Inspiration for new art can come from anywhere, and in my case it mostly comes from my discovery of new algorithms and techniques grounded in physics and scientific applications, mixed and tweaked in new ways, that produce surprising and beautiful results.

While working 18 months ago on my genesis Foundation piece, I was struck by the myriad techniques scientists use to model fluid flow within a container and the important tradeoffs between understandability, computational complexity, and ease of application for a given simulation solution.

To utilize simulated fluid motion to power a visualization, I used the relatively simplified and speedy lattice Boltzmann method to approximate fluid position over time, across a field of fluid-like burbles and flows, to simulate both stream and collision of gas-like particles. Based on the position, velocity, and strength of each particle, I colorize and warp the surrounding pixels to arrive at the final piece and aesthetic.

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Later that year, I greatly expanded this technique with new color-changing dynamics into a full 100-piece Viscosity collection that is currently in the private collections of 49 owners and DAOs with no pieces offered for sale at this time. (A second Viscosity collection is being finalized now and coming this fall, with multiple free mint options for all my collectors. An early preview was shared in our private Discord last week!)

A new form creation machine

Earlier this year, I was deep in the rabbit hole of writing a shader that attempted to connect Perlin noise particles together into unbroken geometries to fill a texture, and discovered that the act of creating noise and then immediately de-noising with Anisotropic diffusion (also known as Perona-Malik diffusion) over and over in a cycle, with subtle shifts and manipulations between each loop, created extremely unique forms that looked both organic and alien.

Coupling this output with AI upscaling techniques trained on illustrations and anime (featuring crisp line creation, deeply blended colors, shadow and form enhancement, and more) allowed me to construct these forms, upscale them with detail enrichment, then loop them back into the noise-denoise pipeline as inputs to form further geometries at ever greater dimensions.

An otherworldly form creation machine, operating at both micro and macro scales, producing visuals that appear both organic and inorganic simultaneously, with fractal-like complexity across any output resolution.

This is layers ⦦ ⦧

The discovery of this technique led to many sleepless nights of experimentation, entire hard drives filled with 300+ megapixel renderings, and continuous refinement of new ways to project geometric output properties through generative color lenses for final pixel-level output.

And today I’m excited because tonight (August 6th) the new 50-item collection of layers ⦦ ⦧ will be minted and offered for sale. This is the first time any art created using this new form creation machine has been publicly available and I’m thrilled to make this my first full collection on Foundation, the marketplace that turned my lifelong passion for generative art into something I could share more broadly with the world.

Looking more closely

This collection represents a hand-selected set of fine examples and happy accidents, showcasing the variety of forms, patterns, and blends that can be rendered. Due to the ability to scale the detail and size of the forms (based on the final output resolution) you will find pieces that appear to either be “zoomed in” or “zoomed out” like you’re looking at pond water through a microscope, or perhaps taking a photo of a subterranean forest using a shallow depth of field.

At the finest level of detail — the maximum level of generative “zoom” that can be achieved within the rendering pipeline — you’ll find examples of forms that look like miniature cityscapes, or cracked panes of glass. These tiny forms are the result of hundreds of noise-denoise cycles that have been upscaled and folded back in on themselves, then repeated through this noise-denoise-upscale loop until confusingly familiar shapes emerged.

On occasion, the denoise stage of the rendering process wins out against the noise-introduction stage, and an extremely smooth gradient of color is evened out across a portion of a piece. These smooth forms transitioning to much more visually complex elements is striking, and one of my favorite parts of this work.

Thank you for your interest in my new collection of generative art: layers ⦦ ⦧

Public sale will commence the evening of Saturday, August 6th on Foundation.

Please follow @flyosity on Twitter for additional details!

— Mike