fx(news): Wrapping up Paris Photo 2024, Marc Maurer x Galerie Data, A Hacker in the Pampas, Release Roundup
written by fx(hash) team
Hey fx fam! Welcome back to the 6th installment of the official fxhash Newsletter!
This introductory section probably sounds like a broken record at this point, but very unsurprisingly… it’s bet yet another two very busy weeks for us! And that’s not just for the sake of saying it, the first half of November has actually been quite eventful! TLDR:
- Paris Photo 2024 came to an end and we wrapped up the fxhash booth there that presented the physical artworks of CYMATIC —and we’ve also got an update for the long-form release that had to unfortunately be delayed for little bit.
- We’ve already got another collaboration lined up, yet again with the wonderful Galerie Data presenting Marc Maurer’s fxhash debut Glance !
- The Museo de Arte Popular in Buenos Aires kicks off their exhibition for Tomas Ditarantos work with a free live mint of Heliodoro Santos’ A Hacker in the Pampas .
- A whole slew of new projects dropped in what we can only describe as a mini mint party where a bunch of fxhash OGs make a return to the platform!
We discuss all of this and more in detail down below 👇
Wrapping up CYMATIC at Paris Photo 2024
Paris Photo 2024 is a wrap! Being part of the prestigious photography fair marks another milestone in fxhistory—and we're proud to have brought a touch of generative art to another event. With CYMATIC, Entangled, and the release of the new website in the coming weeks, we can say that's we've had a pretty successful year!
While the digital collection was bound to release this past Tuesday—a couple of pesky last minute bugs prevented that from happening (browser compatibility 😅). Things have been sorted in the meantime though, project’s been uploaded onchain, and is now bound to release on Tuesday the 19th at 5PM CET—same time basically, just a week later.
If you’ve missed our previous mini email, we’d like to share the trailer and the article we’ve put together for the project again—we think they’re really good explainers for the project’s background, how it came to be, what inspired it, and how Erika and Thomas made it all happen:
Marc Maurer’s Glance x Galerie Data
We’re stoked to announce that Marc Maurer will be making his generative debut on fxhash! In another wonderful collaboration with Galerie Data, the project is releasing both as a physical exhibition and a generative long-form collection, where the digital outputs can be redeemed in a plotted format. While you might’ve caught a couple of sneak-peeks over on Marc’s socials already, here’s a couple more variations that Marc provided us with directly:
Marc’s project is as conceptually rich as it is aesthetically captivating: with Glance he explores the tension between modern life and the natural world, reflecting on how digital oversaturation and consumerism have disconnected us from authentic experiences.
The modern comfortable world separates me from what is really important and close to me by nature. Why would I do that if there is a world full of purity and authenticity outside of it? I imagine myself among the greenery, where minimal comfort and survival allow me to feel like a part of nature again. But will I be able to break away from my usual lifestyle, digital oversaturation and the desire for quick satisfaction?
Through Glance I am trying to understand if we can learn to appreciate again the moments that awaken genuine emotions and make us think about our place in the world.
We believe it to be a feeling that resonates with all of us; it raises a fundamental question about the trade-offs of our contemporary lifestyles. Our ever-increasing digital existences have in many ways disconnected us from the raw, grounding experiences of the actual real world—maybe art is a way for us to rediscover genuine emotion.
I want to ask myself the question: is everything that we consider necessary really that important? Today, one thing helps me keep my balance, but tomorrow new news, sensations and trends drag me back into chaos. The world seems to be split into black, white and blood-red, where the shades are getting darker.
Marc Maurer is a Kazakhstani generative artist whose current work explores the intersection between digital and physical mediums. His journey started with experiments in pixel sorting and machine learning models like StyleGAN to produce vibrant, dynamic compositions. Influenced by traditional artists like Gerhard Richter, Marc's work embraces the ambiguity and energy of abstraction, where his current approach seeks a harmonious balance between chaos and order, often prioritizing experimentation to channel intuition into his art.
Glance is bound to release on fxhash on the 22nd of November (exact time TBD) in tandem with the physical exhibition at Galerie Data.
