The original game of snakes and ladders (Moksha Patam in ancient India) was designed with a spiritual purpose, the movement of players representing their ascending journey via virtues, or unplanned descent via vice. The western adaptation gradually forgot its karmic lessons and became an activity of luck. The American version went further, turned sin-tempting snakes into "chutes". The game’s visual format is a section through a tall building, starting on the ground and reaching enlightenment on the rooftop. While described literally in the original board design, the only hint in the modern version that this is an architectural representation of 3D space (i.e. a section) is the presence of the ladder.

Architectural drawings are translations of a spatially normal yet unrealised world from a completely hypothetical viewpoint. Their symbols and language layer up, representing space and structure, decoration and mechanics. A thought experiment. In a floor plan, each particle in the field can be represented as pixel (solid) and no pixel (space), a binary utterly suited to map-movement and algorithm. A sectional elevation drawing, on the other hand, offers a different understanding of space, foregrounding the interior of each room as a planar backdrop to its inhabitants. More domestic and more intimate than the abstracted eye-view of a plan.

Year of the Ladder is a generative, interactive, responsive code artwork. It is ornamental, tactile, a bit textile, inspired by both architectural drawing and tapestry, and built with a variegated 5-square module as the base digital material.

It is a stack of 48 rooms forming the decorative interior backdrop to the fool’s journey eight storeys up to enlightenment. Movement is directed by the rules of snakes, ladders and dice, however these guides are hidden and we see only traces of their consequences rippling through the board. Just one output reveals the mechanics; this is the ‘back of the cloth’, the structural CAD drawing, and homage to the game’s Nintendo descendent (Donkey Kong).

As well as the rare ‘back of the cloth’ there are five other material traits (Paper, Blueprint, Screen, Two-bit Color, Two-bit B&W). Each output begins with an initial color seed (hue 1-360), from which a full color palette is generated, based on low or high chance of deviation. The game board grid is composed of panels with low or high levels of ornamentation.

The project continues three connected ideas explored in my previous generative projects: Sequence and story in generative art, architectural drawing syntax and imagination, and the responsive screen. The digital canvas (the phone, the window) is a tactile part of the work engaged through touch and resize. Digital art should be made for the computer we hold in our hands while walking and sleeping. But I’ve designed this to expand into a tiled / textiled triptych setting on desktop too.

Less literal than Interiors, more refined than Unicurse, joining these as a trio of projects exploring many connected rooms and tracing our labyrinthine journey through them.

I sat on a deep stone ledge bounding the enormous terrace of the Norway National Museum, stretched out under midsummer cloud, feet dangling. Two seconds later security appeared in a black uniform with badges.

“One foot on the ground at all times” he said. I obeyed.

He smiled and continued: “Norway is a rich country, and they think ‘how can we achieve 100% employment?’ The answer is through imagination. Imagine if you lift both feet you turn into a levitating cat!”

He gestured up to the sky, at the possible aerial pathway of a levitating cat.

“Now we need a rule to prevent that; and now I have a job.”

Inside, the museum is also teeming with security. Not bored security on a stool in the corner, but proactive security with cop tools on their belts.

I notice the cops because in the show I am seeing the cops are everywhere on the walls; tiny figures embroidered in black thread.

Britta Marakatt-Labba is a Sámi textile artist and in what is probably her most famous work Garjját (The Crows) a flock of crows transforms into uniformed police descending on protesters. It was inspired by the activism of the 70s and 80s protesting Norwegian watercourse developments (which eventually went ahead), but its meaning and motif has been revived throughout the decades since, including in 2023 environmental demonstrations (against projects that will also go ahead).

The work is indigenous activism wrapped in traditional women’s work, things that the establishment art world ignored (and continues to diminish) for longer than is defensible. Now 72 years old, Marakatt-Labba finally ‘made it’ in a 2017 show, but she has been practicing all her life.

Marakatt-Labba uses embroidery to tell stories about the Sámi heritage and way of life and to campaign for environmental protections. Her works are delicate and irreverent, and the symbology of the illustrations instantly attracts me: cosmic and ordinary. Her 24-metre tapestry at the centre of the show is a story, or several stories, of Sámi life, put together in an overlapping sequence. In other words it is a history; Historja as the work is called. Impossible to comprehend as a single whole (yes like history), the small scale of the detail requires getting up close to each moment, seeing the threads, at which point the security guards briskly tell me to step away from the wall.

At the time, Oslo midsummer, I walked around the show kind of quickly, big-tiny embroidered vignettes of Sami life were appealing but I felt like I understood them easily. Yet a month later I’m here, Melbourne midwinter, thinking about the attributes of her art (art in general): material, place, having something to say.

When Marakatt-Labba says “go straight to the material and find your story there, your work of art” she is humbling artists everywhere with the reminder that neither their material nor their story are inventions imagined or sweated into existence but that art-making is the speaking/writing of a single-use language to momentarily connect the two. She is also shoving art-making into the action of craft: go straight to the material; do not attempt to speak your language untethered from an action, a daily process, cause and effect, a structural possibility, risk, and failure. Each piece has its “vuogas calbmái” (its aesthetically appealing usefulness), and each practice has its back-face-of-the-cloth, showing the physical and temporal pathway taken to reveal the story (that you didn’t invent) in the material (that you didn’t make).

Historja is 24m long and just 40cm high, impossible to take in as an image, requiring closeness to see each brief part while filtering out the whole. It doesn’t take quantum physics to know that this format is how life is experienced and how meaning is made — in place, one foot on the ground face-to-face; and that this format is a conception of flattened-out non-linear non-scalar time that connects small planetary and small human moments such that you don’t have to try so hard to elevate the ordinary into the universe or shout “fibonacci” and give yourself a migraine flipping between microscopic and cosmic lenses, but instead accept the overlap of every scale and every time separate, together, held in the one geologic place.

Do you remember how generative art’s very strange blip into investment-grade, overlapping with the (hopefully more prolonged) blip of self-releasing, brought a whimsical side-effect in the form of the Art-Blocks-artist’s Project Statement? An unedited musing on the potency of their RGB pixel lines and the mint function as a kind of reveal of the universe? Desperate to levitate.

There is another group of artists using the blockchain not simply as a storage medium / directory, or as a method of dissemination or as a random hash generator, but as the material itself and the place itself (ethereum as digital art city - social, cultural, networked), and despite the medium’s newness and technological invention they embed deep into a tangible and human place (one foot on the ground) by carefully exploring its back-face-of-the-cloth. How it’s made, for whom, and why that matters.

But there is (or was) also a certain criteria in the same cultural space that reveres blockchain artwork that is about its own token transaction or market activity. Artworks about themselves, a shrinking spiral of things to say, a tragedy. Like a poster for a missing cat.

Each thread in Historja represents a tactile everyday reflection of Sámi life in the arctic. Marakatt-Labba seems to butt away attempts at interpretation; she illustrates reindeer not because is it actually about cosmic time and the patterns connecting their hooves to the entire universe, but because “this is how life is”. 24 metres of images and stories because this is just how life is: Are we missing the point? For five decades of practice, each tiny stitch is moved by her single-minded focus on the conservation of Sami life and land. That’s why the show is called Moving the Needle: Something to say, said over and over in this specific language and frequency till a moment of breakthrough.

This is a limited run of 100 numbered copies, the first publication by Blackout Group.

Purchase link for a physical is here

Contact me if you prefer to order via crypto and a couple of DMs.

And/or you can mint a digital pdf version as NFT here

Interiors is an interactive generative fold-up house inspired by Hammershøi’s Interior from the Home of the Artist (1900), and by the themes of ‘home’ and ‘story’ that are activated by the painting’s subject and mood.

By writing code for generative art you are writing a story. A story starts with a single premise, then each sentence is written to support and stretch it. The plot’s skeleton must be scaffolded, the characters known, and then each line carefully shaped, unfurling to the reader (and often to the writer) an understanding that builds and broadens, with tension and surprise but without trickery. This, then that. If, then, else. Imagination following pathways of logic.

Like writing a story, this generative piece Interiors has several components: 1) the original painting’s enigmatic coolness and domestic mystery, 2) the flat-pack fold-up structural 3rd-person conceit of showing everything all at once, 3) the modular parts of the home / the story / the code, and 4) their metaphoric potential in thinking about generative art.

The Danish painter Hammershøi’s many Interiors depict spaces that are at once mysterious, domestically unremarkable, and, through direct or indirect reproduction during the century since their painting, culturally ubiquitous. Here was an introvert artist, moving furniture and people (his wife Ida) into position and into occasional patches of cool northern sunlight to paint reams of still life moments. Like any life it is ordinary but holds secrets; like any turn of the century European mass-built terraced house it’s all the same, but unique.

