Evolving Perspectives
Evolving Perspectives
Thinking about how I want to expand my art practice into physical prints, hand crafted works and self-contained digital installations.
The last few years have been a wild ride. Anyone who threw themselves into the multi-year long crypto / generative art mania will have come out the other side with a wide spectrum of stories to tell. Personally, I benefited greatly from the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by crafting a new career focussed on my love of computer graphics and coding while stacking a reserve fund that permits me to continue down this path.
As we now face a relatively bearish art market in the crypto space — largely due to speculative interests having moved on to other assets — the reality is that a much smaller number of collectors remains. They are the true believers and genuine art appreciators or value based collectors, and so my strategy must adapt. Questions of how to turn my good fortunes and hard work into a practice that can stand the test of time arise. I want to build a practice that is genuine to who I am, further develop my own aesthetics and explore what I want to create, but it must also be a business in which I am mindful of economic realities.
In this newsletter, I share my thoughts on the topic and what I’m exploring to not only produce new artworks in my practice, but also to build a business that diversifies my offerings and earnings beyond just the tokenization of my artwork on blockchains.
The Wall Test
One thing I’ve heard over and over again among collectors is that they prefer to buy art that passes “the wall test”, or perhaps “the wife test” as said by Trinity on the many of the Waiting to Be Signed podcast episodes. Whatever the phrase, the idea is the same; will the artwork look good in my living space?
While many generative artists prefer a style that more closely matches physical works and fits nicely into this criteria, many skew away from the aesthetics bellcurve (🖐️) so getting a spot on the wall may require some creative thinking. To even begin, I need to answer a very simple question.
Can it be displayed easily?
Most of the artwork I have created thus far is difficult for a collector to display. In the case of my interactive and animated works, like Flux or WaveShapes, you need both a dedicated wall-mounted display and a powerful machine to render the artwork. The typical solution motivated collectors advise is to get a Mac Mini and connect it to a Samsung Frame TV, hiding the OSX tray and menu bars and using the app Plash to display artwork URLs on the desktop. It’s expensive and requires tech literacy, and worse yet, doesn’t even permit interactivity rendering part of my work incompatible.
A notable collector of mine who goes by pixelpete has been exploring ways to get a better experience on the wall and came up with the following: a custom framed iPad Pro M4 running a Kiosk web browser capable of displaying work in fullscreen with interactivity (WaveShapes still required a custom script to mimc a “click” event).
BONUS — WaveShapes passing the wall test! 🎶 💃🕺 🎶
https://x.com/pixelpete/status/1807447156980064484
While this is a fantastic effort and one of the best solutions I’ve seen for someone to display most of their generative art collection up on the wall, it doesn’t quite hit the criteria I imagine would work for individual artworks to be on permanent display. It is however great inspiration and I’m keen to find more accessible options.
Why is this important?
I make art first and foremost for myself. I love the process of coming up with idea, studying techniques and technologies and improving my coding craft in the pursuit of building systems that can use my learning to produce my what I envision. I would create whether I had an audience or not, but…
It’s magical when someone connects with my work and truly appreciates the effort I put into something with a sense of awe or wonderment. I’ve been lucky enough to have these moments after releasing work or while it’s been on display. I would love to know that I have work out in the world that brings people this sense of appreciation every day by way of being a part of their living space. I feel this is the next phase of developing my practice; creating work that goes beyond an immutable record on a blockchain and persists in some manner within a physical space.
What are you considering?
The obvious place to start for my static work is fine art prints that I will produce, sign and ship to collectors myself. I’ve ordered an Epson SC P900 and have started to set up a web shop where I can list my artworks once they are ready.
This is all well and good, but I had one fatal flaw in my plan: all of my work to date crashes the web browser when attempting to render at fine art resolutions 😱
So, for the past few months I’ve been studying how to design game engines, code design patterns and rendering technique in an effort to adapt my work, including:
Bucket Renders — chunking an image into smaller areas to stitch together later
Progressive Sampling — averaging the results of pixel outputs to reduce noise
Node Graph Execution — ability to structure data flows for discrete computing
Along the way, I got tired of moving code between projects and losing track of what feature was implemented where and decided to develop my own Engine to give a consistent framework for all my projects and open up potential for future automation.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/@combomash/engine
Together, months of effort resulted in my capability of producing renders suitable for a fine art printer, so now I’m able to focus on what I want to print!
🧠 — Originals
Unlike my long form generative work, where the code was “locked” at time of release, I want to iterate on these over long periods of time, teasing out sets that represent evolutions of the core idea the code presents. Entropy is the first system that will fit this new regime. It’s derived from a chaotic branch of my Erratic collection and I have pushed the output space to go in wild direction, necessitating mindful curation.
These prints will be considered “Originals” and likely name in a way that indicates the system, version, theme and number, ex: “Entropy, Alpha, Background Radiation 1/10”. I’ll print them somewhere around A2 size and each will be individual post-processed by hand to ensure they really pop at the highest quality I’m capable of.
🧠 — On-Demand
Unlike many photographers who offer Limited or Open Editions, I’m not bound by a medium where each individual output is made by hand. Therefore an ethos I want to adopt is always releasing unique work (no editions). My code produces practically infinite sets, so why not make the experience uniquely special for every print?
