Floor is Rising - Generative Art Part 2
Primer: In this article, we continue from where we left off in the previously published article: the Floor is Rising - Generative Art Part 1. This is part 2 of a two-part series where we combine the podcasts episodes from the Floor is Rising, where the hosts Sabretooth and Kizu talk about the interesting generative artists that they like.
Matt Deslauriers
Has done generative art drops on two of the most popular platforms of generative art - Art Blocks and Hic Et Nunc (HEN)
The artwork is called Subscapes - floor price is around 7.5 ETH
What is interesting is that he dropped Subscapes on Art Blocks but also dropped a companion piece on HEN
A companion piece on HEN uses the same algorithm but tweaked to become an animation instead of a still
Also comes in a different colour scheme and is dropped as a multi-edition piece
Have not seen this before - usually, artists in the NFT space try to segment the drops on each platform
However, Matt released his drop and a companion piece on different platforms using almost the same algorithm
Both drops are not competing with each other but instead complementary
Matt chopped up his works into easily identifiable series to put on different platforms
The audience can then see the different styles of work in multiple channels
Almost like seeing the works in a different light if you go to different platforms
Sabretooth think that Matt is actually chain agnostic
Quite a lot of developers are only willing to work in Tezos or Ethereum or Cardano
Most are very tribal and maximalist
Only recently that we see certain developers willing to use their coding skills across different chains and platforms
As crypto matures, a lot of low-level concerns get abstracted away
Thus a developer need not have to know all the stuff on the platform and can just use it like any other tools
This is different when the technology just gets started
Kjetil Golid
An Art Blocks OG and he had done multiple Art Blocks drops
His Archetype drop was one of the earliest and most popular collections
Has the quintessential generative art look
Has similar visual aesthetics compared with Tyler Hobbs's Fidenza collection
This style of interlocking modules, almost like a Rubik's Cube, has become one of his signature styles
One of his collections - Paper Armada - is dropped in the middle of an NFT bear market
Couldn't sell anything for weeks on end
This shows the peak and trough of the NFT world that even one of the most popular generative artists could not sell out
And now Paper Armada is one of the hottest things in the world
Kizu think that his most interesting work is Dual
The name refers to the struggle between a discrete and a continuous ruleset in one piece
The preset and discrete cellular restrictions create a system while the continuous ruleset distorts the original restrictions with noise
It is in those pieces where it's not quite sure which is the determining mechanism in the final output that his work comes out the strongest
Dual is a 1/1 drop and while the algorithm generates the output, eventually it is the artist who selects it
Two ways of presenting generative art
Artist's curation
Artist keeps generating the output from the algorithm until he gets something he wanted to present
This is the way in which older generative artists prior to NFT do things all along
Collected curation
There is an algorithm and it just prints out the output without the artist's part
No way of knowing what people are going to get
This is a choice that generative artists can make in terms of how far they want to turn the randomness knob
Reminds Kizu of McDonald's Happy Meals toys, where you might have to buy a few meals to get the toys you want because you might get the same one
Manolo Gamboa Naon
He is a generative artist but he is not into the collectible drop mechanic that other generative artists do
He does all his creation using algorithms but the ones he puts out for sale are all curated by him
An algorithm can generate a theoretically infinite variety of outputs
If an artist curates the outputs, the audience only sees a small subset of it
This means that the artist imposes an additional set of parameters that only he is aware of to narrow down the output to something that he thinks is the best
On one hand, the artist can be seen to be short-selling the mechanism because it is a very curated and narrowed down selection
On the other hand, the artist has a strong say in dictating the boundaries of what is produced by the algorithm
A lot of the styles he had come up with are strikingly similar to styles that have come to be known as signatures by modern and contemporary artists from the 21st century
E.g. Wassily Kandisnky, Sonia Delaunay, Max Ernst
This is mentioned in an article from Artnome by Jason Bailey in 2018
This is sobering because now we have these very talented generative artists that can approximate the visual styles by these artists that took years and decades to refine
This is essentially the story of human progress where the current generation builds upon the achievements of prior generations in all sorts of human endeavour
Art might not be seen as mechanical compared to other fields
But with the advancement of AI and machine learning, and with enough computing power, perhaps we can simulate the mechanics of anyone in art history
On-chain generative art is so successful because it is not possible to do it in any other context except in blockchains
Since it can only be done on blockchains, this is by definition the medium native for this sort of art
Collectors will want the best and they will pay a premium for the best
In the traditional art world, the art that pushes boundaries, usually newly facilitated by certain technological advances to the specific medium, were historically vindicated as the most important
If history is anything to go by, generative artists might also prove themselves to be the most important and also the most valuable
Links
Podcast on Shvembldr - Ep 15:
Podcast on Kjetil Golid - Ep 16:
Podcast on Manolo Gamboa Naon - Ep 17:
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