I’d love to share more about what the name means to me, how I achieved the aesthetics, the core system driving it, the pixel recursion and so on, but the truth is I have a vision now that’s stronger than ever and I have to pour everything I have into making it real.

Maybe I’ll rekindle the algorithm once that’s done, and give a proper break-down and share the code or put it on-chain, but for now, I’m moving on. If there’s interest from full set collectors, I’d consider doing a limited run of high resolution posters. Let me know if you’d be interested.

This might be a hot take, but …

On Rodeo

Three years ago, many of us were minting fiverr art for thousands of dollars, treating every release like a shitcoin, and in general having a really good time.

We went through a crushing bear market, and felt like the scene and technology we’d fallen in love with, digital ownership and a new market for digital art and collectibles, were all crumbling around us.

We had to raise our defense mechanisms. We had to wise up. Demonetize the grifts. Protect our financial means to be here in the first place.

Of all the trends we’ve seen, from friendtech to AI agent larps, Rodeo has got to be one of the least offensive and most genuine experiments combining crypto and social media.

Were they to succeed in their mission, taking on incumbents like Instagram, they’d bring digital ownership to the masses. OnBoArDiNg! I know.

But in my view, it’s already inevitable, it’s just a question of when. Personally I’m glad to see folks taking the risk to make it happen in our lifetimes. All of our most valuable JPEGs and hyper-sculptures would see the broader appreciation they deserve. Regardless of what that means for price, if you really care about what we’re doing here, that’s great news! We should be so lucky. I will celebrate the day I never see a paid ad again.

Of course there are flaws, many of which get worked out along the way. I’m glad to see artists like Jack forcing the platform’s hand to address the malleability of images and others, the mint timers. If they really garner attention, I expect we’ll see all the normal web2 playbooks unfold as every competitor clones them and drives the platform take as close to zero as the market and businesses allow.

This is a win for creators and artists. It’s small. But folks who need that extra help, whether it’s real feedback as they work, a little extra financial support to keep them going, or just connecting with more artists they admire and potential collectors who appreciate what makes their work special. Thirty cents is nothing, but with the global scale of the internet, it could really add up.

My Process

I decided to stop working on this algorithm, primarily because it was no longer working on me. The intersection of systems creating emergent possibilities beyond what I’d imagined has always been the most exciting aspect of generative work since I first discovered it 16 years ago. That’s why I’m here, and this algorithm became too bespoke, too placed-by-hand.

The rest of this post will be the brief journal entries I made as I worked.

May 31, 2024

Conceptually, I want this work to invent a new word - like a painterliness, or impasto, but for the artifacts left behind by a computational system. That’s been done, I’m sure, but to imagine it hasn’t or at least not to a degree of unreal greatness in my head gives me a north star to aspire towards.

New compositions leveraging the system’s groundwork:

May 29, 2024

Using raw pigment data to explore a new color palette:

May 28, 2024

Insisting on water, or similar; a liquid surface:

May 21, 2024

Capturing a shape, roughly:

May 18, 2024

Capturing a shape, sharply:

May 5, 2024

A saturation and lightness gradient:

An ocean’s horizon:

Blending through different color spaces:

May 3, 2024

Controlling scale:

Controlling direction:

May 2, 2024

Finding new ways to melt:

April 30, 2024

Learning to control the system:

April 23, 2024

Breaking ground; the first output from a new recursive system:

When making art, throughout history, we’ve tended towards literal representation and realism: capturing the interplay of light and shadows, the subtle language of forms and compositions, a quest to imitate human visual perception - the image - and how it can make us feel.

Now, with software as a medium, we’ve opened up a most infinite possibility space for new kinds of representation. Not just of light, but of any other physical law, real or imagined - the system - and how it can make us think.

Through math and logic operating at unfathomable speeds, human expression is expanded; in addition to images and physical objects, we have behaviors and digital worlds. Concepts can be precisely codified, rather than loosely outlined by our low-bandwidth written languages.

With all of this sprawling thousands of lines of complex and technically rigorous programming, it can be immensely difficult to fully appreciate how this nascent medium guides an artist’s hand.