One explanation for the paintings’ magnetism is our collective understanding of ‘the house’ as a metaphor of ‘the psyche’. The house is a protective skin holding the accretion of physical and emotional stuff that defines a life. We therefore read the paintings as a view of Hammershøi’s Interiors (the rooms of his house) and as narrative clues revealing some of Hammershøi’s personal interior.

How is the writer (coder) to understand it, explore it, to put these rooms and their possessions (furniture, figures, memories) together in sequence? How are we to read the story?

Interiors is a pattern for a fold-up house of many rooms and doors. It’s an instruction for the assemblage of the interior skin of Hammershøi’s house. I don’t expect anyone to spend a couple of hours slicing and folding this toy model, although I have. Its dollhouse smallness shocked me and activated memories of small fingers sticky with glue.

Like a sewing pattern or an architectural plan, at full view its structure is evident: 12 rooms, each inhabited by furniture objects that shuffle around the house in constant rearrangement, most rooms connected by doors, the resultant utility of pathway highlighted in blue trails. The first three rooms are representations of the elements described in Hammershøi’s Interior from the Home of the Artist (1900). The other 9 rooms are left to chance in the script.

Through simple commands (mouse click and mouse pan) the rooms can be explored at a claustrophobic zoom. Like the intricate IKEA furniture construction sheet, laying it all out there unfolded. Like the IKEA floor plan experience, seeking to drag the viewer through a labyrinthine path of fake living rooms and repeating modules.

All the components of Interiors are modular, which is the way with code, houses and stories. In this piece the modules are: rooms (4 walls and a floor), walls (door / no door), wall panels (clip clip into place), procedural color (with subtly dynamic phasing), furniture (random generative arrangement of boxes drawn in plan and elevation; a reductive diagram of pianos, desks, tables, chairs), paintings (blue screening despite their demonstrated connection to a power circuit). Referencing Hammershøi’s approach to titles, each room’s trait is an “Interior with… [the materials of everyday life as defined by IKEA’s product spec and selected randomly at each instance]” . A catalogue of ordinary / intimate modules.

A tribute to Hammershøi’s house/s, Interiors is also an exploration of generative art fundamentals. Pattern-making is the gen art methodology. It is a structure for documenting the application of rules (what is set by the writer), randomness (what is left to chance), repetition (how many unique things can be made with the rearrangement of instanced modules), reduction (what constitutes enough material to be an expression of ‘wall’, ‘room’, ‘house’, ‘furniture’, or whatever it is we are trying to say).

House and story are useful creative metaphors for thinking about other gen art fundamentals such as disclosure (how much of the system is intentionally revealed to the viewer), complexity / memory (how many characters, how many possibilities, how many russian dolls’ deep of endless containers of rules we cram into the algorithm), and categorisation (the stretch between epitome or edge), how to structure the sequenced machinery of the generative work (through cause and effect and audience interactivity), and where to tighten or release the grip of control on its retelling.

I’m also reminded of Janet Malcolm’s description of writing and of houses, housecleaning as narrating, and wonder if Hammershøi had these thoughts too — of how much of himself should be put into a painting, and what he should remove so that the viewer would linger a moment:

The house also stirred my imagination as a metaphor for the problem of writing. Each person who sits down to write faces not a blank page but his own vastly overfilled mind.

The problem is to clear out most of what is in it, to fill huge plastic garbage bags with the confused jumble of things that have accreted there over the days, months, years of being alive, and taking things in through the eyes and ears and heart. The goal is to make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that a reader will want to linger awhile among them, rather than to flee.

But this task of housecleaning (of narrating) is not merely arduous; it is dangerous. There is the danger of throwing the wrong things out and keeping the wrong things in; there is the danger of throwing too much out and being left with too bare a house; there is the danger of throwing everything out.

From The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

Nic Hamilton has been making distinctly vibrant digital art for many years. The qualities of his work - growth, decay, object, atmosphere, light - are captured in NUXUI, a 333-piece collection of strange (yet familiar) objects, mechanic and organic fragments, tactile materials - decorative talismans / liquifying circuitboards (more here). An interplay of spatial and flattened elements flickers through all Nic’s work. This includes layers of digital texture, scanlines and splitscreen, liquid noise, architectural structures and spaces, and frames /screens as intuitive 3D/2D viewport devices. Born digital, but anchored to the tangible world of urban and natural landscapes.

The objects that form Timeframe follow the same thread. They are a mechanic and organic weave. Look at them one way they are chiseled from the elements, tilt them in the light and they are synthetic material decaying into earth, always in a state of change.

John Glover moved to Tasmania in 1831 at age 64, named his new property after a local farm from his English Lake District childhood, and recorded the new place. He is considered the ‘father of Australian landscape painting’ because he captured something true about his adopted home, beyond the European Gaze. Most colonial painters applied European landscape painting conventions to the Australian scenery: idealised, picturesque, grandiose, sublime to the point of threatening. Either 1) amplifying the perceived harshness of the alien Australian environment, or 2) containing it in nostalgic familiarity. Painful homesickness and bravado in the painted messages passing at the ship speed (<100 days) between two islands opposite each other in every way.

Glover depicted the brightness of Australian sunlight on bushland and painted the local flora accurately. Many of his contemporaries were unable to resist doodling mature oak, birch, plane trees on their canvas, direct from their yearning memories of what a tree should be; shady, green, thick. Glover, on the other hand, noted the "remarkable peculiarity of the trees" in Australia which, "however numerous, rarely prevent your tracing through them the whole distant country".

You see this when driving today through ‘Glover Country’, the unremarkable yet breathtaking landscape in the north eastern quarter of Tasmania, where golden sunlight fans out across bleached grass from beneath these peculiar trees, passing through their stiffly warped dagger-shaped leaves that are olive in your hand and deep blue in the distance.

Like the old painter-settlers, the A.I. also finds it hard to resist its European Gaze. If you aren’t vigilant, the oak, birch, plane trees creep in, the gardens become more English Country, the frames and structural elements are sneakily colonised by Italianate details.

In Timeframes, Nic-Hamilton-decaying-objects and the Glover-Tasmanian-landscapes are brought together into artefacts that blend the everyday (old but un-precious and preservation-agnostic fragments of a past era) and the sublimely decorative (landscape paintings) in a web-native form. The pieces are held in a web viewer space, and have been reprocessed and ‘de-flattened’ through gentle interactivity and aesthetics intuitive to gaming assets. 2020’s brush-strokes are diffuse, normal, roughness and displacement maps, their own form of nostalgia. Applied to the frames and the painting in layers, the roughness and sheen is highlighted by light and rotation controlled by the viewer.

If these strange but familiar objects ever had a function it is as mementos. The output is not just a still image but a piece you engage with through inspection, moving the cursor and mouse to illuminate texture and edges, in a kind of digital touch.

At the familiar size of an NFT market place thumbnail, this is an arrangement of 21 rooms scaled from the (also familiar) apartment bedroom. Space at a scale of 1:1440.

Rooms like compartments of jewellery boxes; containers of the minutiae of everyday life, over and over and over, dawn to dusk to dawn.

Scale 1440 continues my exploration of code art as responsive and interactive toys. As I have written previously:

those little toys from the museum gift-shop, hand-held models of big ideas. Like mini zen sandpits, machines with a déjà vu of function, big things made small and simple, an easy puzzle performed absent-mindedly in the palm of your hand. Toys toys toys, rules rules rules: substrates of generative NFTs.

In this piece the ‘rooms’ are generated in sequence across the canvas, clicking into place like a thin facade on a scaffold, before folding up again, concertina style, into a single room. And back again with a new array of busy private spaces. The viewer can watch a cycle passively and meditate on the passing of time, or they can get involved with a screen touch / mouse drag to move the perpetual motion along, or hold it still for a moment of banal everyday voyeurism.

https://vimeo.com/890533705

The piece also refers to architectural processes. An apartment and its constituent rooms is the base module that generates the financial equation that births a building that over time redraws the form of the city. Deviation from the rules of the module is a financial impossibility, so architects get loose with facades instead. The facades roll out and wrap up, panels clicking and sliding into place. No two are the same, but they kind of are.

Callum Morton’s installation Habitat (2003) is a large scale-model of a Montreal housing project, activated by dawn-to-dawn lighting and sped-up sounds of a 24 hour cycle - alarm clocks, toilets flushing, kettles whistling, doors slamming, cars starting, radios blaring, conversations and arguments. Experiencing a 28-minute cycle is experiencing the absurdity of daily life.

Two decades later I still often think about this installation. In Scale 1440 I’m homaging Habitat’s system, now in a technological and cultural context of phone screen touching, and the high density solitude of being online in your room at 4am.

Scale 1440 will mint as an open edition, free for holders of previous projects in early January. Happy new year.

https://highlight.xyz/mint/656bcfd26262aa3f9cb91f9e

At the intersection of art and education teachers resist telling students how to think and interpret, instead asking questions and building techniques for exploring those questions. The teacher is not the expert but can help guide students to find their next step, and herself learn from the dialogue. The curriculum doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive, piquing personal interest in an array of new directions, new questions.

