The Weekly Roundup #78
Looking at digital art projects and releases.
Hello and welcome to The Culture Project. I literally just got back home from Marfa a few hours ago. The long drive is finally over. It was such an amazing trip yet again. I met so many cool people and got to hang out with some amazing artists. I took tons of photos of the events and of Marfa. I’m going to have a Marfa 2024 article coming out soon like a do every year. I haven’t missed a single Weekly Roundup article this year and I wanted to keep the run going. There are some really cool projects from this weekend and a few coming out this week. I’m going to keep this short and sweet.
Lets dive in.
Motion Pictures by Neel Shivdasani
Presented on Art Blocks
Ongoing Mint - 20 minted out of 100.
Price: 0.0150 ETH
This project has a lot going on and is animated and interactive. You should follow the link to the Art Blocks site and check it out. If you read the info there it will tell you how it all works. There are some fun ways you can interact and play with the art.
I had the pleasure of meeting Neel at his exhibit. This was the setup he had at Marfa in the St George Hall. He had a little device with knobs on the table. You could change the output on the screen in real time with those and change all kinds of variables. It was really fun to mess with. He also handed out physical pieces that had layers to them like in the animation below. My wife and I ended up talking to Neel this morning while eating breakfast and I didn’t realize it was him till now. It was very nice meeting you Neel, my wife thinks you are incredibly nice.
Motion Pictures embraces the past and the present by combining archaic barrier-grid animations with modern techniques. The result is generative art that's animated and interactive both on your computer and when printed.
Barrier-grid animations are 5-10 frame loops. Slices of the frames are interlaced on one page, and sliding a film over the page animates the loop by exposing one frame at a time.
Motion Pictures executes this concept with some modern twists. The film can be controlled using your mouse or a touch screen device, and a keyboard or midi controller can be used to modify the art. It may not run on older phones and computers.
Inspired by Takahiro Kurashima's Poemotion series.
Presented on Art Blocks
Ongoing Mint - 5 out of 300 minted.
Price: 0.06 ETH
Fahad was another artist present at Marfa that also released a project during the event. I didn’t get to see his exhibit if he had one (there was so much going on). I did get to see him on a panel about preserving digital art for the future. It was fascinating and had some amazing people from different aspects of our space.
I love the playfulness of piñata, it has a childlike feeling to the art. All the different little symbols and details that show up throughout it are so much fun.
What's in the piñata?
In this experimental project, Karim playfully interrogates the materiality of digital art through a multilayered journey, starting in a Marfa backyard and ending on the Ethereum blockchain.
Like the experience itself, the artwork transforms from physical to digital: 30 ink drawings are digitized, stored on Arweave, and composed into unique, algorithmically generated piñatas.
CYMATIC by Thomas Noya & Erika Weitz
Presented on fx(hash)
Mints on Tuesday - 100 pieces in the set.
Price: 0.045 ETH
This is an amazing looking animated project. I love the outputs I saw as I went through them. I’ve seen Thomas’s work on fx(hash) before and he’s had some great releases. This will be Erika’s first release on the platform and it’s a pretty amazing piece for her first drop. Excited to see all the outputs.
Follow this link to see this one live Full Screen
CYMATIC: Patterns of the Pentatonic by Erika Weitz and Thomas Noya builds upon three centuries of technological innovation and image-making. Bridging between wet plate collodion photography—one of the earliest photographic processes of the 19th century—and generative art, an emergent digital artform, it resumes an ongoing dialogue that unites the digital and the analogue.
The project unfolds in two complementary parts: a curated series of five physical artworks presented at Paris Photo 2024 in tandem with a generative long-form series, where acquired editions are permanently preserved as unique digital artifacts on the blockchain.
The project is built on the frequencies of the five notes from the pentatonic scale. Cymatic resonance patterns, researched in the late 18th century, are visual representations of sound vibrations. These patterns occur when particles self-assemble into symmetrical shapes in response to specific frequencies. In CYMATIC, a custom code-driven system simulates these patterns and is used to create a permanent image via collodion photography. Coded light is projected onto a metal plate coated with light-sensitive chemicals, where the light exposure activates silver particles to form the image.
The work explores the hidden architecture of light and sound, revealing how a single phenomenon can manifest across multiple dimensions of human perception. The pentatonic scale plays into this concept and reinforces it—as it is one of music's most fundamental and universally resonant structures. In this manner the five artworks mirror the five notes of the pentatonic scale, each capturing a distinct resonant pattern. The digital collection echoes this, with each acquired edition capturing a pattern produced by one of the five notes.
CYMATIC embodies a dynamic interplay between historical and contemporary practices. In this setting, both the wet plate, and the code become playgrounds for creative expression and experimentation, where the artists lean into the unexpected surprises that occur during the art-making process, and engage in a dialogue with their respective mediums.
This project was presented by fxhash for Paris Photo 2024 as part of the Digital Sector curated by Nina Roerhs.
Techno-Utopian Iconography by The Electric Word
Presented on Highlight
Mints on Wednesday - Open Edition
Price: Free + 0.0008 ETH
I’ve really enjoyed Electric Word’s other releases on Highlight. I’m happy to see they have another work coming out this week. Though it is a repeating system I like the variance I got from all the outputs and the color schemes. Some color combos that I didn’t think would work ended up complimenting each other nicely.
Today marks the zenith of techno-utopianism. From its origins in the counter-culture through to the anarcho-capitalism of today's tech giants, Silicon Valley's guiding ideology has rebuilt the world in its own image. The original prophets of techno-utopianism shunned politics and instead sought to change the world through action. The businesses their ideas inspired now run the world.
Recently, as their beliefs have marched rightwards, senior figures in Silicon Valley have decided to become directly involved with politics. We urgently need to understand their ideology, and its flaws, if we are to resist their power.
The network is the ultimate symbol of techno-utopianism. To techno-utopians, everything is a network. Society is a network. The brain is a network. The economy, cities, companies, libraries: they're all networks. Lets take one specific example: the city. Techno-utopians romanticise the slum and the favela to argue that cities can be self-organising systems. They say that planning control destroys the very lifeblood of cities, and removes citizen's agency.
Today's tech giants say they will free us from the communist terror of mass-transit and brutalist housing blocks. Around the world, they are attempting to build new cities from the ground up, governed by software and paid for by cryptocurrency.
But the language and iconography they use to describe these projects obscures the anti-democratic nature of their own technology. That a system is decentralized does not mean it is democratic. Indeed, their main aim appears to be to create chaos, through disruption and division, so they can rule this new world like feudal princlings.
“Techno-Utopian Iconography” invites the viewer to look at anew at cities and at self-organising systems. In this techno-utopian vision of the city, the austere geometric forms of the modernists may have gone, but the stochastic forms of computerised networks and self-organising systems are no less artificial. When we pare the city down to something as inhuman as a network, as a data-flow, what have we lost?
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