Generative plottable art is (Generative Art)²: not only the digital output is generative, but the physical interpretation of that single outcome can infinitely vary with the physical choices as well as all the glitches and organic events.

Generative art is something that always fascinated me: using algorithms to programmatically draw and exploring the beauty of random noises. Back in "HTML5 golden ages" in 2010, I loved playing with emerging tech like Canvas 2D, WebGL, Web Audio API,... I actually learned a lot at using these to make games: as of today, I still believe gamedev and participating in game jams may be one of the best playgrounds to learn programming art and practice uncomfortable areas because there are so many different skills to explore there. I would recommend people to try it out!

In 2020, I then discovered the "plotting" technique, consisting of putting pens on robots. I instantly loved the idea to collide the determinism of digital generative art against the constraints and limits of the physical world and its organic and analog outputs.

2 years later, I'm barely touching the surface. There are so many ideas remaining untouched to try out! This article summarises the different paradigm explorations I had over these past years and will share some future plans.

My journey into Generative NFT made me release various work on ethblock.art, gen.art, plottables.io, fxhash.xyz, and I can't thank enough all the collector friends I made in the process!

🥹 This article is dedicated to you and the fx(text) parts will be offered to all my present fxhash collectors.

The Plottable NFT Paradigm, a utility token economy

This probably would deserve its own "Plottable Manifest" document at some point, but the "Plottable NFT" principles that I followed are:

• a digital artist releases digital artwork as an NFT. That artwork is rendered with a facilitated way to extract a Plottable SVG file – A Plottable SVG file is a vectorial SVG that is optimized for plotting, notably only containing strokes.
• a physical plotter artist can use this SVG file to physical plot a given output. (and yes, the plotter artist can also be the same digital artist)
• implicit rule to produce physical plots: only the Owner of the digital NFT is allowed to request a plot (or plot themselves). The physical plotter artist has a responsibility to check this. If the physical plotter artist (Y) is different from the digital artist (X), it would be recommended for the physical artist to sign the piece, for instance with the mention "original art by X, plotted by Y".
• Assuming the digital artist agreed with this paradigm, the physical plotter artist is free to define the pricing and terms of their "plotting services". They can also interpret the digital work in various physical ways, not necessarily exactly in how it was initially intended (for instance, choosing other inks). This is an asynchronous collaboration.

The NFT, like any regular NFT, points to a digital artwork that can be sold and resold on second market – blockchain guarantees its unicity.

In this "Plottable NFT" paradigm, such NFT gives a privilege to its owner: requesting a physical plot (with an artistic fee to cover costs). This obviously can be executed multiple times, yet every physical piece is unique: plotting is an analog process that will inevitably yield different results.

A plot is not a print.

A plot is not a print.

A plot is not a print.

The NFT vs physical art decoupling allows a business model that allows both the digital creator and the physical creator to be rewarded and makes the NFT truly interesting as a token that has a real-life action: to unlock physical pieces.

@greweb's plot explorations

All my artwork is shared and open-sourced on https://greweb.me/plots. 99% of my plotting work is made with Rust language and runs efficiently in the browser with WASM.

Since 2020, I have been coding one plot generator a day, #643 is my last plot. https://greweb.me/plots/643

It's a blast exploring all these ideas, sharing the love and the fun, and exercising it by streaming the full process live on https://www.twitch.tv/greweb from the coding to the physical plot.

Not everything goes into a fxhash release, but let's highlight some of the fundamental paradigms I released on fx(hash).

Plot Loop Concept

A "plot loop" is simply the concept of animating plotted frames. A stop motion video can be created from a series of plot, notably that "loop", meaning that the last frame smoothly transitions back to the first frame.

In order words, the creative process works that way:

• an animation is generated with code, (SVG plottable files)
• Each frame of this animation is plotted physically,
• photographed back into a digital picture,
• and post-processed back into a video that makes it an artistic creation by itself.

The concept was initiated in May 2021 (https://greweb.me/2021/05/plot-loops) and have ploted a bunch of experiments since then.

My first take on it what that each frame is an edition by itself, and I started making some "1:1" NFT but still being a N-editions release, N being the number of frames. Each sale would yield a physical work collection.

After finalizing the "Plottable NFT" paradigm, the "NFT collected = physical collected" approach was finally decoupled and therefore I now moved to a higher paradigm: a generator of plot loop!

As my "curated" loop was taking a WEEKEND to physical produces (the first plot loop was made of 16 A4 plots), I more recently optimized the process by making ONE plot of a grid of frames. That way, there is only one SVG file to export and the machine can just plot it in-place. A tool was created to ease the video creation process from one photo of that grid.

On that grid paradigm, 3 Plottable Loops were released on fx(hash):

Plottable Wireframe, which explores looping in 3D wireframes:

Plottable Field, which explores looping into noise fields:

Plottable Circleception, which explores fractal-like zooms (the art infinitely reproduces inside itself) and notably with circle packing:

Plottable Memories Concept

Photography is an immortalization of space and time. Plottable Memories is the idea to use a collection of many many photos taken at a given space and time, and forge them into an infinite amount of outcomes, as an AI would do, but with more simple algorithms.