But if question-posing is the way to teach generative art, what is it asking?

1) Decorative art, challenging no one: Most generative art being published today is pretty and/or clever. Making a beautiful algorithm and printing the patterned outputs is the ‘perfect’ piece of art, without any rough edges, challenging no one. Responding safely and chastely to the human yearning for a tool with no blood on it.

2) Exposing systems, making the immaterial material: Gen art surfaces the truths and weirdness of the technological systems that create it. A generative algorithm is a container of rules, a language of instruction, a machine. While the most affecting paintings and sculptures make the material immaterial, transcend their medium, gen art materialises and gestures intentionally to the math that made it.

3) Rich fruits of a technical craft: Generative art is a craft; the practice of making things with material and technique, and connecting to the way people use things / why things matter to people. In doing so, stretching the space for art to grow in. Not the human yearning for a tool with no blood on it, but the dissembling and rebuilding of the tool to sharpen its edges, or modify the social scope of its bloody potentials.

Week 1: Making things quickly Begin with a fun playground. Jump into an already-functioning sketch (e.g. unexpected lines drawn with shapes and noise) and change its variables. Experiment with generating many diverse outputs. Install artTab on browser.

Week 2: Language and library Understand the basic set-up, interface, syntax and command structure. Sketch with a library of shapes positioned on coordinates within a canvas. Coding Train 1.1-1.6. Contextualise with examples of programming art and generative art that explore relationality and randomness: Conway’s Game of Life, Every Icon by John F Simon Jr, Ringers by Dmitri Cherniak, Web by Jan Robert Leegte.

Week 3: Defining digital-native Interactivity, responsiveness and digital native art, beyond a fixed-size canvas. Mouse controls. Using map(). Coding Train 2.1-2.5. Contextualise with examples of code responsive to window size: Window by Jan Robert Leegte, and Unicurse by me.

Week 4: Dynamic movement Frame counts and animation. Make the circle bounce in the canvas. First use of conditional statements. If, then, else. Coding Train 3.1-3.4. Contextualise with animated examples from ArtBlocks (e.g. Vortex by Jen Stark, Cargo by Kim Asendorf, Pre-Process by Casey Reas but there are many), Towers by Andreas Gysin, the work of Leander Herzog, and Passage by Jason Rohrer.

Week 5: Multiples and infinites Using the for-loop. Coding Train 4.1-4.2. Contextualise with Himinn by Sarah Ridgely, Tych by rudxane, Patched Paradise by Anna Lucia, Impressions of Order by nbswwit, Very Large Array by Leander Herzog.

Week 6: Using functions - the machines within the machine. Coding Train 5.1-5.3. Starting to organise the structure of a sketch.

Week 7: Color Making color palettes, and the first application of arrays. Coding Train 7.1. and a color palette set up. Contextualise with JPEG by Jan Robert Leegte, Generations by Anna Lucia, the palettes of Terraforms by Mathcastles.

Online tools and resources offer a huge range of learning avenues. This list sets primary concepts that drive creative coding (language, library, interaction, animation, multiplication, conditional logic, loops, stored information) and that underpin the magnificent question it asks: What is the value of being able to manifest two or two thousand things and make them respond in random and relational ways?

1. Context

I spent a few winter days at the site of some extreme mining history in the inhospitable west coast of Tasmania. The landscape here has been left barren by a period of frantic copper extraction. The small town, and its pub and hotel, is ghostly. The wilderness that surrounds it is dense, dramatic, deep and alternately protected / decimated.

A local man drove us to the now closed mouths of a number of mines, to see the emptiness, feel the cold damp air of the underground, and hear about the history. It’s a story with a narrative arc that’s specific, but it’s also so common - the very normal globally ubiquitous story of mining towns. Discovery, boom, decline.

To prepare, I’d read The Peaks of Lyell (1954), an industrial history of the Mt Lyell Mining and Railway Company, one of those old works of research that record in extreme detail materials extracted from the archives. The type of book that attains historical authority, calcified by a thousand facts on each page that can veil the subjectivity of the researchers’ entrenched and often problematic biases. The detail is overwhelming. You have to read the whole thing to follow the main and NP characters, their movements, failures, deceptions, and piece together the imbricated geological, organisational, financial machinery of the mine.

In the 10 years since my visit, this place, story and dry book have stayed with me. A background obsession while i researched and wrote my own version of industrial history (about the retirement housing industry - different machines and materials, some similarly extractive themes), and later while i learned creative coding as another sort of machine. So, I have made a p5.js machine about the Mt Lyell machinery, and about the weird machinery of this book.

2. Material

The Little Lyell Machines bring together three digital materials: visual material, words, and sequence + navigation.

The visual material is the randomness and layering of the color, form and arrangement of a field of rubble. Ordinary and beautiful.

The words, barely visible at first, are tiny fragments scattered within the rubble. Words from the mining history are combined at mint into 12 labels describing the little machines of Mt Lyell: tools of discovery, tree felling, water channelling, rock tunnelling, mine machining, mineral sampling, land and sea transporting, company structuring, human labouring, stock trading, air polluting, landscape changing.

Sequence and navigation is the system that connects the visual and word materials, and the wide and detailed scales. Through screenTouch navigation the viewer moves through a sequence in the rock field. Interactivity is a core materiality of computer art because viewing the work is tightly connected to devices, intimately and constantly touched.

3. Catalogue

The work is a ‘slide’, like an insert to a microfiche or View-Master, containing detailed information made visible through the viewing machine. A system to bring 12 fragments into one story, to fit it into one algorithm.

The catalogue of fragments and their labels make an insufficient sliver of sense. Taken away from the gravity of the book’s pages, the labels float with faint information, a wisp of meaning. This is what history is: The moment in time and its catalogue of remnants, no longer used and barely understood in isolation.

The moment in time (Tas, 1897) when extreme never-ending resources were assured. I’m honestly not making a stupid statement about crypto, it’s just the way of humans to hype and extract, falsify and rug. There was a time when the founders and influencers believed this tiny town embedded in dense wilderness would grow into a major city on the back of its copper supply, a beautiful city with tramcars running down streets lined with skyscrapers. The copper became more expensive to extract, prices collapsed, and the Lyell machinery lies in remnants.

https://opensea.io/collection/little-lyell-machines-by-sten

The 12 rooms are built in p5.js from a kit of parts - surfaces, structure, podia, cupola - arranged randomly at mint. There are a lot of constraints shaping what goes with what. Random() is such a powerful driver of generative art, here I am trapping it with architectural regulation.

Other things join the sequential ball of thread transiting through the labyrinth; a ghost with its own pathway (its own rules), skittish bugs that scatter and occasionally explode, crypts. Color palettes with a ‘solid’ materiality are most common, others are ‘backlit’ with glowing color.

As the rooms resize to suit the window proportions (the screen, that other container of rules) they unroll to reveal an underground, then roll up again with contraction. Screen resize is a tactile way of interacting with a digital artwork whose systems recalculate and rearrange to viewing device. I like how clunky and imprecise and laggy this movement is, how extremes of proportion can nearly break the work, I like how the viewer is actively prodding and poking the algorithm via a physical viewing apparatus (mouse, touchpad, actual fingers). The medium has a friction, it almost has a sound.

The unicurse are like those little toys from the museum gift-shop, hand-held models of big ideas. Like mini zen sandpits, machines with a déjà vu of function, big things made small and simple, an easy puzzle performed absent-mindedly in the palm of your hand. Toys toys toys, rules rules rules: substrates of generative NFTs.

The labyrinth is a ubiquitous structure; a linear sequence of an ‘easy puzzle’, this then that, a game whose format and rules are implicit. Programming variations of the sequence of rooms has been a joy, incorporating the creative feedback from both WAGDIE Byzantine experts on discord and a seriously practising architect who one afternoon took a break from his work making new cities in deserts to sketch some fantasy palazzos with me.

Central to the Unicurse is the graphic attraction of the architectural plan, its symbols and language (more rules) layering up, representing a spatial yet unrealised world through a completely hypothetical viewpoint, a thought experiment slicing horizontally through mass and air.

https://highlight.xyz/mint/64f5b3f1373cff27b5e9306f

Four interactive fully-generative code-based works, four types of limited agency at the root of human motivations for mapping - to monitor, name/own, build and travel.

Like the 4 environmental seasons, with their opposing features of heat / cold / scarcity / abundance, each piece is a stand-alone work with its own seasonal texture or mood:

Surveillance Season is a screen to monitor a rain of fragments. The more monitoring performed by the viewer, the more imaginary tokens they receive. Futile work.

