-chain deterministically generated SVG. No. 173 / 256

Ornament No. 173

Node to Node

Mystic Rose, 2023

A deep zoom looks into regions of an interconnected complete graph. Hundreds of nodes are placed at the perimeter of a circle. Each node is connected to every other node, forming the complete graph. Hand picked regions look so deep into the construction that we perceive chaos in an otherwise highly ordered system. I have been using complete graphs ever since I first learned how to connect nodes. It"s natural and enjoyable to take a computational system to its extreme

Mystic Rose #4

Mystic Rose #2

Mystic Rose #1

Circle Inversion, 2023

Clouds of light are created with a single point moving through space. Several unseen circles of various sizes are distributed in the field by chance. A point randomly selects a circle and transforms its position using only circle inversion. This process is repeated billions of times, leaving behind a faint exposure at each location. Circle Inversion is a beautiful and powerful geometric transformation. I wrote the foundation of this algorithm the night of my first NFT release. It is marvelous in my eyes. Ancient in that it has always been.

Circle Inversion #5

Circle Inversion #4

Circle Inversion #3

Onchain land art from a dynamically generated, onchain 3D world.

Terraforms by Mathcastles

Terraforms by Mathcastles. Onchain land art from a dynamically generated, onchain 3D world.