Digital images, custom generative adversarial networks (GAN), NFT, and Ethereum blockchain, 2023
Private collection
Artists Sofia Crespo and Anna Ridler here combine their shared interest in botany, experimental photography, and generative systems. The underlying digital image is composed of artificially generated versions of 83 plant species native to the Swiss Alps. The species are at risk of disappearing due to climate change.
Rather than document these endangered plants as they currently exist, the artists used generative adversarial networks (GANs) to create imaginative variations of how these species might adapt and evolve. Just as seeds contain genetic potential for new traits, the artists produced new visual possibilities by employing “seeds” (data points) in digital latent space, the underlying mathematical structure where AI generates images. Each plant species was generated individually, manually altered using software like Photoshop, and eventually combined into this floral arrangement using a process akin to digital collage. The results reveal subtly uncanny flowers—familiar yet impossible. The final image was subdivided into 25 slices, each becoming a unique artwork stored on the blockchain.
Digital video created with custom software, sound, 43:12 minutes, 2017
Private collection
Jardins d’Été (summer gardens) is a series of videos and prints that uses generative systems to update the historical tradition of landscape painting. Evoking the loose painting style of the French Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, Jardins d’Été depicts the gardens of Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire in France.
Quayola filmed the gardens at night using ultra-high-definition cameras, then used custom software to analyze the subtle movements of the flowers, grasses, and leaves. Using computer vision and machine learning tools, the software analyzes and extracts data from the original videos to extrapolate color palettes, landscape features, and the movement of the plants in the wind. This data guides what Quayola calls his “computational paintings.”
Just as the Impressionists developed a new type of landscape painting expressing the interplay of color and light, Quayola uses the machine’s gaze to interpret and translate nature into new forms of artistic representation. “The natural world and its impressions are not reproduced but re-elaborated, recodified,” he says.
Custom audiovisual software, NFT, and Ethereum blockchain, 2021
Private collection
Synth Poems is a series of audiovisual works by Tyler de Witt (a.k.a. 0xDEAFBEEF) inspired by early electronic music and analog synthesizers. Each work is generated entirely on-chain at the time of minting, producing unique compositions by varying the tempo, time signature, and harmonic qualities within the generative algorithm’s predefined rules.
The audio in this work is based on frequency modulation (FM) synthesis. Originally used in radio broadcasting, it was adopted in the 1960s and 1970s by electronic music pioneer Don Buchla in his modular synthesizers. The black-and-white animations on screen are direct visualizations of the audio wave forms we hear in the work. The undulating patterns simulate the readouts of an oscilloscope, an analog instrument that was used to test and graphically display electronic signals.
In this work, de Witt reveals the raw mechanics of digital sound synthesis—where every tone and shape emerges from pure computation—which are often masked by today’s slick, sophisticated computer programs.
Custom generative software, 2024
Private collection
Earthly Delights 3.2 honors experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage and his 1981 film Garden of Earthly Delights, which alludes to 15th-century artist Hieronymous Bosch’s iconic painting of the same name. REAS references Brakhage through rapid cuts between abstract images and the use of plants as subject and source material.
REAS collected and made high-resolution color scans of native vegetation in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado—the same area where Brakhage worked. From 50 scans, several hundred thousand pictures were cropped and edited to create a data set used to train a generative adversarial network (GAN). The new botanical patterns and forms generated by the GAN have the organic feel of plants but don’t represent any species in existence.
The work unfolds as a nonlinear cinematic sequence. The generative software continuously rearranges fixed frames so that Earthly Delights exists in perpetual evolution. You never see the same arrangement twice.
Web-based generative art software, 2022
Courtesy of the artists
QQL gives us a peek into the generative artist’s process and allows you to determine color palettes, patterns, and other qualities.
On the nearby touch screen, you can adjust the algorithm’s parameters, explore different possibilities, and generate your own unique QQL!
Your selections will guide what the final output looks like.
Randomness is a key force—the same settings can produce strikingly different images.
Created by Tyler Hobbs and Dandelion Mané, QQL is a web-based algorithmic art generator optimized for emergence: Each roll of the algorithmic dice leans toward greater complexity and produces unexpected results.
While the number of potential images that can be generated by the QQL algorithm is infinite, only 999 can be officially minted. Collectors with a mint pass can select their favorite versions before finalizing one as a non-fungible token (NFT). This means that the collectors, rather than the artists, decide which images will be permanently recorded on the blockchain.
Custom audiovisual software, sculpture with LED panels, hand-cast iron, and electrical components, 2021/2025
Courtesy of the artist
A glitch represents a moment when the underlying structure of data, compression, rendering, or computation becomes visible through malfunction or failure. Glitchbox originally appeared as a series of generative audiovisual non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that could be customized by collectors. By changing the generative model’s parameters, the collector could alter the look and sound of the piece.
For this exhibition, Tyler de Witt (a.k.a. 0xDEAFBEEF) has created a custom interactive Glitchbox sculpture. Drawing on his skills as a blacksmith, computer programmer, and electrical engineer, he gives his digital instrument a tactile, physical form resembling a modular synthesizer. Although the ancient craft of blacksmithing may seem far removed from computer programming, de Witt finds many parallels between the two. For him, both code and iron represent “malleable, homogenous materials” that can be molded and shaped into any number of forms. Both can be used to create tools that can, in turn, create other objects.
The artist invites you to explore the work’s knobs, buttons, and levers like you would a musical instrument you are learning to play. How do the changes you make affect the audio and visuals?
Digital video, NFT, and Ethereum blockchain, 2022
Private collection
The duo LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus) create handmade analog synthesizers for processing audio and visual signals. They use these instruments to create low-tech works in which the generative process is embedded in the synthesizers and the unpredictability of live electrical signals.
The Hugs on Tape series was developed during the COVID pandemic. LoVid asked their friends and family to submit videos of themselves hugging someone in their social pod. The resulting intricate digital collages highlight this essential “choreography of closeness” during a time of social distancing and isolation.
The vibrant, colorful patterns in each video are composed of digitized and manipulated recordings of signal patterns generated by LoVid’s synthesizers over more than 20 years. The patterns are looped, tiled, and mirrored to produce kaleidoscopic tapestries. These were then painstakingly rotoscoped: hand-traced over moving images, frame by frame. These hybrid digital-analog compositions retain LoVid’s fundamental interest in the interactions of bodies with technology.