Network Season (AKA Psychedelic Islands) features gentle explosions; randomly-generated arrangements of color and shape palettes. A straight-lined symbol or identifier is created from the connections between their epicenters. This translation is a mapping action - distilling complexity into a line on a drawing, pinning the data down, taming by naming. (400 outputs an be viewed here)

Blueprint Season is a game with an identical starting point and endless variations of density, brightness and pattern within the narrow confines of an extremely limited palette and a 10 x 10 gridded structure. While a user can control outcomes to a point, the 100 grids continue to randomly generate, soon over-writing.

Escape Season is a navigation game with only a hint of purpose.

User control and interfaces are explored in all the pieces, sometimes using clear instructions (click OK when the computer tells you to in Surveillance Season), sometimes requiring discovery (in Network Season, while color palettes and constellation lines are fixed, random for each of 400 outputs, the forms are surprisingly dynamic with mouse click / touch screen / resize). In Blueprint Season and Escape Season the user can start to directly shape the visual outcomes.

Seasonal Maps are explorations of assumed interfaces and world-making. Attempted control, incomplete knowledge, a thin thread of the logic beneath chaos, as if the convenient neatness of their quartet gives them meaning when taken together.

Seasonal Maps were created during an intensive period of community learning in the Mathcastles server, home of the seminal Terraforms computer art project, through a course generously created and delivered by artist 113. I’m immeasurably grateful to the inspiration and social context he has built and gifted.

Little Block Machines are 12 x blocks and 12 x color themes made in p5js.

The work is an on-chain machine; a system generated at mint in 400 ways. Each machine is made of 12 blocks that are held together by a couple of simple rules, their parts randomised within those constraints. If two blocks stacked vertically are of a similar width, they get a connector. If blocks are wide or narrow they have a light or dark tone. Some of the machines are dense, some sparse, as the gaps between the blocks tighten or loosen and their proportions shuffle.

Each machine scales dynamically, so as the width and height of the viewing window change the connectors and colors and line-weights do too. Stretch the window wide for chunky outlines. Try to almost break its blocky structure. Because it’s a machine not an image, you get an array of visual outcomes / right click saves with each minted nft.

There are 12 color themes, starting with the words (code) and then finding the colors. Soft peachy, mountain moss, dense green, highlighter nux at night.

Just because art is code doesn’t make it interesting. Within the spectrum of generative art - Raw Math / Beautified Math / Math Used / Math Castle - Little Block Machines are in the Math Used camp: they are things for play and a kind of déjà vu of function.

Little Block Machines were minted through a custom front-end platform called Persistence, an independent project built by Neokry who is one of a number of hugely smart and culturally crucial members of the Mathcastles community. Of course the whole project is indebted to Mathcastles and artist 113’s fluid computing art lessons, and their curation of a resilient, loosely-bonded, tightly-aligned community constructed around the catalytic magnet of their groundbreaking Terraforms project. Wrote more here about personal revelations of learning p5js in 113’s school of art.

The minting and transaction of a project is emotionally horrifying, dopamine pump and dump, a necessary hurdle of sharing work in a culture and industry that is fun and fraught, inspiring and overwhelming. I tried to calm this by dropping Little Block Machines completely unplanned, at a time of day when only Australians were at their computers. Will work on these dynamics more in time for Big Block Machines.

Lost Home Worlds pays homage to the themes and anatomy of Mike Kelley’s Kandors series. Kelley initiated this work in 1999 and grew it over the subsequent decade into world-making across multiple works and media to directly explore a story:

The popular Superman story recounts the adventures of an alien being sent to Earth as a baby to escape the total destruction of his home planet Krypton. However, it turns out that Kandor was not, in fact, destroyed. Shrunk and bottled by a villain, the futuristic city was rescued by Superman and protected under a bell jar in his sanctuary, the Fortress of Solitude. For almost a quarter-century in comic-book time, Kandor and its miniature citizens survived in Superman’s care, sustained by tanks of atmosphere, a constant reminder of his lost past and a metaphor for his psychic disconnection from his adopted planet. [1]

The miniature world is a reminder of grief for fictional Superman, and for Kelley. And for Sam. For us all, maybe, these images associate something lost: The empty / full room, a shrunken world sustained in a jar.

The image of the bell jar as a tool of psychic disconnection is wrought in the cultural shadow of Sylvia Plath’s death. The Bell Jar is her darkly sharply funny semi-autobiographical story, in which the protagonist describes feelings of being trapped as if in a bell jar, in a life she hasn’t chosen. There are few innocent readings of Plath’s writing because of the heavy posthumous presence, and there’s an undercurrent of voyeurism in the protection of her memory, maintained in its own bell jar.

The castles in bell jars are little worlds within a world, a long-held human obsession. What’s the appeal? Simulated worlds grant power to whoever is imagining them, and the opportunity to create features without unwanted complexity, devise private games, program consistency and rules alongside absurdity and paradox. They are a creative coalescence of early 21st Century obsessions with virtual world-building, alternative universes, illusions, interface, video games, avatars.

Simulated worlds are also social spaces and social creations. Kelley was aware of this in his Kandor world-building in 1999:

Originally, my proposal for this work included a website where fans of Superman comics could log on and make proposals for the construction of a virtual version of Kandor. One of the things that interested me the most about Kandor is that there is no continuity in its depiction in Superman comics. Its skyline changes from story to story, making it impossible to truly reconstruct. An interactive computer program that would allow the city to be changed continuously, based on fan's input, would be a perfect reflection of the ambiguous nature of the city, and an appropriate model of memory's elusive nature.

... I also proposed to physically bring all of the Superman fans together who met on line via this project. Kandor-Con 2000 would then truly have functioned as a real celebration and meeting place for like-minded people. Of course, this was impossible. A number of large graphs and charts reveal the economic impossibility of bringing these people together. [2]

Kelley had ‘economically impossible plans’ to bring all the fans together in a global, dynamic, interactive social whirl of community building. If he could see us now.

In Kandor, Kelley transforms the emotional core of 2D Superman into real space and real forms and installations; from simple comic drawings to looming rooms and large scale sculptural pieces, illuminated and immersive. In Lost Home Worlds, Hains explores this world through code, through digital space and simulation. Code offers the ability to create almost infinite variables, stretching the 3D generative format to contain time, light, space along with the colourful spectrum of worlds in jars. Everything is variable and changeable, there are thousands of options. So, which one will I keep?

Unraveling memory is part of psychoanalysis, working out what moments caused the lifelong echo in a personal OS. The expectation is that you confront and strip away, acknowledge the central pain of a truth, then grow and heal. Padding around the truth are soft memories of childhood - a scent, a game, a cereal, a soundtrack, a cartoon, a car trip, a Saturday morning, vivid moments later revealed to have been photos (not memory) all along; feedback loops of a story of home and belonging. Nostalgia selectively adds rather than stripping back, building these fragments over and over, till the simulation solidifies into something at once bigger and smaller than reality.

The Lost Home Worlds, and the castles in bell jars they depict, are little things you hold in your hand and view, safe in your tiny screen. They are NFTs. You own the little world, you got to protect it. Stealing and entirely twisting Kundera’s words here: Nostalgia causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How important this moment was to us! The second tear says: How important to be deeply moved, together with my culture, by that moment [3]. That memory, long ago and distant, shrunken so small, a kernel of a moment now contained safe within a glass globe.

We can move around in these little Lost Home Worlds, the shadowy rooms and the illuminated memories of Superman’s long-gone home. Navigating with a mouse and keyboard in a way that we will soon tenderly recognise as early 2020s we can shift and pan to come up close to that other shrunken world in a jar. A simulation inside a simulation inside a simulation. Images, stories, moments and feelings made for us, and by us; trying to build future and past cultures concurrently, making homes for our avatar emotions.

[1] https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2011/mike-kelley-exploded-fortress-of-solitude/

[2] https://www.eai.org/titles/superman-recites-selections-from-the-bell-jar-and-other-works-by-sylvia-plath

[3] Milan Kundera’s description of the ideology of kitsch, which I superficially reinterpreted for nostalgia. The actual quote is: "Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!”

This one is focused on the creative learning process in course shape > experience > people.

I worry that articulating will diminish it, so know these classes were the highlight of my week and unlocked a pivot point in my life.

Held on twitch stream and in discord chat, free for any of the 1900 or so holders of a Terraforms NFT who wanted to join, no formal enrolment process, no announced end date. About 50 joined. Classes were a combination of p5.js tooling instruction, technology discussion and art review. Some moved methodically through programming techniques, most included delightful / dramatic detours into the spokes of culture and politics radiating from computing art in 2023.

Each class had a timbre, and the course had an arc shaped by accelerating content (classes got hard, fast) and accelerating context. The outside world came into the twice-weekly cocoon. It was a crypto winter, and the start of the course coincided with the exponential adoption of AI through Chat GPT, the end with an exponential zombie rise of memecoins, and in between the gutting of artist royalties and the fulsome realisation of digital art marketplaces as gambling dashboards.

