When I first began work on this piece, I started with the elementary shapes of field lines, curves like those drawn and studied by the scientists since the time of Isaac Newton and Copernicus. Nature can be green, nature can be blue, and nature can be vast. Humans can interact with nature, becoming co-creating architects of the universe, at least in the immediate squares of our existence. Some iterations depict an explosion of activity, an expansion that imitates the yet to be understood infinite expansion of the universe itself.

To complete the piece I envisioned that the spheres could be looking in from the outside, or become harmonious points in the chaos of the background artwork.

To solve the optimization my first thought was to have the spheres wander the space along gradients for a number of steps until they reached what appeared to be a local minimum or maximum.

Here was my original thinking, written down on the to-do list comments, on how to place the spheres in the field lines. The idea was optimization in huge mathematical spaces, like a small AI weights training engine.

It was a fun little diversion, but in the end what I ended up using was just regular pen and paper, solving for minima the way we are all taught, by hand.

Canal Street And User Control

While testing outputs I came upon an iteration that reminded me of Canal Street in Manhattan. If you've never been to New York's Little Italy, or Chinatown, check it out sometime and maybe you'll be reminded of these patterns too. Here are three versions that are born from the same basic feature settings.

Image Generation from initial conditions of your NFT. Not wanting to say goodbye to Canal Street and Broadway, a short walk to the rest of New York, I decided to open up the NFT for the user to produce as many iterations as they like based on the uniqueness of their piece. Each piece of Human and Nature will be able to produce an infinite number of images based on the same unique setting, and hash of their cover piece. All the images will be created deterministically by keyboard input + PRN, so you can write down your sequence of keystrokes in the interactive part of this piece, say [1] (create image in 1500x1500 pixel) [1] (create another unique image) [3] (creating a third image in 3000x3000 pixel) will generate 3 different images in a similar style, which someone else can reproduce following the same key strokes. That way if you liked Canal Street, maybe visit a different part of it, send it to a friend.