The Weekly Roundup #112
Exploring digital art on the blockchain.
Hello and welcome to The Culture Project. We had a little drama this week in the Tezos community. Fx(hash) is closing it’s doors to minting on the Tezos blockchain for the foreseeable future. The community is pretty torn and there was a lot of discussion about it on twitter and discord. I’m not going to get into the details, but I understand where fx(hash) is coming from. I trust their direction and dedication to this platform, the art, and the artists. I hope in the future there will be a way to have Tezos come back and be open to minting again. There were so many great little projects and experiments that were created there. I have so many fond memories from the years of collecting, but maybe those memories aren’t tied to a blockchain so much as they are to the people and the art. I appreciate Tezos for what it has been able to create and provide for artists and creators. But I also want fx(hash) to thrive and I don’t think that was possible with it anymore. I will always love Tezos and collect there. We will just have to wait and see what the future holds.
We have a ton of art to look at. The article is a pretty long one this week.
Lets dive in.
There is a giveaway going on in the The Culture Project discord server. If you are a Brush Stroke holder, please come and join in. We just acquired some Genomes by ciphrd this last week. We are giving one away in celebration of the new era of fx(hash).
Genomes #287 by ciphrd
Rodeo mints of the week.
Coast #123 by wren
Coast #126 by wren
[WIP] Business Class ✈️ by fingacode
Releases on Objkt.
Floating Into The Night by Louis Dazy
Morphology 01 by ThePaperCrane
Sunlight through Wild Roses by Nat Sarkissian
Presented on Heft Gallery
Nat’s nature and landscape work is so damn good. I had the pleasure of meeting him in Marfa and collecting a nice little pen plotter print of his work. I tried collecting one of these, but they went so fast.
Sunlight filters through the branching forms of rose bushes and lands, dappled, on grass and blocks. This work is thematically about contrast. Between light and shadow, soft and hard forms, natural and unnatural objects.
The expression of this work, digital and physical, is also full of contrasts. The digital work uses computer graphics to synthesize textures and to blend colors in a way that is not possible physically, and yet it is familiar. The physical work is created with acrylic paint applied to cotton paper by means of a pen plotter and paint pens. With sub-millimeter precision, the machine methodically places each mark, following instructions generated by the algorithm. In this case, the visual and tactile texture is entirely a result of the materials and the tools used.
This work follows the example of the impressionists in two ways. In both the final images, and in the code, light and shadow are at the forefront. Conceptually, in the same way that impressionism celebrates brushstrokes, and does not strive to hide artifacts of the medium, this work celebrates the various inaccuracies and idiosyncrasies of the algorithm that is at its core. The objects in the scenes are not solid. They are thin, hollow surfaces and skeletons. For that reason, they sometimes pass through each other in unintuitive ways. These artifacts are not hidden, but celebrated as a reminder of the medium.
Space Wanderer by Cemhah & frostbitten releasing on fx(hash)
Mint + evolve w/ $WANDERER
Releasing July 22nd on Tuesday.
Will be covering this more in next weeks article. This looks amazing.
Presented on fx(hash)
Ongoing Mint - 542 minted in the set.
Price: 500 $fuckyeah
What a fantastic drop by Ryan. Fuck Yeah. He was recently tied to the first NFT to be minted back in 2012. The Fuck Yeah meme. So obviously his coin name had to be $fuckyeah. It’s just to perfect and a little funny. Some of the fractal patterns that have emerged from this mint are pretty insane. There are some super minimalistic pieces and then some super complex ones. And there all from the same seed. The evolutions in this series have been incredible.
Here are three from the same seed. The original, a minimalistic one half way through the evolutions, and a super complex one towards the end of the evolution chain.
Duality of Zed #67 headed to my vault.
I’m really happy with my mint. It has a heart shape in the middle.
This artwork explores patterns not merely described by or created by mathematics, but rather pre-existing structures uncovered through mathematical relationships. These are forms that emerge naturally from pure logic through concise yet powerful expressions like ln(-z)/ln(z) or ln(z)/(z+1). Using computers as microscopes, viewers can explore these patterns across a zoom range spanning more than 25 orders of magnitude, from macroscopic scales down to microscopic depths, where individual pixels represent regions smaller than subatomic particles. While each piece is distinct, they're all unified by overarching families of equations, related like neighboring species.