Introduction to Computing Arts is a case study in learning by leaping. A group of amateur artists and coders with unstated competency pushed to an edge of fresh confusion then asked to lift up our eyes and refocus from the code loops to the context and back again. This creative vertigo is a counterpoint to Shiffman’s (also great) gently paced step-by-step tutorials.

The refocusing demanded by this ItCA teaching approach exercised a fundamentally human act: Skills and outputs directed by thought and feeling. AI acceleration met with a shrug or open arms is an inevitability of economic capture; where objectivity and judgements of cultural meaning are assumed not to mix; where explanations of what people do are detached from normative philosophies of why things matter to them; where human groups are understood as actors of practices without appreciating the meaning of those practices for them.

In a recent essay [here] Tina Rivers Ryan talks about distances between appreciating the tech and feeling the artwork. There is a tendency by some readings of computer art, she says, to privilege the medium, to become fixated on the affordances of a software program:

I don’t want to dismiss the importance of framing “art and technology” as technology, but I do wonder if our focus on how these works are made tends to inhibit our ability to also fully experience them as art, pushing us away instead of drawing us closer.

Focusing on technological traits and tools draw us much closer when we connect intentionally with the building blocks and machinery of our extremely real and incredibly tactile online experience, and engage with the way their everyday aesthetics shape how we view images, perceive color and light, touch screens, store, remember and remix digital media. The aim is both 1) see the technological traits as real parts of culture without nostalgia and without being overwhelmed by their sorcery, and 2) connect with what they are communicating independently of their cleverness.

Three moments from class where technological traits drew me closer:

1. Pixels: Engaging with the pixel as a materiality that has behaviours and relational complexity. Zooming in to comprehend its fixed yes/no existence, zooming out to see the rigid primitive fold through multiplication till you no longer see it. (Also considered in this talk by artist Jeffrey Alan Scudder).

2. Keyboard controls: The narrowed viewport and game-based interactivity of keyboard controls in artwork Passage bringing the viewer close to the entwined aesthetic and emotion (familiarity, nostalgia, intimacy, brevity, endings).

3. The empty array: No matter how many times I use them, I’m hit by the weird power of the empty brackets [] as a place for storing an unknown quantity of unknown visual elements, and how from this agnostic and simple command can spring abundant and serendipitous outcomes to surprise the operator.

In each moment, shifting gaze from new code learned (foreground) to the connected materiality and meaning of computer art (middle ground) to its presence in yonder intersection of art and technology and (horizon) its embedding in our relationships with and within culture and society.

It isn’t normal for a busy artist and project founder to dedicate hours each week to teaching a free course, it isn’t normal as an amateur artist or coder to be taught by one of the best, it really isn’t normal for a 6700-member NFT discord to be a soothing cocoon, and for it to feel this productive.

People from many timezones and sleep schedules joined the class, meaning we responded to shared work and questions in a rolling asynchronous chat. Classmates giving extended creative feedback and technical suggestions in my DMs shocked me with their generosity. Despite some obvious baked-in fundamentals, in that the class was quite nerdy, people with a wide range of creative and code backgrounds (or neither) attended. 14 of us presented final projects. After chatting in text to anon avatars for over 100 hours, voice chat in the concluding weeks of final project crits (and some clues of gender and geography) felt close and gently moving.

Among the cohort and during the course, Neokry launched Persistence, a permissionless contract and front-end to enable minting p5.js works, and offered invitations to test it. So far, seven of us have used it to mint and sell NFTs. The Mathcastles art stream, home to the meditative delight of watching 113 work on Terraforms upgrades, is now open to the cohort to also stream on.

Class is dismissed, but we are still making and learning loosely together. So much to be gained from each other in this subculture setting; creativity sustained by connection, finding porosity in boundaries, building scaffolds for openness instead of cynicism.

Some people will literally learn p5.js rather than go to therapy. Four creative coding psychology hacks they don’t want you to know about:

1. Beginner computing arts mindset

2. Holding the mirror self

3. How to do nothing while coding

4. Being creative

When I first began learning p5.js, I heard artist Matt Kane talk about his recovery from a life-fracturing event, supported by the meditative practice of developing creative coding systems. At the time, I was moving coloured ellipses around a digital canvas, showing my friends like I was 8 and it was my rock collection (still am, sorry about that). Now, a year later, I’m more convinced that creative coding can be a deeply sustaining practice filling all kinds of everyday voids. To make sense of some of those void-filling capabilities I reflect on the three vectors of my own experience: The methodical practice of learning new skills via Daniel Shiffman’s enthusiastic videos (how to do it), the surprisingly amniotic discords of NFT communities pumping ideas (what to make / make it better), and the revelation of learning by unlearning through a chaotic-brilliant live and fluid computing arts course gifted by artist 113. The sketches included below were created during the first few weeks of that course - seeds, scribbles, test systems, fragments. They look silly, but behind them are personally profound steps forward. Like therapy, the work happens inside.

Whereas creating in flow state depends on a level of expertise and control, creating with a beginners’ mindset embraces instability, mutability, un-surety. The concept was pilfered from the zen Shoshin, applied to calligraphy and martial arts among other specialised extremely-non-beginner practices. Beginner mindset isn’t necessarily naive, it’s open to possibility. Expert mindset isn’t necessarily sophisticated, it’s fixed on a target. Both states are fragile for different reasons.

A computing arts beginner mindset allows confusion to be piqued, rolling on the waves of not understanding why is this happening and not what I expected to happen, fucking around, finding out, glimpsing control for a moment, then releasing it when a new confusion breaks over you. A ride.

Creative coding interfaces support beginners’ mindset more than a high pressure blank sheet of paper because they give immediate feedback, conjure it here in the left window, and see it there in the right, allowing a gentle incremental leap into making before you know what to make, following along with Shiffman and sometimes (often) not understanding the logic, and being ok with that. The ‘rightness or error’ of code provides a scaffold for learning creatively, and allows a kind of open play that is an energising space for amateurs, professionals, degens and serious art collectors, nurturing the making and the owning of computer art as ripples of the same dynamic. More on that here.

Making something and sharing it is no innocent practice. Everyone’s personal code runs this loop or something similar:

if (I am proud of it && I think they will like it){ share hope for heart reacts }

Sharing a png of a sketch is a vulnerable act asking for aesthetic judgement, sharing the code itself amplifies this - saying to anons you respect: check out my intellectual failures written clearly.

Looking glass self is the relational phenomenon where individuals understand their sense of self through what they perceive to be others’ views of them. A kind of circle where being / performing is modified by the reflections of ourselves that we think we see in others’ appraisals. A conga line of imagined judgements. This can obviously be damaging, i.e. being very online. Alternately, practicing holding rather than feeding the mirrored self can be critically grounding and anti-insular.

By holding the mirrored self I mean embracing the social sharing potentials of computer art and showing off ones guts: the basic, pastiched, codified aesthetic languages absorbed and shoehorned, and the imperfect, dirty spaghetti code. And then asking people to look at it, while you look at theirs, cushioned by anonymised relationships that focus on the work not person - a buffer to undeserved self-judgement and unearned self-satisfaction.

This is possible through the global networks clustered around projects like Mathcastles and 113’s Intro to Computing Arts course. And, it’s possible because creative coding is open on web and can be always in progress. I can open someone’s sketch and learn how they made it, I can modify variables to test it, I am playing in their WIP and reflecting it back on mine. This practice has been the true miracle of NFTs - opening new gaps new wormholes for a community to form around artist and work as they develop, all the way along the amateur-professional spectrum.

The challenge is to resist wringing productivity out of a practice which is all about efficiency. It’s like in meditation (acknowledge the discomfort, back to the breath) where constantly rejecting mental distraction gradually builds rather than weakens focus on that thing beyond whatever lists of unachieved needs, desires, expectations, hours grind in your own head.

The challenge is to resist projecting finished outcomes out of a practice which is all about production. It’s like gardening (is it like gardening?) where menial work one day is repeated the next. Am I being completely present, I wonder, while visualising the validation I’ll taste in the cherry tomatoes that will burst from the dry seeds I am right now pushing into the dirt.

Creative coding practices join meditation, gardening, walking in the roses, as another (easier) way to be fully present. Deceptively effortless, deceptively hard, multi-tasking prohibitive. A lot of methodical repetition, a lot of incrementing, a rhythm. What’s harder is to remove from your mind the juicy cherry tomato before the plant’s even blossomed, to resist seeing everything you do, every silly sketch, as a future NFT to be sold. Acknowledge the ambition, back to the loop in front of you. This, then that. If, then, else.

Creativity is a wind, not a well. An action, not a talent or resource. I don’t know if artists feel this fear - that the thing you are currently working on is the last idea you will have - and then this relief - that inspiration is everywhere, both infinite and rare.

