Hey there, fx fam!

It's been a while since we’ve last made a proper update, and we felt it was time to touch base and reconnect. While things might have seemed quiet on the surface, behind the scenes we've had our hands full and have been steadily working towards various milestones.

We're excited to start sharing developments with you on a far more regular basis! That's right–this is the first of what will be a weekly newsletter to the community. We're initiating this to keep you better informed about what's happening on the platform, in the community, and within our team.

This way we can communicate our efforts directly with the community, unfiltered by social media algorithms. These newsletters will also serve as a central reference point for our ongoing work, to keep us accountable, and will also go a long way documenting our journey moving forward.

In this first installment, we’ve curated a number of topics that we think are relevant for a start, but we’ll definitely refine the structure over the coming weeks—naturally we’d love to hear your feedback in this regard. With this introduction out of the way, let’s cut straight to the chase and have a look at some of the important fxhash things that have transpired in the past weeks 💫

Last Week on fxhash

The past couple of weeks have been nothing short of a bustling period for the platform. Filled with various events and engagements, the fxhash archive has continued growing with incredible generative collections. Let’s take a moment and highlight all of the standout moments!👇

1. Onchain Summer comes to an End

The end of August also marks the end of the Onchain Summer event, a big collaboration with the lovely folks over at Coinbase. Running for the duration of two months, from the 4th of July to the 29th of August 2024, we saw the release of 10 distinguished generative artworks on the base L2 chain:

It was absolutely amazing to see the creativity that went into all of the featured projects: from strange discombobulated particle devices, latent geometric dreamscapes, and self-assembling space machinery, all the way to elegant concrete poetry, and audio-visual CSS experiments in the middle of the woods—there really was a little bit of everything to satisfy every kind of aesthetic appetite. Collectively the projects sold over a whopping 11.4k editions! 🤯

Just a couple of days ago the final two generators closed out their minting periods:

Link to hal’s Tweet | Link to Pixel Symphony’s Tweet

Here’s a couple of noteworthy tidbits about the projects:

• Complex Assemblies is actually the first in a series of projects, titled THE PHASE EXPERIENCE, that Hal09999 ’s planning on releasing in the near future. So, better keep your eyes peeled! 👀
• Pixel Symphony’s project Idle/Interludes was accompanied by a physical showcase at the Gallerie Met in Berlin from the 27th to 30th August . Pixel Symphony also integrates a cool collection mechanic to reward those that acquired more than a few iterations of the project: 25+ mints lets you redeem a plot, whereas 100+ mints gets you a folded notebook that features 10 plots. You can redeem your mints for physical prints here.
• Kcdilla ’s project breather turns generative art into a therapeutic medium—the concept even catches Monk Antony’s attention and merits a mention in his article Can Art replace Religion?
• David Seven ’s The Space in Between not only marks his debut on fxhash but is also his very first long-form project—with a beautiful 1111 mints David makes a strong entrance into the long-form game.
• Reportedly, the squirrels in California’s Idyllwild woods are still recovering from the fever dream that was Leander Herzog and Millian Mori ’s DOM2 🐿️

Link to Tweet

But these are just some cherry-picked facts, if you’d like a more in depth piece about the projects, or maybe even conversations with the artists where they let us in on their creative process, let us know!

Here we’d like to extend a huge thanks to all of the participating artists, as well as the collectors that played a crucial role in bringing the individual projects to life. If you’re still missing a couple of pieces, and want to acquire a complete set of onchain summer tokens, now’s your chance - a complete list of projects can be found here.

2. Second Installment of the Responsive Dreams Generative Art Festival

With the beginning of September we also saw the second installment of the Responsive Dreams generative art festival. Organized by TGAM (The Generative Art Museum), a longstanding partner of fxhash, the event was hosted at the Roca Umbert Fàbrica, an exhibition space, arts hub, and an arts factory located in Granollers, a northern part of Barcelona:

Photo courtesy of Responsive Dreams

The 3-day exhibition kicked things off with a live+online minting event powered by fxhash, featuring pieces from 6 fxhash alumni that you might already be familiar with: Edu Prats, Quentin Hocdé, Shaderism, Eliza Struthers-Jobin, Office CA, and Poperbu. Over on the Responsive Dreams website you can learn more about them and their featured artworks:

Link to Responsive Dreams Site*** | ***Link to Tweet

Here you should also make sure to check out the articles tab over on TGAM’s fxhash profile, they’ve released a series of interviews with each of the participating artists in form of fx(texts)—making for an incredible resource if you’re interested in learning more about their creative processes. Maybe also collect one, or two of the fx(texts) to show your support while you’re at it!

