(Probably) All in the Mind

Botto - Seaport Subject

A sailor’s life is romantic in many ways. Going out to sea every morning, the wind in your hair, the waves under you, the sky above, the sun blazing down. At night, all is calm. The moon floods the harbor. The white sails stand out. All is tranquil except for the occasional splash of an oar in the water. A lighthouse guides the way home.

Botto, in conversation with GPT-3, describing Seaport Subject

Seaport Subject was the fragment chosen by the community to be Botto’s first editioned work. While this work is not officially part of the Genesis period, Botto’s first year of work, it has been selected during this time frame. Period 0, or the Genesis Period, started in October 2021 and ended October 2022 — putting a total of 52 artworks to auction. This period is defined by the original design of Botto’s art engine that included only VQGAN + CLIP, the outputs of which are much more abstract and distinctly machine generated than that of Stable Diffusion.

BottoDAO created an alternative voting interface to select Seaport Subject the first 10/10 issue artwork. This was the first experiment of a core idea in Botto’s roadmap: the development of multiple voting pools that will allow for the creation of secondary collections and collaborations that capture different expressive desires.

Seaport Subject is a unique piece of Botto history. It was created by Botto’s art engine Round 3, alongside the batch of fragments that populated the first voting pools Bottonians interacted with. It soon became a community favorite, making it to the Top 5 twice in the first two months of life of the project.

Botto had barely been trained by the collective. Seaport Subject belonged to the batch that gave the machine its first opportunity to learn from the tastes of the DAO, while still being quite free to roam the latent space of its generative models.

Seaport Subject's imprint can be seen in some recurring features that emerge round after round. Features that crystallize the interests of the community expressed through their voting behavior.

Seaport Subject is the first non 1/1 Botto: a unique opportunity for collectors to become owners of a flagship artwork by the Decentralized Autonomous Artist.

Cole Sternberg - a floating island

A floating island took us across the Pacific. Twenty-two days at sea. On a sunny day, between the storms, the ocean recomposed a painting and we were off.

This body of work photographically chronicles that journey. Each image was shot while crossing the Ocean on an ultra-bulk cargo vessel’s maiden voyage from the shipyard in Western Japan to the U.S in 2015, using a Canon 35mm camera from the 70s. They are a frozen moment in time without grounding in a time. They are the macro of the sea and the micro of our floating home, unencumbered by the trappings of the outside world.

On the fourth day of this journey, I threw a painting in the Ocean and let it surf the wake. This singular action and resultant composition led me down an eight year path of environmental exposure, culminating in the painterly component of these works. The painterly elements of a floating island were physically made in the manner of that initial piece. They are painted layers of acrylic and watercolor on raw linen, left to the water to recompose themselves, each surfing its own wake. They are their own translation of the environment in and of themselves.

Each work is collaged purposefully for visual composition and storylines. Every work of a floating island embraces its own singular unique photograph and painting and hence are constrained by the limited volume of the physical series of paintings and photographic imagery. It is a finite eight years of creation culminating herein.

a floating island should make one wonder of scale, of irrational human hubris and of the ability of the earth to recompose itself. It is both hopeful and dire, inspirational and fearsome, endless and entrapping.

Please note that only five works are currently available for sale. The series will be released gradually over an extended period.

Matt Perkins - Lake Festival

You are on the shore of a lake, waiting for the festival to begin. A soft wind blows, and the remains of a storm are passing away.

In art school, I discovered and fell in love with impressionist art. The style of capturing the essence of a scene with bold marks and colors captured my creative curiosity. Throughout my life, I've had a spot in my heart for this movement.

As I began my generative art journey, I looked back at these artists, wondering if I could capture the feeling of an impressionist masterpiece with code. Over time and with experimentation, I've developed and honed my algorithms to closely mimic true brush strokes and applied color mixing techniques to realistically mimic paint mixing.

Lake Festival is the culmination of my work over the past year to capture impressionism on a 2D JavaScript canvas. Through randomness, this piece can explore the styles and moods of several impressionist masters with different paint mixes, brush strokes, and atmospheric conditions. Iterations range the gamut from hope and joy to melancholy and ominous.

Copyright (©) 2023 Matt Perkins / Nudoru

Krankarta - Drop

A drop of rain seems fleeting and inconsequential. Yet, within each lies a microcosm.