Creative coding is a revelation because it puts making something from nothing (literally the act of creation) into a convenient, everyday, accessible format of computer and internet connection. Because creativity is an action, making something even without a clear vision invariably leads down pleasant and rough pathways to an array of cool or bad outcomes. Share, consider, talk about it enough to slowly, socially, help clarify why we are using this medium? What are the values of being able to draw ten thousand things in one second and make them move in random and relational ways? Where will we take it? Where will it take us?

But, even before attempting to parse fully formed computing art meta meaning and purpose, there’s a very basic motivator that, as with all self-help, is kind of obvious - making, creating, sharing is good for you.

Ownership underpins NFTs, so looking back on the projects minted this year kind of aches in a personal way, within the communal ache of a generally bad year, and the wider ache of time lost, moments passing, everything / nothing changing. Looking at the jpgs can transport to that urgent dopamine moment in a different time. It’s like listening in December to your most played song from February, but the artist got paid.

Seasons, not years, are the right unit to chart change and remember time. Nothing to do with the weather, but collective rhythms, phases and cycles. More cultural, less cosmic. Do you remember what was 2021 and what was 2020? I don’t, but I remember the feeling of these past four seasons and the evidence is immutably on chain.

In 2016, Scottish author Ali Smith asked her publisher: what’s the quickest we can ship? She wanted to reconnect with the novel’s immediacy, resurfacing that literary format’s origins as instalments released locally and in the moment, the setting completely real but not yet history. She wrote and published one novel each year, one for each season, written in the season. History took over anyway: Brexit, Trump, Covid-19. Yet, these major events are not centred in the novels. The lockdown and fear of early stage pandemic hovers at the edges of the minutiae of her characters’ daily lives and relationships which are their (and, as the reader, our) focus. It’s a peripheral anxiety for us too, we are living in the same space and time.

Smith centers an artist in each novel (Pauline Boty, Barbara Hepworth, Tacita Dean, Lorenza Mazzetti) and it’s through encounters with their works that the novels’ characters examine their own worlds.

This from Summer:

Creativity is cultural not because it is derivative of it, but because it aims to heal culture. Art saturated with the unconscious acts like a compensatory dream in the individual: it tries to rebalance and address deep-rooted problems.

The diagram of Smith’s layered seasonal novels is therefore four concentric circles: A barely-there us forming a protective shell to the kernel of me, culture (meaning) anchoring us, and history happening all around, colouring the scent and mood of each season, now and then puncturing through, shaking us, and completely changing everything / nothing. The chronos of the seasons cycles on, and the kairos - the qualitative moments - break through.

In Smith’s novel , winter is the gradual reveal of truths beneath the lonely and claustrophobic environment of a country home at Christmas. Winter makes things visible. Holding your circle near, staying close to home. It was my summer in December and January, but continuing pandemic wave travel restrictions kept us rolling around local parks close to home, minting friends’ projects at the kitchen table, early morning sunlight streaming in. Clouds on Chains is an iconic first mint. Nuxui my first (only) executed post-mint flip and post-pump re-entry for the one that I wanted.

Spring blossoms with hope, not. Spring brought Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and inflating economies and obvious multi-collapse ahead. In Smith’s novel, spring is about escape; the real and heavy escape of war-time refugees, as well as the overwhelming urge to drop everything and disappear from a mid-life mid-work crisis. A lot of clever NFT projects (plus owls and ape land) launched in Spring (ha!, we said, what bear market!). For me it was Unix Days, good to mint whenever you remember, whenever a pink day comes up, and Silk Road, the shifting colours duly replicated by low light through leaves around the easter full moon.

Summer, Smith notes, comes from the Old English sumor, meaning both one and together. I guess it’s time for big fun energetic pfp projects in communal celebration. Allstarz and Finiliar wormed their way in with unhinged cuteness and drip and (say the words) extremely pleasant discord vibes. I also minted lots of flowers and Tsunflower Chaos (above). Abundant.

The opening line of the novel Autumn is an unambiguous Dickens: ‘It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.’ Late autumn has had some historical bad times, more bad times to come. I cycled what I made from selling my own small collection into NFT art grails: Terraforms, Heaven Computer, and Tombs. With the exception of Tomb’s Shadow House (the most stressful mint in history) these were slow and uncomplicated purchases chosen outside of any rarity calculations or urgency - a floor Terraforms because I liked the colour and animation, a floor Heaven Computer because of this line in the metadata: Walking towards your dreams is important, but knowing when to walk away is just as important.

Chronos ticks on, but kairos bursts out. Each of these mints, the art and the memory, has personal importance to me. As well as flex and/or parsed cultural meaning, NFT galleries might also be on-chain journals.

To end, this passage from Autumn, which visualises chronos and captures the fleeting convictions of worth and value in a fragile and chaotic art-world:

Time flies, Elisabeth said. Well, yes. It can do, Daniel said. Literally. Watch this.

Elisabeth doesn’t remember much of the above. She does remember, though, the day they were walking along the canal bank when she was small and Daniel took his watch off his wrist and threw it into the water. She remembers the thrill, the absolute not-doneness of it.

She remembers there were two boys down on the rocks and they turned their heads as the watch arced through the air and over them and hit the canal, and she remembers knowing that it was a watch, Daniel’s watch, not just any old stone or piece of litter, flying through the air, and knowing too that there was no way those boys could know this, that only she and Daniel knew the enormity of what he’d just done.

She remembers that Daniel had given her the choice, *to throw or not to throw. *She remembers she chose to throw. She remembers coming home with something amazing to tell her mother.

Are spatial models for digital gallery experiences ever going to satisfy? Swamped by generic modernist aesthetics and the reach for structure without walls and gravitas without gravity. Analogies are lazy, so here is the analogy of the labyrinth to consider the cartesian map we desperately want (despite our good intentions) to organise all the funny little things we own.

The labyrinth model is done in museum theory, but it offers a couple of useful ways of thinking about the digital gallery that release it from static folio or uncanny physical derivative, and that help link some art-archive-ownership-community vectors:

• Bounded discovery: Connections in an atomised field

• Bounded agency: Friction and personalisation in online experience

• Mapping collective meaning and value

A labyrinth typically has one entrance and the objective is to get to the centre and then return. Unlike a maze (built to confuse, for fun, with multiple branches of dead-end paths) the traditional labyrinth is unicursal, winding and complex sure, but not trickery, built to slow down and protect. If you just keep following the thread/s you can noodle your way to the centre, and you can get back. A simplified model of the unicursal labyrinth is popular in museum design (like the Guggenheim spiral) and retail design (like IKEA) as a way to organise and control the relationship between artefacts/products and consumers.

In online space, the labyrinth model offers a kind of structured discovery that anchors the confusion of a tide of digital assets. Discoverability is less than useless on most NFT platforms, limited to tracking wallets or entering the name of a collection or its fake into a search bar. The worst discoverability tools will be Amazonian if you like that you’ll probably like this. The best will leverage thematic and community connections that exist in narrow knowledge segments, and layer them into a collective catalogue of projects, art, ideas, assets, things that matter to people.

The labyrinth functions as a map of things (each in its place, relational to the others, and providing directions to get there), and it functions as an on-ground experience of one-on-one immediacy, like a lantern spotlighting just a couple of feet ahead of you in a vast shadowed space. Ideally, we can hold these two scales and levels of understanding simultaneously - the big (reductive) picture of everything all at once, and one individual’s careful and subjective knowledge of that specific artefact, that one snowflake, just so.

Related to discovery, agency in the labyrinthine model is relational rather than an act of individual determination. Labyrinthine museum theory may be old, but the desire to collapse the separation between museum-goer, artefact and museum space is resonant with today’s art and collector communities (eg. NFT communities) where participant replaces audience. In the DYLABY LABYRINT exhibition in 1962, artists and curators structured environments and pathways to actively engage the audience in chance encounters, contrasts, interactions with objects and spaces. This description from the catalogue has resonance with NFT art communities:

Artists gathered from several countries with the aim to let the public participate in their work to let you see, feel, and cooperate with them

they start from daily life the sensations you get feeling your way through a labyrinth the surprise when you open a door the freshness of the coloured world of plastic the machine that moves but without practical purpose the shooting gallery where you don’t destroy but help to colour the objects

six artists in seven rooms created surroundings full of variety gay and weird – loud and silent where you may laugh, get excited or thoughtful

you are not outside the objects but constantly within them as part of a whole. [1]

Moving through a labyrinth intentionally slows movement and narrows focus. This friction has the effect of gently gating progress from outsider to insider. You are free to move anywhere, but you can’t just go everywhere immediately. The more you engage, the more you participate, the deeper you get, the more you come to know the space, and the more you leave a mark for others, in directions, interpretations, and rearranged and found objects on the way.

The labyrinth experience is a kind of dark wandering, but it’s also a collective project of sense-making and value-defining. I guess the community made the labyrinth in a burst of construction, and I guess the community now maps it and describes its many pathways and the things it contains, how to get to them, and why they matter.