"Memories" are also something that fades away, so the idea is to travel into abstract results: by mixing, merging, blending, smashing, morphing a collection of photos and using plotting techniques to map the pixels into strokes. We all experience memories in different ways, I can't picture clearly things in my head, this is called aphantasia.

This may be one of the most innovative works I have produced and I may have more collections of this kind – "Image composition" is a popular label but it would deserve to be split into multiple cases, this work isn't a simple layering of images. Instead, the image is not the end result of the creation but only the means to achieve an abstract result. After all, an image is just a 2D array of values and you can use this data to feed into your generator. Despite the bad press of "Image Composition" is having, this work is probably one of the most generative work I have released because of the high variation of outcomes (which also makes it very hard to control).

Ultimately, I love this idea that the collection isn't settled in advance, it fits particularly well this "Memories" immortalization, and we don't know what will be the randomly chosen ones, we can only guess with the stock of photos.

You can see in the first "Train Station" generator how various the results are from very photographic to abstract ones:

Plottable Era

Plottable Era series is my first long-term project towards achieving more scenery and landscape artworks. This initially started as an experiment to implement "Reflection" effects in plotting. When working on the artistic direction, I decided I would do a series of generators that would explore different eras of mankind, always around this mountains and sunset principle.

This first series "Primitive" shows the beginning of mankind with people exploring the mountains and traveling on the sea during sunset:

I have started working on the next Era which will be exploring Medieval Era. I am solo-brainstorming a lot of ideas for the future eras too and I'm always happy to take ideas in, what would you like to see in a future Era? shoot me a DM on Twitter, it could become an easter egg hidden in some future collections!

Other plottable explorations

Each of these releases tries to highlight a particular aspect or technique of generative art. Let's see what other work wouldn't necessarily fit in a "series of generators".

Pattern 03: my first nft plottable generator (on Ethereum). Exploring various abstract patterns with just strokes: https://greweb.me/2021/08/pattern-03

Shattered: experimenting recursive slicing of polygons (on Ethereum): https://greweb.me/2022/02/shattered

Plottable Storm: a noise field built with circle packing and gravity attraction principles.

Plottable Mountain Moons: a recursive packing of mountains and moons.

Plottable Mesh: an exploration of contouring noise domain warping.

Plottable Circles: concentric circles with varying ring wings made out of a lot of strokes

Plottable Ricochets: exploration of parametric functions.

Plottable Letters: an exploration of typography and simple shapes exclusive disjunction (XOR).

Plottable Fibers: minimalistic reproduction of nature's fibers effects in plants.

Plottable Thousands: recursive circle packing. A work only made of positioned circles.

Plottable Slimes: combines the effort of some of my best explorations of the past 2 years: radial projection of noise, mountain moon algorithm, custom packing logic,... It was technically challenging to achieve and it was so fun developing it while figuring out how to implement efficient binary packing in Rust language.

Future plans

More future releases:

As I shared already, Plottable Eras will be a big focus for me, it's a "long-term" project. I will always release other experiments as well during the exploration artistic process: I think it's important for everyone to understand that to be creative, artists would explore many different ideas, we don't forget our past projects, we just make them grow with side projects that eventually benefit them back! This is very hard to consider a project done!

I may release more "Memories" too but only if I travel to a special place that would be interesting to "immortalize" as a collection. The way it gets "plotted" will also have to innovate on each next generator. I also welcome collaboration with photograph artists who would like to explore this idea (but understand that the photo is not the end result, it's only the mean to go into abstract results!)

More artistic events:

This year, I started exploring the Twitch FR Art scene, and it was truly refreshing to make traditional artists discover generative art and discuss about its constraints, we don't have a lot of generative art in the artistic scene in general and it is very interesting to explore our own weak points at explaining to others what we try to achieve. I have participated and will continue to participate to some Twitch events on the matter! I also plan to redo some game jams in a near future, because I would be curious to see if I can put what I learned in generative art back into a mini game.

More paradigms to explore:

As you may notice, I love hybrid art and all the ways to bond digital and physical art, I also want to continue exploring ways to connect with collectors.

I would like to explore other ways to spread art to the world. One idea I recently tried is fragmented art: https://greweb.me/plots/tags/fragmentation – I did an A3 plot that I then cut into 8 pieces and distributed it all over the world. Each collector has part of the art piece, which constitute a big map.

I have planned the possibility for collectors to "subscribe" to a plot – I would ship to each collector, without knowing in advance what it would be, and therefore with a need for a communication to exists between collectors to determine the "big picture". That would fit particularly well the idea of the fragmented art paradigm. (NB: That would not fit fxhash paradigm)

I also like the idea that a generator could be used to explore and curate art, we could let the collector curate the true one they want and request a plot with the generator seed they want. (NB: That would not fit fxhash paradigm)

Finally, I may do curated work as well, meaning that even tho I do generative art, I would curate ONE specific output and produce a physical work with that. It would be particularly relevant for bigger plots as I just received my A1 plotter...

And so much more plans...

Cheers, 🤖✒️ @greweb