Here I am. Once again, same human, but maybe not the same person.

On an initial note, I greatly appreciate the minters (and buyers) of my previous collection. It truly felt amazing seeing it minting out and people liking something I made. I hope my works keep getting better and better in the future.

Now on to the next one because the world keeps changing, and so must I (I believe). A couple of months have passed by, my new project (Disrupted) is a few hours away from being set free to the public and I thought it would be good practice to complement said project with a bit of insight. I'll try to keep this article less dense than the first one.

The End Result

Felicity was fully minted by the morning after it was open to the minters. I felt like I could finally relax a bit and so I thought about starting a new project which ended up not happening right away. I'm not a full-time artist so things went a bit slow for me with my learning and development of code. "No problem," I thought, "got plenty of time" - famous last words.

So something like a month or so came about and guess what, nothing. Procrastination had gotten the better of me. The only thing that got me even thinking about specifically creating were the wonderful mints I was seeing. Acequia was just too much to ignore. Loved it. The water beautifully falling wasn't even the best of it. Truly amazing art!

Works like this one (Modulation, for example) inspired me to start a new sketch on the basic approach of a cube. Complexity achieved through simplicity, the module, the same way the various elements of this reality compose the universe. A pleasing theory to be behind one's project, certainly.

I did a couple of sessions, but without achieving any true modulation I didn't find any sparks in these attempts, for now. Although this isn't directly related to the recent project, it still integrated part of its journey. Here you can see some outputs (not completely randomized):

Besides this one, I did some projects around some stuff that I won't disclose, but not all that exciting. After all, I was missing opportunities for doing something I liked, because I didn't trust myself, didn't trust that I could do anything worthy of being called art. The longer it passed, the harder it was for me to open the code editor. In hindsight, it almost feels stupid that it kept going for so many weeks. Things only changed on December 2, when I decided to propose myself a challenge with my friend as a witness. Involved in a sudden desire, not truly explicable, maybe motivated by a bit of disappointment, I announced "I shall not pass this night without a satisfying project" and so it started.

Time to fly

As if the last month didn't happen, I opened the boilerplate (which you should definitely check if you are interested in making art that fits this platform), set up all the stuff so I could make a dimensionless project from the very beginning (thank Hevey for me not making that same mistake again) and had a few twists here and there.

Well, I started with the classic Mondrian palette (whose colors are of immense pleasure for me to look at, may I add). Proceeded to make a grid system which incorporated squares, in a similar way to a chessboard. It felt strict, rigid, so I decided to add some random rotation and something I enjoyed started to appear. Not this quickly of course, but time flew past me so swiftly that I ended up with this after some hours:

The so-called "grid", wasn't so much of a grid now. Rotation was a key element. It made the orthogonal aspect of it go away. Nevertheless, it felt too simple. I strived for it to become less organized, something more organic, more natural. It's decisions like this that bring personality to a work. I started playing with some random changes, altering coordinates in the loops. And eventually, this showed up:

At this point, I knew I got something I liked, which I felt like it was the most important. The outputs were giving me the feeling of a strange prison which suddenly had been... disrupted. It was made with the same elements of incarceration, but now meaning freedom. This change is inevitable, and so is liberty. It can't be stoped. At the time of this output, many hours into the dawn, those were my feelings. Strange how disorganized shapes were conveying such meaningful messages. Artistic revelation can be so chaotic that sometimes one fails to comprehend he has achieved it already.

After this, however, many adjustments had to be made in order to adapt the project to fxhash. A bit of work, but nothing that I couldn't handle. Even added some (maybe too many) palettes of my taste to the project, something I had completely thrown out the window in Felicity. A friend helped me with most of them, to be honest, but I believe he chose wisely.

And So It Goes

Now it's up to you whether you like my work or not. Anything goes for me really, since I've broken out of this inertia. I feel satisfied with Disrupted since it helped me to overcome my own struggles. It's time to let it go and see it grow in the hands of strangers who might feel the same way I do (not so much of strangers after all).

Since I've written so much, I would gladly read some of your opinions on all of this. Feel free to contact me via Twitter. It feels amazing to be part of such a community.

Best regards,

Mark, 2022