Summer Party. History of a snapshot.

This piece will be available as an Open Edition on OBJKT.COM (Tezos, 1xtz per piece) as part of the 52weeksartistsdrop project by NFTCanarias.
Minting will remain open from 22:00 UTC, February 11 to 22:00 UTC, February 18. (2024)

Summer vibes. Party, sun, beach, sea waves, sand. An abstract composition that captures the sensations of a wonderful summer vacation.

An exploration of the contrast between rigid and organic, abstraction, and pointillism.

An algorithmic art piece selected from many candidates to be part of this wonderful collection.

Made with custom algorithms. This piece is a snapshot of the endless exploration when creating long-form algorithmic collections.

This post aims to explain and show the creative process around an algorithmic piece and eventually the building of a long-form collection.

There is a lot of information out there, but in short, what generative artists do is create an algorithm, a set of rules that could generate an image. (ok. not just images, it can be sounds, music, animations, data…)

Tools: code editor to create algorithms and web browser to view the raw result.

We see this every day in movies (CGI), computer games (procedural maps, visual effects), graphic design tools (brushes and filters in Procreate or Photoshop). Programmers and artists work together to achieve impressive audiovisual effects.

In generative or algorithmic art, usually the programmer is the artist. (or there is a collaboration between artists and programmers).

We can consider a success when the algorithm is able to ‘throw’ hundreds of pieces while maintaining coherence, diversity and surprise. Furthermore, the “worst” productions should be decent enough as a stand-alone work of art.

Let’s try to show it using this ‘Summer Party’ piece as an example.

I usually like to start with a draft or a basic layout.

This time I was looking for an abstract composition that showed a duality between rigid and organic structures.

On the technical side, an algorithm based on a set of particles with different behaviors could solve this problem.

This set of automatically generated results from the early stages represents design exploration.

These four images show diversity in density and composition, a decent balance between rigid and organic forms and aesthetically they seem fine to me.

Sometimes a base algorithm can take you down very different paths and could eventually become the core algorithm for a set of collections.

For months I have been working with the above concept to explore the potential of these modeling techniques.

Symmetry

A study in vertical symmetry, also adjusting the thickness of the lines to add some depth to the final result.

Textures

Also with double symmetry. This pointed to something reminiscent of the back of a deck of cards.

Pointillism

The third round of this modeling technique has been the “pointillism” approach. In short, draw a series of points around the lines that make up the shape.

In this approach, a set of palettes has been defined and each output uses a set of randomly selected colors.

Some of the outputs generated:

The snapshot

Happy with the results so far, I generated a set of a few hundred images based on the same algorithm. This is something I usually do to get an overview of an entire collection and adjust some parameters for the sake of diversity and surprise.

This is how it looks a generative artists’s test folder.

From this batch, I manually selected a few outputs and finally chose the work that I present as part of the 52-week collection.

Some post-processing has been done (not with code). Tweaking the hue/contrast values, adding a subtle shadow with some of the original code, and I signed the piece.

Summer Party. A snapshot of the endless exploration on generative art.

What’s next?

The journey continues. I’m building a long-form collection over this concept that hopefully will see the light this year.

Polishing details, tweaking colors, exploring new ideas to expand the initial concept… that’s what we do. An endless exploration.

If you have read this far, thank you. I hope this article has been helpful in better understanding generative/algorithmic art and my creative process when exploring and building long-form generative collections.

Cheers!
Fernando Jerez

This piece will be available as an Open Edition on OBJKT.COM (Tezos, 1xtz per piece) as part of the 52weeksartistsdrop project by NFTCanarias.
Minting will remain open from 22:00 UTC, February 11 to 22:00 UTC, February 18. (2024)