Author: Monday

Monday – NFT Reading

This movement towards NFT’s by new media artists starts to feel more and more like a byproduct of a broken art market, and it’s more than understandable why some artists sell NFT’s, despite the environmental costs. I was honestly  shocked by the statistics listed in the Flash Art article about the demographics of today’s most successful artists in the auction market. Chances are, if you’re not a white male from an extremely wealthy and privileged background, your chances of success in the traditional art market is incomparable. Thus, I can’t help but be sympathetic and supportive of these artists. 

However, it is impossible to ignore how unstainable the market is, and to what degree it can harm the environment. This problem is at the fault of how the value of proof of work cryptocurrency is determined to begin with, and its energy consumption is increasing with no end in sight. I can’t imagine a successful and sustainable future with a cryptocurrency-based market for art, especially with a proof-of-work model.  

Lastly, I’m skeptical of the current NFT market, especially in regards to art theft and frequent themes in the art being sold. As stated in a couple of the articles, transparency is a major issue in this virtual market. A lack of accountability in art theft and a rise in sales in NFT’s such as tokenized tweets raise questions about the future of this market. Additionally, the disconnect from the rest of the contemporary art world and these NFT’s, with a large number of NFT’s focusing on brightly-colored 3D animations of sci-fi environments strangely enough,  also make it unclear how they are in relation to contemporary art now and in the future.

Monday – Creature

Dust Bunny Disco! Download Video

For this project, I wanted to focus on an old-timey, peaceful vibe, so I created dust bunnies! I’m very interested in abandoned/ruined settings and was inspired by the game Unraveled and its tiny protagonist, so I stuck with a smaller scale with weathered-down objects. I found some old phonograph music from Free Music Archive, and the images from free stock photo websites.

In the program, you can interact with the dust bunnies and feed them pollen particles to grow them and create more bunnies, and they’ll track your track your mouse cursor with their eye if you’re close. You can also play them music ( which they love) and drag them around the screen only if they are not dancing (you don’t want to be rude).

Link to Sketch Here

Monday – LoopResearch

I really love the combination between 2D and 3D visuals here, and I’m also curious about how they achieved a seamless loop with the forest path.

 

https://vimeo.com/334650763

I’m familiar with Wannerstedt’s work since it became popular through Instagram and I was always very in awe of the imagination it took to make these strange contraptions.

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bocy4DmAjbB/

This piece is so confusing to look at, I have no idea how it’s structured!! The objects in the grid constantly disappear and reform and its very visually confusing.

 

Monday – LoopReading

I was honestly really surprised by the segment of her presentation that showed how even the plain statement “sometimes behave so strangely” (discussed at 20:00) was noticeably changed by looping. It solidified her argument for me and I still vividly remember that clip.

Monday – Wallpaper

Wallpaper sketch

I based the palette of this wallpaper off of an image I took of some leaves at a park and wanted to create random blossoming shapes to form a more organic look. I ultimately used 1D perlin noise to create variation in the lengths of the “petals” of the shapes and layered them in multiple colors to create more contrast. Lastly, I arranged them in staggered paths and left room for negative space to balance everything out.

Original image:

Process Photos:

Monday – Readingso3

A very useful piece of information from Tyler Hobb’s essay “Color Arrangement in Generative Art” was the idea of inheritance in the subject of generating color palettes. Previously, I was unsure of how to generate colors, but I knew how chaotic random selection was. Inheritance is definitely useful for generating colors that will create a sense of unity in a palette, as it bases the newly generated color off its parent color.

Monday – Readingo2

Kate Compton’s “10,000 Bowls of Oatmeal Problem” introduces the interesting idea that random generation, over a large set of possible outcomes, can eventually start producing outcomes that lack “perceptual uniqueness,” despite having different, randomized qualities. She described this through an example of 10,000 unique bowls of oatmeal. Although they would all be technically unique in their arrangement of oats, for example, over that large sample size many of the bowls would share many similarities and may only differentiate in one aspect.

In some situations, this phenomenon might actually come in handy, when doing tasks such as random map/environment generation, where one would want the different parts of the map to resemble the other without much noticeable change.  In other scenarios, however, such as generating unique 2D designs, one would have to overcome this problem. Possible technical strategies  could be to limit the number of possible similar values such that minute differences, although still technically different, wouldn’t fall under the same group visually. Another possibility would be to increase the amount of possible outcomes such that there would be more variation naturally.