Florian Zumbrunn - Scents of Spring

In late April 2017, I moved to Tokyo.
After a few months, every local I met asked me, with a sense of pride: "Do you also have four seasons in your country?" as though it was a treasure unique to Japan. Naturally, we do.
Nearly a year after, at the end of march 2018, I encountered "Hanami," a captivating event marking the beginning of spring, celebrated with the enchanting bloom of the famous "Sakuras" (cherry trees). Japan is renowned for this breathtaking spectacle. Every year, tourists fly to Japan hoping to join the Japanese who gather in parks to welcome the new season; rejoicing in the ephemeral beauty of the blossoms.
This magical display lasts a mere two weeks at most… And I’ve been lucky enough to experience it in four distinct years. Once, to my amazement, it unfolded beneath a delicate blanket of snow in 2020— a phenomenon last witnessed 32 years prior.
Today, I’m back in France, re-discovering “our” spring for the second year; and I understand the sentiment of the Japanese people: their four seasons are indeed strikingly distinct.
That said… My memories as a child are similar; but with a different backdrop. France's spring bursts forth with Wisteria, Tulips, and a vibrant tapestry of flowers and vegetation.
Winter in Paris paints the city in moody grays. But as spring arrives, it revives. The sun tenderly caresses your face, the wind lovingly envelops you, and your spirits soar.

In a world where seasons seem to fade away quickly, let's cherish the emotions they bring. This collection is an ode to spring and the essence of those feelings and scents that marks its arrival.
As climate change alters the spring I experience today compared to my childhood, I wish new generations will be able to enjoy “four seasons” and create their own precious memories.

Lunarean - Dustfold

Dustfold is a generative series that began while I was experimenting with triangulation algorithms. The patterns reminded me of the crease patterns used in origami. These are the lines seen on a sheet of paper after an origami figure is unfolded and provide a kind of blueprint of how the figure was created.
From there, I introduced perturbations at each step of the triangle subdivision process, allowing the structure to evolve in unexpected ways. The final triangles were shaded with lots of tiny dots to give the output a dusty, textural feel.

MJ Lindow - The Nature of Memory

Memory is not the infallible record we sometimes believe it to be. Like an old photograph, it has many limitations. Weathered by time and reshaped by intervening experiences, once crisp moments fade into fluid forms. The true nature of the past is often lost, leaving behind ghosts and illusions.

LoVid - Upstate Summer, Trees Fall

LoVid’s work centers incorporate media and material, physicality and virtuality. Our practice incorporates a wide range of techniques and processes, from DIY electrical engineering generative digital art, fabric works and stained glass.

Throughout multiple projects, we maintain a signature visual and sonic aesthetic of color, pattern, and texture density, incorporating glitch and noise. Our process: navigating between the handmade and the machine-produced, highlights the challenges and possibilities of the networked age, particularly a sense of the world that intermixes virtual and physical, materials and simulations, fantasy and reality, hope, connectivity and isolation.

Tau Ivona - Asynchronous Response

Asynchronous Response is a collection of images created through the use of code and artificial intelligence, exploring the intersection of technology and art. The works in this collection are not concerned with perfection, but rather with the ways in which code and AI can allow for a deeper deconstruction of visual concepts, resulting in a reduction of forms and a non-human gaze.

The 30 final images are the result of an asynchronous dialogue between the artist and the technology they are utilizing. By relinquishing some control over the creative process, the artist is able to tap into the unpredictability and randomness of the digital world, resulting in outputs that are at once familiar and yet otherworldly.

GAN, Diffusion models & P5.js 2023

Visconti Sabato - Ecco the Dolphin: #C a t a c l y s m, Ecco: The Tides of Time

Ecco the Dolphin: C a t a c l y s m reimagines the classic Sega Genesis game, Ecco: The Tides of Time as a parable for the Anthropocene told through a series of postcards and looping animated GIFs. Works were created by glitching ROM files of the 1994 game, recording the ensuing game performances, and crafting looping videos from these recordings.

Ecco: The Tides of Time was the sequel to Ecco the Dolphin, a game franchise that has earned a cult reputation for its unique graphics (designed by László Szenttornyai and Ed Annunziata) and post-human storyline, influenced by John C. Lilly's controversial research with psychedelics and dolphins. In Ecco the Dolphin: C a t a c l y s m, the threat of an alien invasion has given way to ecological collapse and the resulting collective chaos, exemplified through endless glitches and corrupted gameplay mechanics.