So, I want to show you.

One Concept, Two Worlds

By bringing to life a physical implementation of a digital system, the artist’s adherence to constraints, aesthetic decisions, and search for the medium’s boundaries reveal themselves in stark contrast.

I partnered with my wife, an excellent exhibit designer and artist herself, to build a physical reinterpretation of Proscenium’s world-canvas and bouncing paint. Seeing the two side-by-side will reveal more about digital systems art than my words ever could.

The Experience

This collaborative event will take place at Art Blocks’ Marfa Weekend (details below).

Each visitor plays the role of an “Agent” within the Sunrise Protocol. To join the protocol, you must first interact with a pseudorandom script that assigns a ball type - just like the initialization of a generative algorithm. However, all choices afterwards are in your hands: paint color, drop height, initial velocity, etc.

The introduction of entropy sourced from the whims of each individual is not new in and of itself, but it’s a worthwhile lens to consider. We’ll create an artwork that’s randomly generated both by an algorithm and by the myriad human hands working together. Perhaps, if the two truly exist, the work will simultaneously exhibit properties of both free will and determinism. Or maybe we’re just bouncing paint.

Agents can also take home a piece of the art: the rubber ball you used to bounce and splatter paint. Around 20% will be able to use and keep custom Art Blocks golf balls. The script will also be assigned three official Proscenium prints from my personal collection to distribute randomly to participants at the event.

Sunset

The naming and brief description around this work has some personal context, so I’ll briefly summarize with a stream of consciousness from the thoughts and feelings as I worked.

While prototyping a physical concept, I created this first painting with the same oil paints I had sampled for Proscenium’s “From Zero” palette, using only the kinetics of rubber balls to make marks. Anyone who’s used oils would tell you this is a bad idea. I learned the hard way why acrylics were the right choice, but I had wanted so badly to match the algorithm as closely as possible.

Over two days, I worked tirelessly to get a feel for the medium; the shapes and paths illuminated the viscous interaction and energy transfer in each bounce. It was so wonderful to witness! I wanted to find ways to express myself compositionally. I wanted sunshine peeking over the horizon. I would end up taking my three-year-old to see his first sunrise a week later. I wished we would see it everyday; how can we forget to appreciate something so close, so common, and yet so brilliant and glorious as to burn the sky with its colorful grandeur?

As I stubbornly pushed forward, pacing around the paint-splashed canvas, the fumes building up began to seep in, to overwhelm. I found myself growing dizzier by the hour, internally aching; by the end, despite having so much fun, I was delirious, exhausted and in physical pain.

I was furious with myself. I’m now five years sober, but I felt I’d dragged myself into a hangover, and was forced to remember how I had struggled with depression and substance abuse in my teens and twenties. I was confronted by those self-destructive nights, like the feeling of smoking a cigarette when you’re sick. A sort of misdirected determination. You know better, but fuck it.

It’s hard not to think of Pollock; he probably inspired me more than I realize. I wondered if he suffered while he worked, splashing and mixing chemicals and paints. How many of his mistakes, his troubles, at least in part, arose from the invisible particles he inhaled while immersing himself in his paintings? I thought about how our understanding of material science and biology is still so prehistoric. How when I was a boy, my grandfather passed from a likely combination of pesticide exposure and tobacco. I take after him, but I’ll be damned if I don’t let him teach me a lesson.

My thoughts swirling, I was reminded of how it felt to unravel the nightmares we weave for ourselves in those darkest moments. We are the authors of our own stories, the narrators of our inner monologues. Write yourself the best story with everything you’ve got. Take control. Happiness is a choice, my father always told me. It’s perspective. Always look forward, always be learning, always keep going. Every sunset is a sunrise from another angle.

The Details

Phew! It’s been a journey, but we’re never more than halfway there, and “there” is not really where we’re going. All and all, making these physical pieces has been both a great joy and a great lesson.

I humbly invite you to join me in making a collaborative bounce painting in Marfa!