A Hacker in the Pampas
This past week fxhash also had the honour of powering a live mint for the Night of Museums at the Museo de Arte Popular in Buenos Aires—marking our first collaboration with a museum in South America! Heliodoro Santos’ A Hacker in the Pampas released as a free long-form project that could be collected directly at the venue, such that visitors could essentially take home a digital memory of the night with them:
A Hacker in the Pampas is a revival of Martín Fierro, a 2,316-line epic poem by José Hernández (1834-1886). The poem recounts the life of the eponymous protagonist, telling the story of a gaucho's struggle against social injustice, exile, and loss, reflecting the hardships and values of rural Argentina in the 19th century. “Gaucho” in this setting is a cultural term that describes a skilled horseman and rural worker from the South American pampas, often celebrated as a symbol of independence, ruggedness, and cultural pride.
Tomás Ditaranto is an artist who reimagines the figure of the gaucho through his illustrations, connecting the traditional gaucho identity with modern Argentine culture and landscapes—Heliodoro’s work is inspired by these illustrations and directly based on them: In each iteration, the algorithm randomly selects one out of the 100 images and a stanza from the poem; both inputs trigger a new image, built from color and text, resulting in an abstraction of visual poetry.
In this manner the project embodies a rich and beautiful mix of cultural, poetic, and artistic inspirations. After the opening night we also received a wholesome message from Gabriela Serkin, that we’d like to directly with you here, because we thought that it really captures what live minting is really about:
I'm glad to share that last Saturday, during the Night of the Museums, many people reached out to mint their first NFT. Most people didn’t know anything about crypto/NFTs and were hesitant to trust, so they didn’t want to scan the QR code. However, many others did, and it was a great satisfaction to see their happy faces after receiving the digital souvenir as a gift. Some people even took the opportunity to mint more than one piece.
Release Roundup
In terms of releases on fxhash—it’s been a wild two weeks! A bunch of OGs made an impromptu return to the platform in this first half of November:
- In celebration of Coronado’s 2 year anniversary, Jeres releases his newest project Sano , that captures a similar conceptual idea to its spiritual predecessor. More interestingly is the release mechanic that Jeres chose to use: leveraging fxiteration and fxhash’s preview feature, he makes it so that the variations button would show you the exact iterations that would in be mintable once the project goes live—this way collectors were able to explore the exact editions ahead of time. If you liked one, you then just had to coordinate your mint and make sure to snipe the one you wanted!
- Jeff Clark, another fxhash OG, brings us his newest skeuomorphic piece Expedition : a project that boasts a beautiful variety of different algorithmically drawn mountainscapes covered in generative greenery—Jeff with the attention to detail in each single one of the iterations.
- Qotonana’s Calypso ties directly into their ongoing series of works inspired by Homer’s Odyssey. Calypso is a prominent figure in the epic, detaining Odysseus on her Island for seven years on his return home, offering him immortality if he stays. Despite this, Odysseus longs for home however, which is meant to symbolically represent the enduring power of love, as well as Odysseu’s loyalty and acceptance of mortality.
- Fauxjebus’ In_formation is a conceptually interesting piece that tries to visually represent how thoughts and ideas are rapidly disseminated, distorted, reshaped, repeated and buried in the ever-advancing stream of information that we all are subjected to in our digital spheres. He achieves this visually by plastering the canvas with words, letters, and other typographic elements, then distorting, reshaping, and quite literally mangling parts of the canvas. The project also features a super fun interactive mode that let’s you control the stream of things that is drawn to the canvas.
Wrapping it up
Behind the scenes we’ve also dutifully continued to polish and hammer out all sorts of smaller bugs for the upcoming website—we really want to have things in a clean state before we drop the open beta! Our internal mantra this week has been the beautiful description of Jeff Clark’s Expedition:
Let us celebrate the explorers among us, those who venture beyond the familiar and embrace the unknown. Through their journeys, we glimpse the infinite potential that surrounds us all.
And that’s pretty much it from us this week. We hope you enjoyed reading this issue 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!
Did we miss something important? Is there an interesting project you think should be featured 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.
Cheers, see you in the next one ✨