Online, without material or spatial limits, the labyrinth can be infinite. But it offers a contained conception of infinity - one step ahead of the next, this then that - folded like a never-ending intestine not expanded like a galaxy or maths. The unicursal form is not necessary in online space, but it’s useful for welcoming and guiding extremely-non-fractal humans who can only hold onto a couple dozen ideas at once.

Messy interrelational meaning-making between artifact / creator and audience/collector is human intimacy in vast internet space, distinct from a one-way archive pit made possible by bottomless servers, and distinct from traditional top-down dogma and critique. Someone/s still has to emotionally labour to define cultural value and communicate meaning beyond each intimacy, each niche. The methodology of building and mapping the labyrinth - one connected but infinite thread, a scrunched up cluster of overlapping pathways, many crevices, the ability to link everything in map and one thing in intimacy - is a useful way of thinking about curation decentralised to many participants, many owners.

[1] DYLABY (Dynamisch Labyrint), exh. cat. (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1962), discussed by Noit Banai in ‘The Labyrinth as an Exhibitionary Model: Form, Event, and Mode of Life’, Stedelijk Studies Journal, Issue 7, 2018, https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/the-labyrinth-as-an-exhibitionary-model-form-event-and-mode-of-life/#_edn9

Original animated cards are lovingly designed and coded in p5.js. They explore the layered meanings and life instructions of 78 tarot cards, and the process and themes of learning how to code.

The four suits relate to themes of labour and resources (Coins), intellect (Swords), emotions and the subconscious (Cups), and creativity and enterprise (Wands). These themes are reflected in imagery and movement (the cyclical Coins, directional Swords, psychedelic Cups, and colourful and interactive wands). Each card has an upright meaning and a reversed counterpoint, and their relevance lies in the tension between.

There is a story across each suit - from a new start (Ace) to a point of hardship or conflict (Five) to a culmination (Ten) - like moving through a life. The royals have their own focus: from tools (Page), to action (Knight), to assets (Queen) and realm (King).

The Major Arcanas are a sequence of cookt characters, on their path towards enlightenment from Fool (0) to all-connected World (21). Major Arcanas are each inspired by or use other NFT artwork, including CC0 collections, adulation of three great projects (Exodus 2, Unix Days, NUXUI), and inclusion of two friends’ work for the most transformative cards (Death and Tower) - thank you Errorgardener and gsrvnt.

The cards reveal a learning process and beginner’s exploration of creative coding in p5js. The coins cards were created in the early ‘pig in the sandpit’ phase, full of trial and errors, manual brute force, making up for lack of intelligent coding with hours and hours of labour. The swords took a more methodical approach, following along with Daniel Shifman’s Coding Train (the YouTube link to tutorials is included in many of these cards, as small tribute - another homage here). The cups phase is learning by wandering through, using intuition more by now. Finally, the wands bring in replication and cultural association.

The cards and their code are a kind of Code Brut, raw code or naive code. The structure of code (trial, error, error, revelation) opens up space for creative expression and exploration, generating outcomes somewhere between unmet plans, random surprise, and incremental control.

https://tarotcode.xyz/

Some of my best friends are coders and their coloured text on black screen { tap tap tap semi-colon } activity always seemed puzzling yet deeply uninteresting to me - runes for a dumb computer. Then Daniel Shiffman arrived in my life via hundreds of youtube videos and The Coding Train - short tutorials teaching p5.js creative coding from the beginning. The beginning. This guy, Shiffman, is a hero and an icon. In an age of alleged soft skills and storytellers, there is only one (it’s Shiffman) who can so clearly and enthusiastically communicate fundamentals of code to non-coders.

Starting with nothing (literal blank screen, empty brain) and creating something is an amniotic miracle. Doing it in the open play zone of childlike wonder, before your own (let alone others’) expectations have caught up, is a joy. The strict ‘rightness’ or error of code gift a solid scaffold for the skill-free to learn creatively - through iteration, experimentation, trial and try again.

As you learn more you start to panic, internalised capitalism asking: What are you making? Why are you doing this? What will you gain? Yet, still, when I open each ‘work’ on my phone I feel a rare emotion of satisfaction and ownership. I smile watching the loop animate, and I send it to friends (sorry) as if I were proud of it (I am).

Like other forms of art ownership, NFT digital art ownership wraps together object, story, and moment.

The object is the work itself. Obviously the thinly-generative things I’m creating with Shiffman’s guidance are not art, yeah ok some of the generative patterns sold as NFTs are not Art, a lot of it definitely is. At the beginning of an epic conversation about poetry and (digital / physical) primacy, David Rudnick talks about art history as per the perspective of Christopher S Wood, who traces the cultural actions and relations by which artifact becomes artwork. The art object Wood is interested in is not only the object of extreme value (the painting, the sculpture), but the components of collective visual culture. The objects embedded in the culture not outside of it.

Art (as objects of extreme value) moved into the public gallery, but we still want to own it. That’s me in the gallery gift shop, buying the exhibition postcard because seeing the work moved me to purchase a token. What am I gonna do with this card? Look at it and remember, maybe feel that same thrill. The emotional connection to the work isn’t aesthetic or technical judgement, but a personal story of witnessing it, layered in a wider (changeable) cultural story of what it means and why it’s of value (for now). The story builds the link between the object and its meaning.

Shoehorning this in here, talk about Story!… Peter Schjeldahl, long-time art critic at The New Yorker, describing collecting bits of the wall that 1989 night in Berlin:

“A small hammer I bought in Berlin at the beginning of this month dislodged only sparks and dust from the Wall - that sucker is hard - so I had to glean bits from tailings left by better armed others. Had to? It did occur to me as I grubbed in the dirt that such keenness for crumbs of concrete, with or without the traces of spray enamel that elated me when found, might be idiotic. But yeah, had to. That’s the way with collecting, which no sooner battens on a species of a thing than it applies a hierarchy of qualities - size, presence of spray paint - for greed to glamorize. Once you let something symbolize - let a wall be the Wall - you are lost to yourself and must possess it to be whole again.” (7 Days, December 27, 1989)

The moment is the abundant occasion of bringing the art/Art into being (shopping, hunting, catching it). In a recent essay Waiting for the “Drop”: Crypto-art and Speed A. V. Marraccini captures the pace of minting (“You will miss the drop. there will be 10,000 pieces of new work before you wake up in the morning.”). But rather than being a lonely solo 4am AEST experience, minting from a launch is fizzy with (online) social build up and release. If you’re buying from mint you are probably also on the discord, and bearing witness to a collection release and sell out. The joy is greater than just that of the financial value pump ascribed to your piece of it, although that of course plays a part. This feeling is important. Even if what you’re buying is serious Art, minting is play, flipping is (can be) play, collecting is (can be) play.

There’s an obsession with scarcity and rarity features of NFTs. This obsession is also play. For the creator, NFTs have abundance features. Artists like Case Simmons and Figure31 have talked about the expansive reach and the joyful looseness of being able to experiment and disseminate generative work online like this. (Case: The infrastructure of the traditional gallery can't hold all the artists to make the community thrive; Figure31: Trying to print 1000 images in a dark room, it is so much fucking work). These are artists at the other (expert) side of the graph, but it feels like they are also having fun activating the open play zone for us.

It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Malicious scams, theft, pump and dump, financialization accelerationism, boring or derivative or bad work produced and replicated, the dilution of Art, a pile of non-stop stuff building up without humans parsing it for meaning. Hanging in the edge of the Dunning Krueger has value, as long as you realise you are there. The damage happens in the painful transition between knowing nothing and knowing something, and determining what that something is.

Nuxui, Nic’s new NFT series, is made of 333 compositions of strange (yet familiar) objects, mechanic and organic fragments, tactile materials, and thick atmospheres. The arrangements grow and decay across the spectrum of the series. They are overlaid with still and moving blurs and held within the frame of a digital viewport. The pieces are captivating - decorative talismans / liquifying circuitboards.

The elements of the compositions - objects, material, atmosphere, viewport, growth + decay, spectrum - are common threads in Nic’s work. Trying to describe Nuxui means following and unravelling these threads.

I scroll distractedly through his retired tumblr to see the 3D forms and visual atmospheres evolve and layer up across a ten year back-catalogue. Nic opines generously on twitter and discord but doesn’t talk earnestly about his work, so I open the archives to remind myself. Scrolling right down to the bottom of the page, a video of scratchy 3D and pixels is a visual accompaniment for IWAAD, a track by London producer Actress. Nic sent it to Actress like, hi, I made this. Since this meeting, his visuals have often augmented Actress’ music videos, record art and concerts.