Sincerely,

Jimmy Griffith (aka remnynt)

↓↓↓

• Date … Friday, November 15, 2024

• Time … 11am - 3pm

• Place … Saint George Hall, 113 E El Paso St, Marfa TX

In 2022, I began to think of my smart contracts as "medium-native artworks." After all, they were designed for and within the EVM and its constraints; they were interoperable, exposed APIs to interact with the visual art, and experimented with blockchain incentives. My thinking went further: they're native to computing arts, digitally native, because they're math equations quantized to the pixel and its RGB color space. Surely, this makes the work special and worthy of attention, or at least a pure gesture exploring the medium. I mean, it’s not like I’m pretending it’s paint.

This piece will show why I was wrong and how the combative discourse around physicality and skeuomorphism in software art is misleading and misinformed.

Lost in the Discourse

I need to use better words. Native is a word about otherness. It is to say, "most everything else is foreign." It does not elevate a work of art, it puts down others. In using it, I wanted to draw lines to define the medium of my practice, but in retrospect, it feels more like saying, "my work is not like theirs." Which is unfortunately a sentiment we see all too often on social media, where nuance is a blood sacrifice on the arena grounds before artists reduce themselves to combatants for attention. I think our work deserves better, and it starts by recognizing the fallacies in our arguments.

The debate around "traditional media" in generative art has been a sticky one, and having felt strongly on both sides of it, I’d be so happy to dismantle this false dichotomy once and for all.

Software is World-building

Creating an arbitrary spectrum of physicality, and opining sweeping judgements about either side of it, is extremely reductive, and it does artists on both sides a disservice. Rather than spending time with a piece and thinking about what the artist is trying to say or how it was made, we are picking one of two buckets, and tossing out the other. With layers of entangled systems built on a foundation of logic and math, making art with software is most akin to world-building, and if you're not engaging with that depth, then you're not really seeing the art.

"Each generative art project is a world itself." - Licia He [1]

Collections like Licia’s “Seeing and Believing” demonstrate how art can be simultaneously digital and physical.

Licia He

@Licia_He

My collection, Seeing and Believing, is showing in Miami this week at the @tender_art booth in the @untitledfairs. It consists of two large generative plotter paintings that I'm in love with.
1/

67

7:06 AM • Dec 4, 2023

The truth about this digital-to-physical spectrum is that it’s shallow - it doesn’t extend beyond two pigeonholed definitions of surface aesthetic - because making something look physical with software is an arduous digital endeavor with deep roots in the history of visual computing.

Digital Paint

While developing the styles for Proscenium, a friend noticed I'd worked squares and circles into my compositions. The actual geometries are more like ancient temples and impossibly tall spires, but without their third dimension in the final outputs, they are reduced to simpler shapes. My friend asked, "are you adding triangles next?"

The absence of triangles is intentional - it's a nod to the fact that the entire piece is triangles. The default render is a geometry of more than 8 million, all very small, and weaved together to look like paint on canvas. Through that lens, the piece is an homage to the tradition of Computer Graphics, a field where the fundamental building block has been the triangle since the '70s.

I fell in love with artfully using those basic shapes in 2008, when I wrote my first heightmap algorithm; I remember pushing through the heavy doors of Chapel Hill's Sitterson Hall, racing down the steps because I was always late, faced with a triumphant digital battleship looming overhead, boasting breakthroughs in triangle count.

The trajectory of Computer Graphics software has been one of increasing realism over time. Software artists who explore that space are free to choose any point, whether at the cutting edge, or in homage to the earliest days, and leverage that context to say something or just to show love and self expression. I wanted to capture that starting point in my journey, so I’m using the simple lighting techniques from that era, and as many triangles I can pack into the browser without making it crash.

To Err is Human

… and so are pixels and paint.

In aggregate, our medium is a complex structure of math, computer science, intricately networked hardware, and layer-upon-layer of software building up from ones and zeroes. It is possible to zoom in and focus on one aspect, one programming language, one environment, or one piece of hardware, and make art within those constraints and about them - to define a narrow medium and to explore its specificity - and that's an interesting and worthwhile exercise if we learn something, gain a new perspective, or just find something we love. However, that's not what we see in today's digital art discourse. All too often, the most accessible attributes of visual programming are claimed as pure elements of the medium, yet we could not be further from the truth.