3. Joshua Davis’ Giza Pyramid Complex

Another stand out project from the past week was Joshua Davis’ the Giza Pyramid Complex: a creative, colorful, and chaotic take on arguably one of the most popular techniques in generative art: Cellular Automata. Each mint of the long-form project is its own animated, ever-morphing pixel canvas that is continuously redrawn with different CA flavors at different scales:

Link to Project

If you’re not familiar with Joshua Davis, he’s one of the generative art OGs whose contributions have had a transformative influence on the creative coding scene over the years. Moreover, we observe how the Giza Pyramid Complex treads into the physical realm in two ways; for one, through a collaboration with the master quilter Libs Elliott, bringing to life a still frame of the animated piece via a gigantic quilt, and for another, through a large print that Joshua is sending out to all of those that have collected a complete set of tokens spanning all possible color variations:

Link to Tweet #1 | Link to Tweet #2

4. Humanbydefinition’s fxhash Debut: ASCIIMATA16

Last but not least, we also want to shine the spotlight on fxhash newcomers: with a passion for ASCII based artworks, and having previously released an open source GLSL ASCII renderer for P5JS, Humanbydefinition released their first long-form project on fxhash this past week, titled ASCIIMATA16. In a similar vein to Joshua Davis Giza Pyramid complex, it’s an animated cellular automaton, in which ASCII patterns endlessly morph and battle to overtake the grid that they’re contained in:

Andrew Gretchen’s Facetune Portraits + Berlin Art Week Exhibition (11-15 Sept.)

In collaboration with HOLON, fxhash had the honor to present Gretchen Andrew's piece Facetune Portraits: combining beautifying social media AI filters with plotterized oil paint, Gretchen brings to life abstract caricatures of the photographs fed through the algorithm. The resulting artworks highlight the emergent tension between our own, true image and what AI thinks we should look like.

For the Berlin Art Week exhibition, Gretchen’s creative robotics facility migrates from London to the German capital, transforming HOLON’s space into a blended physical/digital studio. The installation uses as subject portraits of Berlin-based influencers, facetuning them, and subsequently channeling the results into oil paintings via her plotters.

Photo Credits: Julia Lee Goodwin

After the exhibition, and leading up to the Paris Photo Art Fair in November, Gretchen Andrew is joining forces with creative coder and generative artist Luka Piskorec, aka {protocell:labs} (an accomplished fxhash alumnus), to bring the project to the Tezos blockchain in form of a generative art collection. Collectors will then be able to create their very own facetune-d portraits via fx(params). We’ll keep you in the loop about the upcoming release! ✨

ENTANGLED: THE EXHIBITION

Arguably the biggest project that fxhash has taken head on in 2024, in close collaboration with generative artist Bjørn Staal, is Entangled. The reception of the project when it launched earlier this year has been nothing short of stellar—and we’re super excited for the Exhibition throughout this week!

Objectively seen, Entangled is one of the more innovative blockchain projects of recent years. Its successful release marks a big milestone and demonstrates that cross-chain experiences are entirely possible—doubly important in the case of fxhash as a platform, considering its adoption of a multi-chain identity during the 2.0 launch. Both the conceptual and aesthetic dimension of Entangled reflect this notion of interconnected-ness.

While this is important from an artistic point of view, it also creates entirely new collector dynamics, as individual tokens don’t exist in a void by themselves anymore, but rather, are entangled with other editions of the project. Over on fxhash’s dedicated vertex page a graph visualizes the global state of the project, mapping each edition on the Tezos chain to its counterpart on the Base L2, and vice-versa:

Link to the Project Page

This leads us to the upcoming Entangled exhibition at the Wintercircus in Ghent. The Wintercircus is a fascinating building in the heart of the third largest city in Belgium (in terms of population). Devised as an arena for spectacle in the 1880s, the building complex has had a turbulent history and most recently undergone an impressive transformation. It now proudly stands as a big technology hub as well as a cultural venue that we feel very fortunate to partner with for this exhibition! You can learn more about the Wintercircus’ history here.