Through years of exploration, most of the rules and variations I tried failed to produce any images with interesting features. Countless boring blobs and torn unaesthetic plots were rendered amidst a sea of static and emptiness as I searched for anything worth further exploration. But on the rarest occasions, something exciting would happen (!) -- a doorway to something alien and infinitely explorable would suddenly materialize in my viewport, and this excitement would encourage me to keep looking for the next. I've gathered my favorite discoveries into a curated set, intentionally leaving room across hundreds of attributes for collectors to evolve the collection according to their own curiosity. With equations centered vertically, a sense of pareidolia invites viewers to find their own meanings, as personalized structures emerge simultaneously strange yet familiar, unique for each observer. What do you see?
Presented by Galerie Met & Lonliboy on Verse
Mints on Tuesday - 2000 pieces in the set.
Price: Fixed price $45 or 0.013 ETH
I’ve been blown away by this project. It’s interactive in the creation process. You can go to the verse site and get a blank canvas and create the art you will mint. You can have it generate random pieces, but if you read the Handy Tips and Hidden Modes article below, you can really create some amazing pieces. It’s a bit weird a first, but once you get the hang of it. It’s a lot of fun. I’ve already decided I’m going to mint a couple of these. How often do you come across affordable gorgeous art?
Exploring Polypaths: 4 Handy Tips to Unlock Hidden Modes
I spent a lot of time making outputs. It’s a pretty fun process of creating dots and lines that will grow into your work of art.
In nature, every plant emerges like a finely tuned set of parameters in motion.
Phyllotaxy may appear as opposite, alternate, or whorled. Internode length adjusts in response to light. Leaf margins range from entire to serrated or undulate. The angles of branching and the density of nodes together compose the posture and rhythm of a plant’s body.
These seemingly incidental traits are, in fact, the result of a deep and intricate logic shaped by time, adaptation, and systemic interaction. To me, nature is the earliest and most profound generative artist. Generative art, in this sense, becomes a way of reading its original language. Polypaths is a system I have cultivated since 2023.
In truth, its foundations were laid even before Equinox was completed. It does not aim to imitate plants but to understand them — to explore how they branch, how they negotiate limits, and how they thrive in the tension between order and chaos. Each version of the work begins with the same initial conditions, yet diverges through subtle shifts to form an outcome that is entirely unique. This uncertainty is not mere randomness but a structured openness, a reverent acknowledgment of the world’s inherent multiplicity.
CENTURY-XXX-METABILL by Casey REAS
Presented on fx(hash)
Mints on Tuesday - 108 pieces in the set.
Price: 48 Tezos
This will be the last Tezos project to drop on fx(hash). A little sad, but if there has to be a last, this feels like the right project to do it with. Casey started this series back in 2021 and has released 7 other projects over the years on fx(hash).
This is the original these are based off of. "Neun Felder durch Doppelfarben geteilt (Nine Fields Divided by Means of Two Colors)" is a 1968 oil on canvas painting by Swiss artist Max Bill.
CENTURY-XXX-METABILL is an homage to Neun Felder durch Doppelfarben geteilt (Nine Fields Divided by Means of Two Colors) (1968) by Max Bill.
3 of 5 in CENTURY-XXX, Series 2
Edition of 108
CENTURY-XXX is a series of software sketches that pay tribute to artists of the 20th century. Each piece is named after a specific artist and reimagines one of their original works through code, often by adding motion, variation, or interactive elements. These sketches don’t replicate the original artworks but instead extend their core ideas into new forms.
By “software sketch,” I mean something more informal than a finished artwork. While some of my projects take months or even years to complete, these sketches are created quickly—often in just a few days. They may be lighter in process, but they’re equally important to me. Sketching with code is how I think through ideas and discover new directions for future work.
The project began with the CENTURY exhibition at DAM Projects in Berlin in fall 2012, where I premiered Network C, Network D, and the first Signal to Noise software piece. Since then, these sketches have inspired more full-scale artworks like METASOTO, METAVASARELY, METAMOLNAR (also known as Hommage à Molnar), including the eponymous CENTURY released through Art Blocks in June 2021.
CENTURY-XXX Series 1 was released from December 2021 to January 2022 in editions of 1,000. The first artwork in Series 2 followed in October 2022, also in an edition of 1,000. The remaining four works in Series 2 are scheduled for release starting in 2025, each in smaller editions of fewer than 128 based on what feels appropriate for the individual piece.
The long-term vision for CENTURY-XXX is to create 100 software sketches, each one inspired by a different artist and artwork from the 20th century.
Thanks for reading! Please like and share the article if you enjoyed it. We are just trying to spread some Generative Art love with The Culture Project. Our community is open to anyone that wants to learn about or share generative art. The communities Twitter & Discord. My twitter is @joshripple. If you like the content please give us a follow.