A cornerstone of digital aesthetics is the RGB color space - particularly around the highly saturated extremes, like the neon green of a text terminal or a visualization of "The Matrix" - but the RGB color model was developed in the 1850’s and 60’s [2], almost a century before digital computing. It helped contribute to the biological understanding of human visual perception - the red, green, and blue cones in our eyes. The color model can be fitted neatly in art historical terms as it led to the development of color photography. With that in mind, RGB is more analog and biological than it is digital. That is to say: work leveraging these aesthetics can be considered about computers, or a nostalgia for a certain era of computing and its constraints, but it is not in some way "digitally native" or more pure than other software art.

Similarly, we can trace the lineage of the pixel to Pointillism [3], a painting technique that first appeared in the 1880’s, and the simultaneous development of halftone printing. The shared conceptual ground of small dots as fundamental building blocks to an image illustrates how technology and art evolve together, not in a vacuum.

We are standing on the shoulders of giants; the elements of our medium that sometimes feel cold and logical - distinctly digital or native to computers - are in fact very human, and arise from advancements in thinking and technology pulled from both art history and science.

It’s Personal

The concept for Proscenium, as mentioned in a previous essay [4], started with my heightmap algorithm while first studying Computer Graphics. Having worked with JavaScript canvas APIs for over a decade, I was hungry to properly learn WebGL, and to get started, I set about recreating that terrain generator that meant so much to me.

remnynt

@remnynt

the evolution of a generative system
2008 -> 2023

what if paint could bounce like rubber, and the world was a canvas?

software is a medium for reinventing the rules.

34

12:12 PM • Nov 26, 2023

I was so proud of it! The emergent archipelagos and winding rivers, things I had never intended, would arise from the generative system. In excitedly sharing with my family, my brothers chimed in, “what are you gonna put on it?” “Make it a game!”

While rebuilding it, I remembered that excitement, and my brothers’ suggestions. I remembered how we’d take a rusted metal shovel out to the beach to build giant sandcastles, patting down paths spiraling around, over bridges and through tunnels, just like dad taught us. We’d race golf balls until the waves started washing them away.

I thought about my collection of rubber balls, stretching an Electronics Boutique bag to its limit, and how I’d always wanted to find the best places to set them all loose at once.

What if they left marks along the way?

What if paint could bounce like rubber?

On the Importance of Audience

In my practice, I want to make truly great work. My best measure of that is somewhere between my own feelings about it, the critique it receives, the number of people who see and appreciate it, and the value of the work in a free market.

But before I can look back and assess a work’s success, I have to start with a set of goals, and they’re much harder to quantify. A great work of art, to me, takes an inventive concept and achieves a sublime aesthetic that captures observers in a moment of awe, while still presenting a thought-provoking challenge. I want my work to reach people and to have that same effect outside of the places I call home, the generative art scene and more broadly crypto.

The undercurrent here?

Art is other people. - 0x113d

Or more generally:

happiness [is] only real when shared - Christopher McCandless

Proscenium is far and away my best work towards achieving those goals. Outside of the concept and message, I believe paint as a visual language is very well-suited to reach and communicate with the broadest possible audience.

...the moment of active viewing, taking in the visual stimulus, engaging in pure perception. That is the moment when the artwork must succeed. If an intimate relationship between the viewer and the artwork is not established here, nothing else matters. - Tyler Hobbs [5]

Studying the tradition of painting has also served to push me in ways I would have never imagined. Even a casual google over the past century is enough to humble and inspire. To lead art history’s focus along a path from paint to software will take a monumental effort from digital artists of every perspective, and decades, if not centuries, of great work. We are just getting started.

The Only Should

I hope this writing and artwork give another perspective on how we can reimagine traditional media in software and generative art. As someone who collects and loves works like “Terraforms” by Mathcastles [6], known for its superb digital typography aesthetic and conceptual depth, this is in no way a position of maximalism or an attempt to tell artists what they should do in their practice.