Fragments from a rocky wilderness and from an electronics factory. Each piece is a precious artifact or discarded detritus, or both. Some are relics of a hyper-real still life, some are basic forms that have been stretched / squished / fractured / carved. The 3D generated forms are the mechanics of digital model production; the subtractive or additive actions that create concave or convex contours, sharp and rounded terrain, respecting and warping the rules of gravity and space.

The strange objects have a real-world tactility. Elemental materials – shiny metal, cool stone, powdery chalk, molten oily plastic, salt, opaque resin, porosity, gloss, rough, matte, liquid, heavy; like you can pick them up in your palm and feel their density and surface. They are born digital, but anchored to the tactile IRL world of urban and natural landscapes.

• A darkened house, like a forbidding display home, thick smoke rolls through the rooms and coloured light breaks through, laser-like.

• A forest, dappled light, mossy rocks, hanging mist, sunlight glistening on stone steps covered in blood.

• Under water, a flooded post-modernist atrium, Rodin’s The Thinker submerged with smooth marble glistening while office-palm fronds move in the current, bubbles bubble and a school of fish flickers.

• Golden rays of low-angled light penetrate a disquieting space overlooking clouds and a smoking city.

• Kinetic particles synch across giant LED screens on a hot late summer night in a dusty field under a really wide sky.

The atmospheres are immersive multi-sensory landscapes from nature, city, and club, with music at their core. Nic calls them visual accompaniments because they look and feel like the music. The synchronicity between the visual and the sound is a kind of mutual construction, without one exogenous to the other. (In other words, a collaboration).

The origins of most of Nic’s collaborations are global, remote, and online, including through social links forged on the music forums of the early 2000s where he was *prolific*.

A screen is therefore an intuitive 3D/2D viewport device used in his work. Screens are added as frames and surfaces in his still and moving images. They function like a stage-set to control focus and composition within uncontrollable and multiple viewing contexts (printed, on a phone, a computer, various video platforms, in landscape / portrait, in an endless sea of tiny squares).

Then, as in Nuxui, taking the tangible presence of the screen further – a frame, plus the film of a visible surface, and blurred overlays that animate and pass over and filter the viewport. Different levels of opacity give 3-dimensionality to that thing we take for granted as a 2D plane to stare through.

Culture and community evolves, exchanges, transforms. Culture grows organically / generatively, through Fibonacci-style maths (links x people x velocity + chaos), and through experiment, and hardly ever intentionally. You put something out there and someone responds, it moves beyond the resolve of any solo creator. Culture grows in mutable Gemini ways. A kind of thank u, next with no break-ups. Layering, but also easily discarding and moving on, a gentle killing of darlings, two or ten ideas at once.

First in the generative simulations that create particle swarms and changes of elemental state (melting, fracturing, crystalising, exploding), and the generative interactions of pixels and RGB layers (to get very technical) across thousands of rendered frames. Second, in the way both his figurative and abstract work echos shifting natural and urban landscapes – always enduring, always changing.

Back to January 2022, to Nuxui. A full spectrum of tactile objects, atmosphere, viewports, growth and decay. The nuxui (plural) stretch across minimal, subtle, dark, shiny, intense, bright, vivid, glowing, liquid, heavy extremes. And, as in all Nic’s work, dripping in detail and colour. This is ‘Set 8’ of the 9 sets:

The scale (333 - enabled by the platforms and culture of showing and selling art through NFTs) reveals Nic’s experimental process. The groups of nuxui are less ‘variations of a theme’, more the witnessing of the invention of that theme as it is uncovered and pushed to extremes that test its elasticity. Nuxui doesn’t feel like a concept NFT project with an idea executed, nor is it a static final outcome. It is a snapshot of 3-months’ experimentation in ideas and techniques. You can see the making and crafting as the tones, techniques, patterns and parts evolve over the spectrum of pieces.

Stasis is death. The culture and themes underpinning Nuxui, shared and housed online and on-chain, will continue as threads - more collaborations, maybe music, maybe new works, wider community. Growing, changing, all these wormholes opening up.

Nuxui by Nic Hamilton is released 22nd January 2022 at nuxui.art

https://nuxui.art/

Density and lightness. Seriousness and irreverence. Intensive labour and exuberant joy. You can have these in the same breath.

This is what density and lightness look like in artist Case Simmons’ 2021 Clouds on Chains series:

To start with, two decades browsing the infinity of images on the web. Searching via multiple engines for an object, word, tenor, colour. The images that appear are shaped by what others have searched for before. The lightness of the absent-minded muscle memory of a billion human thumbs searching for the thing flickering through their mind in the moment, the deep cultural anxiety of that, and the density and gravity of the image search as a paradigmatic POV. Some of the Clouds on Chains materials are from Yahoo and Flickr searches 15 years ago; intended and unintended splinters of algorithmic pathways, fragments of the global movement of information in our recent history.

Next, the photoshop-native practice of polygon lassoing and cutting the collected images. The literal chains in Clouds on Chains have been loosened from bikes, chainsaws, chain fences, chain mail, from necks of the famous and anonymous, from online jewellery $3 to $3000. Through this labour, untethering the content from its photographic genesis, releasing it from its background to hover in transparent .png space.

Then, categorising a million images, on digital palettes and in dense libraries stored on a heavy server somewhere.

Searching, seizing, preparing, archiving.

The next steps of Case’s process have taken a 2021 leap. Twin upheavals - the gravity of a global pandemic, and the fizzing exuberance of a nascent way to make, sell and collect art through NFTs – have reacquainted him with digital space and code. The switch to digital space has burst open the scale of his work. At 420 x full scale pieces, Clouds on Chains (and its audience) could not fit in a gallery. Viewing in digital space finally fully empowers the depth and detail of each artwork.

A two-decade creative practice that grew from and with the web has come home.

Case has designed and written the algorithm that now assembles the images, piece by piece, through their categories, tones, and traits. Clouds in crepuscular, high noon, sunrise, and midnight constructions; chains in metal, gold, and platinum; a spectrum of colours. They layer up - arranging, shifting, rescaling, rotating, relating, overlapping, distorting, blurring, fading, contrasting, harmonising, finding their position in the whole. A controlled mix of cloud & chain imagery, shifting coloration, and various backgrounds, balancing on a taut line between intention and surprise.

How are we let into the creation of an artwork? Often art is understood as a solitary practice, the process invisible and guarded, the final outcome admitted only when complete and beneficial to sales. Some technology-led generative art celebrates the process (the code) as the creation itself, that, by being on chain, is implicitly open.

Case’s work overlaps these two social practices of art. His works have been installed, complete, in physical galleries and museums for years, where people viewing them have come up close, noses almost touching the print, trying to imagine the six-month process of how this was made. And now his digital art practice has extended into NFTs, opening new gaps for a community to form around the artist and the work as it develops.

CASE: I went into this intentionally with an attitude of trust and optimism. I asked and listened to the community, and I knew right away that the people I was meeting were the ones building it.

Those people are the smart contract engineers and front-end designers and developers that are essential and recognised partners in NFT projects, plus people who encouraged, guided, collected and connected. The connections build up - searching, relating, layering, contrasting, harmonising, 6-degrees of separation, weak ties, strong ties, overlapping circles, chats, likes, retweets, dense, casual, irreverent, light, algorithmic, global.

Clouds on Chains already bears the fingerprints of the community who will collect it. Clouds, chains, a series numbering 420 x pieces... this is playful, there are little smiles and nods everywhere.

The community scaffold has supported Case’s release of Clouds on Chains as an independent project, revealing (again) the rich possibilities for digital art beyond a traditional gallery model or a traditional-gallery-model-applied-to-NFT-mechanics. The traditional model that has deeply structured the way art is made, viewed and valued, is currently inadequate for this art community and moment. Gatekeeping and scarcity can dampen social and cultural outcomes.

CASE: The infrastructure of the traditional gallery can't hold all the artists to make the community thrive. The art world could learn so much from web3, but hesitancy to do so just reinforces outdated dynamics of collector-dealer-artist.

Decentering away from a platform/gallery and into creative ownership of production, curation, marketing, sales, risk and reward depends on connections and community; it’s the interdependence of independence. In this profound 2021 leap, art practice expands, and artists apply their creativity and labour to the full spectrum of activities, or where they can’t, their peers can, transparently. And, as doesn’t need to be said, the audience has expanded too - outside the gallery to the digital-prime community.

You can’t detach the Clouds on Chains collection from its creative process or from its culture and community, they are woven together, but the result is this:

CASE: A simple idea executed to the max. A programmatic visual tapestry that is provocatively psychological, immersive, explorative.

Stepping away from the process and coming up close to the complete work, nose almost touching (now with a thumb-and-forefinger zoom), dive into the detailed, dense, heavy image that fills and echoes horror vacui, the fear of emptiness. Zoom in again: irreverent details, exuberance, joy, and lightness.

Clouds on Chains by Case Simmons is released December 22nd 2021 at cloudsonchains.xyz

https://cloudsonchains.xyz/