I’d love to make generative systems available on-demand in a variety of common frame sizes with accessible price points. I imagine an ordering flow where previews of a system are generated to the desired size and can be picked through until they find one they really love to order. Perhaps a “blind order” mode could be fun too 🤔
I haven’t yet determined if I’l fulfill these myself or outsource that to a fine art drop-printing service like The Print Space. Either way this will require considerable work to get the right experience and workflows in place, as no service is made exactly for this, but I feel it would be worthwhile to have a wide reach complementing my Originals.
🧠 — Mixed Media
When viewing physical artwork a quality that always draws me in is when there is an element of depth to the medium. Thick impasto paints, sculpted clay on canvas, 3D printed structures, layers of wood, etc. This wonderful work I saw at Art Vancouver, Contemporary Art Fair really pulled me in and caught my attention.
It dawned on me recently that all of my active art projects — including a collaboration with another artist — were actively exploring depth in one way or another. As a reader of my newsletter, you get early access to blog posts so please take the opportunity to read my latest article where I expand on this realization in more detail.
Suffice to say, I am exploring this motif and want to find ways to produce works that clearly exhibit depth. Both Entropy and Replica were already using a layered design approach, so what could I do with them?
At first I decided to try a Looking Glass Factory Portrait screen, which has a lenticular display connected to an internal Raspberry Pi, capable of displaying stereoscopic 3D without the need for glasses. Quickly modifying Replica to export the necessary 48 views the device’s specification requires and got some promising results!
But… after cycling through the samples on my desk for a few days, I realized it wasn’t the right fit after all. It simply costs too much to buy the unit itself, the resolution is not as high as I’d need for high frequency details, and at around 4x6” it’s kind of small. It’s a great way for me to soft proof works with depth, but not as a final display device.
Then I remembered another artwork I saw at the fair, where an artist painted layers of underwater plant life and fish on layers of epoxy resin, creating a pleasant illusion.
I’ve begun to make proofs of this idea by printing each layer onto clear plastic sheets on my home office printer and applying them to layers of resin contained in a simple frame from the dollar store. My hope is that from these proofs I might get an idea of how I could scale the process up and if it presents visually compelling depth.
Phygital
Okay, it’s a silly buzz word, I know… but when it comes to the question of how to get my animated and interactive work up on a wall, it kinda fits? What I really want is to be able to offer a self-contained bit of hardware in a boutique case — ideally hand made for that artisan touch — in which an entire generative system is running at the touch of a button. I muse a little about this idea on Camille Roux’s latest GENART podcast:
🧠 — Self-Contained Systems
Years ago I started learning the basics of Arduino programming to use custom circuits in building fun DIY projects. I originally wanted to make some MIDI devices to go into my music gear but the novelty wore off and now I’ve got a drawer of hardware looking for new life. The idea of a self-contained generative system seems like it could be a good fit, so I wired up a screen and got a standard drawing library working to draw random coloured squares to screen.
It was pretty slow to draw and while I could squeeze in a couple more wires to add a button or two for basic interactivity, it was feeling a bit too limited. Add to that, I would need to get much better at C++ and would be limited to very basic drawing library 👎
So I looked over at the RAK Helium Miner I had running in the corner earning barely a few cents per day of SOL and I recalled it had a Raspberry Pi 4 inside. After a quick tear-down I got it booted up and tested the of my performance of existing artworks.
I could get WaveShapes running at a super low quality and Flux squeezed out 15fps, but looking at example ThreeJS projects it ran at a reasonable 30-60fps. Not great, but if I made an artwork targeting the device from the very start, pairing a small LCD screen with it and array of sensors, I could create something performant and unique.
I later got an Orange Pi 5 to get a bit more CPU/GPU power to play with and now it’s a more compelling option. I haven’t yet prioritized this concept yet, but I do think it is a strong contender for a “buy it, plug it in and see new art every day” type experience.
🧠 — Blockchain Tokenization
My work to date has been tokenized on Ethereum and Tezos blockchains and while I love having work on an immutable database with permissionless trade, I’m going to focus my usage of blockchains to a few key areas.
Archival — when I produce physical works from a version of my code, I’d like to capture it on Ethereum to ensure it can be reproduced in the future.
Partnerships — for the right platform and/or collaboration, I’ll participate in a drop if there is a reasonable demand (mostly to ensure my hard work exists as mints)
Sketches — I have systems that I enjoy but don’t want to turn into saleable work, so for these I’ll simply capture them as 1/1 infinite generators
Innovation — for collections that require a smart contract for some meaningful interaction, inter-connections or execution at the time of mint.
And wherever possible, I’m going to be mindful to incorporate the other strategies into my tokenized collections. Why limit all this beautiful work to just the occasional glance on a computer or mobile device, right?
TL;DR
I will make artwork that passes “The Wall Test”
To pass the baseline test, displaying my artwork must be easy!
Recently started developing my own Engine while studying rendering
Ordered a fine art printer — Epson SC P900
I will curate sets of Originals to print from systems I explore over time
Investigating an On-Demand print strategy for open edition systems
Exploring epoxy pouring to produce uniquely layered artworks with depth
Early access to my latest blog post — Exploring Depth in my Work
Phygital installs using small form factor hardware for animated & interactive work
Using blockchain tech for archival, partnerships, sketches and innovative mints