Software is a medium where art is truly free. It’s more infinite than any medium before it; from a set theory perspective, it’s as infinite as our imagination and more, capable of simulating and representing every type of media that’s ever existed. It is unfathomably and wonderfully infinite. That is software.

sofia garcia

@sofiagarcia_io

The ongoing debates around generative art aesthetics (re: skeuomorphism etc) came up during one of my panels last week and, for the sake of transparency, I’ll share my simple thoughts on the matter:

Artists can do whatever the f*ck they want.

Cheers.

269

12:47 PM • Dec 12, 2023

Proscenium

The arguments in this essay sum up to one of many statements that Proscenium makes as an art piece. I hope folks enjoy any time they spend with the work, and that more broadly, it illuminates a way of thinking about what’s possible with software as a medium for systems art.

I’m honored and humbled to finally share that Proscenium is Art Blocks Curated, and will be available to the public on Valentine’s Day, 2024.

I’ll update this thread in the next few weeks leading up to the release.

remnynt

@remnynt

8,245 lines of code from scratch
585 days in the making
400 digital paintings
145 kilobytes on-chain
19 days 'til mint

Proscenium is Art Blocks Curated
Valentine's Day

I don't know what a masterpiece is, but this is how I aspire towards one. A journey well had.

↓ 1 / 5

603

6:27 PM • Jan 26, 2024

Notes and Sources

1. Quote from Licia He

2. RGB Color Model

3. Pointillism

4. Proscenium

5. Intellectualism has Hampered Generative Art

6. Terraform Explorer

In creating it, I’ve prioritized aesthetic emergence through the interplay of a few simple systems, and even after being my sole focus for more than a year, the algorithm still surprises me in the best ways.

For now, I want the work to speak for itself, so the focus of this essay will be what you can expect to see and how it all works; but before we get into the details, pause briefly here, and imagine: what if paint could bounce?

Algorithm

Based on a generative terrain system I created in 2008, the core component underpinning Proscenium is its heightmap algorithm. Before building the heightmap’s geometry, a scalable mathematical model defines its shape from a combination of land and structures. Let’s take a look at an example using circle-packed domes:

A heightmap geometry is generated based on the model and a formation of paint drops is suspended above. Gravity takes hold, and each paint drop begins its journey, falling into the world below. A deterministic timestep ensures that the simulation is always the same. The magic of watching paint bounce unfolds in the live render:

https://vibes.art/proscenium/live_render.mp4?height=888&width=1579&autoplay=true&loop=true&muted=true&controls=true

After all the drops have settled or fallen off the canvas, the heightmap is flattened, all except for the paint left behind by each bounce. This technique, leaving marks in three dimensions and then flattening down to two, creates a rich variety of shapes that reflect the character of the now invisible world.

The unique properties of the simulation begin to reveal themselves. The paint is more sparse around the highest peaks and tends to pool up in the valleys. Tracing a drop as it bounces and ricochets across the scene gives new meaning to the final output.

As I spent more time with the work, the sculpted land and structures began to feel like my brush - the action, emotion, and diversity in droplet shape all arise from the angles and curves of these underlying worlds - and so they became the star of the show: the styles.

Styles

The landscapes are categorized into “styles” because the land’s shape determines the final aesthetic more than any other attribute. From rugged mountaintops to sci-fi cityscapes, there are a total of nineteen distinct styles.

Each style contains its own set of unique variables, but most common amongst them is a range of scales that determines the size of the structures strewn across the land. This example from the “Superbloom” style showcases how each of its flower-like abstractions differ in size from very small to giant:

Although the styles are core to the algorithm, it’s only through their interactions with the paint that their characteristics can really be appreciated.

Paint

The paint starts in a formation suspended above the world. These formations are a combination of seven “forms”, which you can think of as two-dimensional layouts of paint, three “drops” that control the vertical distribution, and five “densities” factoring into the total number of droplets. Forms are most obvious in their control over the negative space in a composition:

In most outputs, each paint droplet is sized to reach as far as it can without overlapping a neighbor on its first bounce; though, there is an exception: the special “overflow” mode greatly increases the scale of all the paint.

