(Minting 12.1.25 here: https://www.editart.xyz/series/KT1WJHYR1aYLrf2bJiR5zgZHcBYeCPEFgBC7)

Sometime in misty early 2021 I was approached by someone I was told was important in blockchain about building some kind of generative art platform that used some novel token dynamics and hash systems and harberger taxes. I knew nothing of those things, but I was excited by the potential all the crypto art maniacs were sure was flowering. I had done some creative coding before all this flurry of activity, and some of my favorite experiments had been trying to take well-appreciated modern art and translate the geometrical compositions into code. I'm not exactly what you might call "good at" computer science, though, so I was just trying to sort out how to get simple things like Josef Albers squares to render correctly. I sincerely liked Mondrian, El Lissitzky, Laszlo Maholy-Nagy, Frank Stella - I could go on, but it was an opportunity both to explore their work and to try to get to a point I was confident I could draw simple shapes where I wanted and how I wanted.

So for a while when I was just practicing coding and needed models, I commissioned an artist (who went by Toa - but won't do more work for me, lol) with some of my early crypto-art money to make pixel art avatars of Albertron, Mondriatica, and Frank Lloyd Wrong. These were going to be the first programs that we created for a project we were calling "Boundless" - something like artBlocks in that it's onchain, but it used user-submitted hashes of meaningful transactions (to them) to create the art. Someone else, I found out, had also done this custom hash system - but we were trying to make it more like a standard way of controlling variables with blockchain culture (which I guess is just ethereum transaction hashes). Me and Kate the Cursed were working on simple programs for this first pass - she did Mondriatica and I had Albertron.

We built a simple version of our stuff and it was implemented by a team for a hackathon somewhere - but the project kind of petered out after that and never got a proper launch. The truth of the matter is, though, of the three modernist artist tributes, Frank Lloyd Wrong is the one that I always felt really struck a unique chord. Most people know him just for being one of the most famous mid-century architects, but I had always been enchanted by his Liberty Magazine covers and stained glass. Every once in a while I ask for some kind of merch that has one of those designs on it for Christmas or something.

It's been said that Wright's architecture was an attempt to blend the modern capability of man to conquer geometry, hard shapes and rational structures with the landscape that surrounds them, feeling a part of organic contexts. In a sense, I think this was the great dream of the 20th century: to take the western conquest of reason and power and direct it toward organic and beautiful ends. Most history books say lines like that with a taciturn flourish, recounting the atrocities of world wars, the slavery and alienation of factory production: in short, using the powers of modernity to crush mankind and the natural world beneath its boot harder and with more brutal efficiency.

The one design that always gave me shivers was the Saguaro Forms. I don't think the magazine cover was ever published, but years later after his death it was adopted as a stained glass installation by his students. You can buy it as puzzles, mugs, notebooks. I have always loved it. So, between seasons of projects years later, I sat down and was reflecting on the dream and failure of modernity and this design. I started writing some code again - trying to do things by hand (this was before AI-assisted coding was mainstream) and chipping away at a way to generate a kind of uneven grid. I'm not that clever sometimes but eventually I figured out a way I liked it, and worked on it here and there trying to figure out the geometrical rules of Saguaro Forms: quarter circles, nested squares, diagonal frames, checkers - etc.

I was approached by a friend working with Editart.xyz about creating something for it, and I figured this was my chance to dedicate some time to really getting a decent version of the thing going. What struck me in my research, though, was that the "official" version of Saguaro Forms isn't the most famous one and isn't even the one that's on most of the merchandise. In fact, almost every version of it you can find except the old sketch is an adaptation by ... someone? For example:

Trying to decide what was "authentic" and what wasn't - and eventually wondering if it even mattered - I laughed to myself that none of these designs were quite Wright, they were all Wrong. So I thought I should dig up the old avatar for the project, too. I wanted to do it as a dayglo variation, but ended up making versions in several palettes including the original - but all of them rendered something that looked about right but under close inspection broke some of Wright's rules, or rather: gave the impression of Saguaro forms rather than reproduced it. This was honestly what I wanted, though, endless iterations of something like that genius blend of reason and nature, of the hard lines and repeating patterns and circles that actually was a faithful impression of nature (expression?) and not conquering it and turning it into just lines, just circles.

Will I come back to it one day and try to make it flawlessly re-create the Saguaro Forms sketch? Who knows, but it feels kind of narrow-minded to think that would be a better accomplishment than trying something new and hopeful that tries again to live up to the dream of modernity.