“little boxes on the hillsides, child” is a series of abstract suburban cityscapes powered by a program of LIA’s own design and development. Over the 25 years of her artistic career, LIA's working process has typically involved as much intuition as it does engineering skill, and this piece is no exception. Growing from an initial Processing sketch by way of the artist's careful selection of angles, transparencies, and line weights, a virtually infinite sequence of house-like forms appears and disappears. LIA conceives of her practise as a conversation between her own fluid concepts and the formal precision required of software code; when accidents or bugs appear, they are often treated as a part of this conversation and incorporated into the final work. In this piece the “cheeky blue” and “cheeky red” features arise from a bug in calculating the colour spread, and have been retained for their aesthetic contribution to the images. Taking inspiration from the song “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds, this piece is a contemplation of houses and cities. The cyclical relationship between the construction of homes, the lands and environments they have replaced, and the ecosystems that will eventually replace them is echoed through an infinite production of geometric compositions. “little boxes on the hillsides, child” is the successor of “little boxes on the hillsides, mother”, presented in the exhibition “Synthetic Imagination” at bitforms gallery San Francisco, October 2–November 15, 2021. The NFTs minted on Art Blocks are the children of the “mother” work: brilliantly colourful, they are rendered in stillness as an artifact of the mother program's generative output, whose ancestry can be activated on the Art Blocks website by pressing the 'a' key to reveal the animated process behind the production of the still image. Dutch auction starting at 5Ξ and decreasing every 5 minutes to 0.2Ξ (5→4→3→2→1.5→1.25→1→0.75→0.5→0.4→0.3→0.2), 25% of sales over 0.2 ETH will be donated to charity (5% to the Processing Foundation, 20% to COTAP - Carbon Offsets To Alleviate Poverty).
