The beginning

In late November, while relaxing in the La crème group chat, flexa and I, who both have a fondness for geometric works, decided to do a collab to express some difficult thoughts with our art. First, we decided to experiment with some interactive storytelling on objkt.com

Reaching out

The piece was about the fact that we keep striving for our goals and dreams, even if many of them are considered impossible. The work was to be an abstract, interactive piece with different endings, and just as we were going into it, when we had an accident. Flexasaurus created a final version of all the objects in the work, but for better or worse he had a PC crash where the layers were lost, making it almost impossible for me to make it interactive.

The Dawn is near

Flexa suggested redoing it, but I thought I could handle cutting layers and told him not to worry and that I'd work with it. Later, though, I took a closer look at this beautiful sun with all the grain and realized I had no chance of separating it as a layer. That's when I got the idea to recreate the sun with some code in p5.js. After some work the result looked pretty good, but the moment I put the loop() ON I was mesmerized. Immediately, I knew I wanted to keep working with p5.js on this. It was calling to me. