## *Spire (Bokashi Cone)* explores soft gradations of color.
In traditional Japanese woodblock printing, bokashi refers to the technique of applying ink to the print in a manner that produces a subtle transition of tone or color. The resulting look of a bokashi effect can be described as a hazy gradient. The technique was famously used by Hokusai in Red Fuji (c. 1830), as well as by many other artists of that time period.
In Bokashi Cone, the technique takes center stage. Each cone form is rendered in soft gradations of color that span from light to dark. The effect is very subtle in some instances, and more pronounced in others. Further heightening the bokashi is the transition of hue within each gradient, a process which would be laboriously difficult to reproduce with traditional block-printing techniques. Bokashi Cone's generative color model means that the colors are chosen algorithmically without the artist needing to assemble predefined palettes. Each cone has its very own unique generative color theme and gradient.
ZENTRUM is a dynamic, endlessly running abstract animation made of structural elements and random codes. The random generator ensures that each endless loop is unique. For ZENTRUM, Franke had to make do with the limited computing capacity that a home computer offered at the time. Despite this limitation, it was important to him to develop moving sequences even in his first programs for the Apple II. He considered the movement to be a pioneering digital innovation. The combination of dynamic image sequences and music, as well as the interactivity, were already groundbreaking in his MONDRIAN program code, developed in 1979 for the Texas Instruments home computer. License: https://quantum.mypinata.cloud/ipfs/QmUnSepLccUajd2kJi3hX7bFvzUuFHr39UUP1TTk9yHaaq
ZENTRUM is a dynamic, endlessly running abstract animation made of structural elements and random codes. The random generator ensures that each endless loop is unique. For ZENTRUM, Franke had to make do with the limited computing capacity that a home computer offered at the time. Despite this limitation, it was important to him to develop moving sequences even in his first programs for the Apple II. He considered the movement to be a pioneering digital innovation. The combination of dynamic image sequences and music, as well as the interactivity, were already groundbreaking in his MONDRIAN program code, developed in 1979 for the Texas Instruments home computer.
"Receive Transmission" embodies the echoes of Peter Saville's iconic album cover, of Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s discovery of pulsars, and the powerful vibrations of Joy Division's music. Ripples radiate from the central core channeling the spinning pulsar. These stars exhibit symmetry, with two beams extending on either side, similar to a lighthouse's sweep. The composition follows a bending grid, similar to the paper that aided Jocelyn's work. Occasionally this grid is exposed as an overlay, a testament to the barriers confronting women and their ability to overcome them. There is a rhythmic cadence to the artwork, sometimes steady like Stephen Morris' drums or jagged and spontaneous like Ian Curtis' dance. From the distant pulses of a dying star to the timeless grooves on a vinyl record, the artwork encapsulates the endless ripples through time. A transmission received by all who look for it.
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Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the pioneering scientist who discovered pulsars, was the sole woman radio astronomer at Cambridge University in 1967. She helped build a satellite and operated it alone, carefully studying the marks made by a pen across thousands of feet of graph paper. Jocelyn uncovered a mark that should not have been there. This signal, a transmission received from a perished star, continues to traverse time and space to wash our world in radio waves for eons to come.
Her discovery was initially overshadowed by her professor's skepticism, who attributed the anomaly to interference or faulty wiring. To validate her intuition that this was a new celestial entity, Jocelyn continued working and discovered a second pulsar. Her work earned a Nobel Prize; however that prize was given to the male heads of her program. In 2018 when Jocelyn was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her pulsar discovery. She promptly donated the $3 million award to the Institute of Physics (IoP) to propel women and other underrepresented groups toward earning PhDs in physics. Her impact as a role model will carry on for generations.
ATOM is a way of thinking about digital images. The pixel is the atomic unit of every digital image — each pixel is three numbers that define the intensity of red, green, and blue light sources. Every digital image has two representations, a linear sequence of numbers and those numbers converted into a grid of lights that form an image. ATOM is the collision of the objective and subjective, it’s a space to explore.
An early version of ATOM, called ORA, was written in C++ in 2003. It was the first time I thought precisely about images as data and data as images. At that time, I was loading photographs into the system to “see” them in different ways, to look at their data through other representations. ATOM, created from scratch in 2023, is completely generative and synthesized. The static gooey color patterns are the core of ATOM. They are generated with code that combines sine waves. These patterns are the data sources that drive three other diagrammatic representations of each pattern image: color blocks, RGB signals, extruded terrain.
ATOM is my Rosetta Stone. It’s the foundation for ""An Empty Room,"" my work exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in Spring 2023, and also ""923 Empty Rooms,"" a long-form generative art release with Bright Moments and Art Blocks in August 2023. This work all builds on my ""Still Life"" series, first exhibited at the bitforms gallery in New York in 2016 and concluding there with the final ""Still Life"" exhibition in November 2023.
Press “spacebar” to keep exploring the “space” of possibilities within the features of each mint. The ‘B’ key changes the background value.
Gone are their worlds. Actions taken that silenced these places for a thousand years. The echo of distant cannons forgotten, the souls of their victims evaporated, claimed by the void. A new epoch now, a different era.
Long after the cold and the dark came to claim everything, smoldering under the ashes of memory, we find the veins and arteries of their civilization. Clusters of roots, cavernous extensions of what they lost, that drive themselves deep into the earth. Potent icons of existential dread, of what is gone. Their meaning is unknown, but not unknowable.
These RELICS will bring to light what we have forgotten, ancient memories of their catastrophe, so we can learn how not to replicate it.
Upon encountering Matisse's ""Blue Nudes"" series, I found myself intrigued by the photograph of a room adorned with these simple yet evocative depictions of the human form. At first glance the figures appeared as harmonious abstractions, each embodying a shared pose while subtly diverging in unique ways upon closer inspection. This experience ignited my fascination with the artistic endeavor to recreate the same essence through multiple iterations, prompting a contemplation on the role of variations in a generative art series in an era often fixated on extravagant algorithmic diversity.
Here we aim to celebrate subtlety. This project employs not only the randomness inherent to algorithms but also the serendipity of human intervention. Anchored in my own hand-drawn inputs, the process intertwines organic paths with algorithmic automation, generating polygons that exude the beauty of nuanced distinctions.
Beyond technique, this endeavor mirrors an autobiographical passage — a celebration of my evolution from functional coder to constructor of pure form. Matisse's iconic method of composing with cut paper — initially a preparatory ritual — mirrors my own journey. What once served utilitarian software now finds purpose in artistry, code morphing into my chosen medium of artistic expression. This metamorphosis, a kinship to Matisse's transformation, is my homage to the creative odyssey that beckons when code transcends its pragmatic origins.