We really couldn’t imagine a better venue to present Bjørn’s outstanding generative artwork, especially as a way to celebrate this important chapter in fxhash history. As for the week long event, here’s a quick itinerary of what’s planned:

• Entangled collectors are invited to a special fine dining experience at the venue on the exhibition's opening day, followed by the private opening itself. This dinner experience is available to collectors who own 1 or more Entangled editions, and yes, the artist will also be at the table! You can register here: https://lu.ma/t12923pf
• If you own a perfect pair - there might also be a special gift waiting for you! ✨
• But even if you’re not a collector, you can still attend the opening, given that you RSVP beforehand - you can do so here: https://lu.ma/fn7a6p7a . If you love generative art, are near Ghent, or have the chance to travel there for the opening—we would love to see you there! The evening includes a number of artistic performances as well as talks with Bjørn.
• On the weekend, Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd, a number of workshops will take place as a part of an educational program in collaboration with Tezos. If you’re interested in learning more about generative art, how the Tezos blockchain works, and/or programming particles with Three.js, these workshops might be up your alley. You can find all of the events over on the Wintercircus event agenda .
• Finally, if you haven’t seen it already, make sure to check out the interview that Peter Bauman from the Le Random team has done with Bjørn earlier this year. Throughout their talk, they touch upon many of the important facets behind the project.

Link to Interview | And if you can’t make it, don’t fret, we’ll be covering everything through our social media channels!

The New fxhash Website

Besides Entangled, the other large project that’s kept us more than busy this year is the UI/UX overhaul—for simplicity’s sake we’ll refer to it as the new fxhash website from now on. It’s arguably been the most challenging project that the team’s tackled so far; considering that a lot of technical debt has accumulated ever since fxhash’s original launch back in November 2021. Much of that has already been cleaned up at this point, allowing the dev team to move forward with a cleaner codebase and develop new features more rapidly after the re-launch.

While we might’ve underestimated the scale and difficulty of this endeavour at first, we’ve slowly but steadily been making meaningful progress, and we’re excited to share more in the coming weeks. We’ll tackle some of the technicalities in upcoming installments of the newsletter! Here’s a quick sneak-peek of the new hero section, with a gorgeous artwork from the shader wizard Pablo Andrioli:

At this point, it’s important to stress that it’s not just a simple reskin of the platform in its current form, but rather a complete revamp of the entire experience. The aim of this is for you guys to slowly familiarise yourself with this new and improved iteration of fxhash, so that it isn’t too overwhelming when it eventually releases. That also means that we’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts on these teasers, just so that we’re on the same page.

Worth Keeping an Eye On

To cap off this first installment of the newsletter, here’s also some of the things our genart friends have been up to in the past weeks 👇

1. Le Random Genart Timeline + Joan Heemskerk on Quantum Web4

If you haven’t caught wind of it yet, our friends over at Le Random have recently completed their generative art timeline; we think that there really isn’t a better place to learn about generative art history. We’re also flattered to have numerous mentions throughout the final chapter of the timeline that summarizes the onchain era of generative art:

Link to Timeline

Besides that they’ve also picked up their weekly editorial cadence again, publishing a new piece. This time Monk interviews generative art legend Joan Heemskerk, one part of the renowned net.art duo JODI:

Link to Article

2. Upcoming Events and Shows

TwiX user CSA2D7 asked the art community what some of the upcoming exhibitions and events are that are worth keeping up with—they ended compiling this very useful list:

Link to Tweet

The two events that caught our eye were the Buffalo AKG at Electric OP that’s boasting an incredibly impressive roster of artists, in addition to the Women, Art & Computing exhibit taking place at MUDAM.

3. Eko3316’s Educative Threads on Generative Art

Accomplished generative artist Eko33 announced that he’ll be starting a series of threads that explores the history of robotics in generative art—check out his TwiX profile for these updates:

Link to Tweet - GM if you love computer generative art!

And that’s pretty much it from us this week. This round-letter was meant to be a brief update… but it ended up being just a bit longer than expected. We hope you enjoyed reading it as much as we enjoyed putting it together. If you have feedback for the structure and/or content of this newsletter - let us know how we can improve; you can keep up with us over on your favorite social media:

• Tag us on TwiX via @fx_hash_ or via #fxhash
• Follow us on Instagram and Threads via @fxhash
• Connect with us on Warpcast @fxhash and join our Farcaster channel

Did we miss something important? Is there an interesting project you think should be featured on here? Any particular topics you’d like us to cover? Come join the discord and let us know! **

The fxhash discord is where the community regularly gathers to discuss all sorts of generative art related topics.

Oh, and before we forget—if you‘d like to have a physical piece of fxhash in your office, studio, or living room, you can grab one here over on our generative art kiosk - there’s a still a few things up for grabs. Here’s a lovely pic generative artist & collector Maxwell White shared of his acquiries over in the discord:

Link to Tweet

Cheers, see you in the next one, your fxhash team ✨