The artwork was originally an experiment on how self-modifying drawings work, and what sort of sonic architectures do these compositions create if the drawing process has a perpetual sound generator, that changes its parameters according to the shifts of the underlying rules behind the line being drawn. A Turing machine first writes a symbol in a cell on the tape, then either moves the tape one cell left or right, then, based on the observed symbol and the machine's own state in the table, either proceeds to another instruction or halts computation.

In tur1ng, rules are stored as colours and the original tape cells are constructed from a two dimensional array. The drawing algorithm continuously and consistently executes its given instructions, such as any dynamic, living entity that struggles to maintain ordered patterns in our world of ever increasing entropy. The sound unfolds as the algorithm proceeds: monitoring these binary songs requires being attentive to changes in the state or behaviour of the system over time so that appropriate interventions or other process-related activities may be carried out. Another feature of listening algorithms is that it often has to be done as a background or secondary task or, perhaps, in parallel with one or more other primary tasks.

As an opportunity emerged to show the process in a gallery space, I made some high resolution prints of eight different iterations of the artwork. The selection was completely subjective, I was trying to find different, visually interesting and characteristic pieces from the latent space. The curation workflow was frictionless, thanks to some useful python scripts called fx_hash_utils that make it easy to scrape all thumbnails of a generative token from fx-hash.

Apart of the selected and enlarged previews I also made a print of all 300 editions on one large surface, where each iteration is organized based on their visual similarities (colors, shapes, image structure), using a dimension reduction algorithm, called t-SNE that is a subset of widely used unsupervised machine learning methods. This composition was made with openFrameworks, an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding.

Since the nature of a generative token is dynamic, I also decided to show the artwork in action, together with sound. By making a functional structure from aluminium and plexiglas, where each cable and the technical components are visible, the installation resembles the transparency and traceability of the blockchain on an ontological level (each layer and each transaction is visible, such as the cables and the DIY computing components that make computation possible using electricity and the circulation of abstract layers of data).

The first appearance of the hybrid installation was prepared for the Space exhibition in M21 Gallery (Zsolnay Quarter, Pécs, Hungary), using the digital tokens, metal, paper, electronics, projection, sound. The hardware was made of a RaspberryPI 4 running linux, a pico projector, a hardware button for interaction (that is made using touch/click on the original fx-hash piece), and a decomposed computer speaker for the sonification.

There are some other locations under discussion for possible future setups, among other tokens. The journey to bring generative pieces into real space with an awareness to their ontological embeddings just began. Thank you for the curator László Százados for making it possible, also thank you for the organizers Valéria Fekete, Júlia Hermann. It was a honour and pleasure to setup the pieces together with such great artists like Loránd Szécsényi-Nagy and Ádám Kokesch.