Colors

The majority of the seventeen color palettes are derived from paint pigments, and mixes thereof, based on color science[1]. Others are inspired by my love for nature and the landscapes that spark a sense of wonder in my life.

Palettes are weighted to take up an approximate percentage of the output space, as is each color to take up a percentage of a single output. The most common palettes contain upwards of 30 colors each. The leading palette, “Mixed Oils”, will make up about 25% of the collection with a total of 37 colors.

The palettes also have some structure when applied to the paint droplets, driven by one of six “patterns” (color shapes) and one of nine “arrangements” (color sorting). You’ll be able to spot some of these in the palette list below:

Let’s save the final 5 palettes for the release.

Outliers

As I pushed the aesthetics of the algorithm further, I fell in love with some of the outliers that emerged around the extremes. The first of these extremes to be canonized, I’ve called “rifts”. Rifts are like folds in the fabric of spacetime - blending the default landscape style with an extreme terrain from another world - it’s as though the built up shapes and structures just melt away.

There are two special modes, in addition to overflow mentioned earlier: “Stratum” and “Debug”. Stratum brings a minimalist flair that captures a single horizontal layer of terrain, while debug breaks the fourth wall with a colored canvas, sourced from the paint’s own color patterns.

There’s still so much more to cover with the algorithm, the live render, and the thinking behind the art, but I want to save that for another day.

Closing

I have not finalized how the work will be released and sold, but I want to prioritize technical and cultural durability. Although my work up until now has been through my own bespoke contracts[2], I intend to partner with a platform to bring Proscenium to life and into the hands of collectors.

As time permits, I plan to open source the zero-dependency WebGL engine I crafted for this work, so that it may benefit other artists and creators, and continue to empower my own work as well as theirs.

More updates to follow here and on social media[3]. There may be some minor changes to the algorithm between this essay being published and the artwork’s release. Thank you for reading, thank you for being here.

Notes

1. Spectral.js & Kubelka-Munk theory

2. vibes & [the reliquary]

3. bird app: @remnynt farcaster: @remnynt

She runs a print shop out of her basement, with help from her family, in a small Appalachian town. When I’ve seen her, she is always smiling, and surrounded by beautiful artwork.

That’s because her art is printmaking - empowering artists through the physical (re)production of paintings, photographs, digital artworks, or any other two-dimensional representation you can imagine - and she’s a master. In contrast to her unassuming and warm demeanor, the way Sally strives for perfection in her craft is unmatched: the prints must be indistinguishable from the originals and made using the most durable media and art supplies rated for timescales to last generations.

About a week ago, Sally notified her clients that she was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and may only have a few months left to live. I racked my brain for ways to help, and after some discussion over email, she’s indicated the best way is to keep her shop running: to print more art.

So let’s send her a message. Let’s say thank you. Thank you for loving art the way you do, Sally. Thank you for helping artists put their work on walls. Thank you for being you.

Let’s print all the art.

I’m claiming the 101 unprinted vibes in my personal collection, and coupled with 16 already in queue, we’re sending 117 more prints her way before this post. For comparison, we’ve only printed 132 total since 2021; I think we can do a lot more.

How to Help

Claim Your Prints

Each [genesis] vibe from my first art collection on Ethereum includes a free print + shipping anywhere in the world; if you’re a holder, just follow the instructions and fill out the form below. I’ll buy prints from Sally as long as her business is open.

If you’re new to my art, the thinking behind the work and where to find it is all here on my site: vibes.art.

vibes print claim

claim a 1/1 physical print of your vibe artwork each print is 12" x 12" on hahnemühle photo rag (3000px render @ 300dpi = 10" + 1" border) see https://vibes.art/vibes to check if a token's print has already been claimed if the vibes you want to print are spread across multiple wallets, please complete this form separately for each wallet

http://docs.google.com

Share This Post

It’s hard to reach all of your collectors on a pseudonymous blockchain, so any help in reach is greatly appreciated. If you know someone who holds vibes, please let them know!

Other Ideas

Out of respect for her privacy, I’ve limited the public details in this post, but if you read her email above and want to help in some other way, contact me on discord at remnynt#7777.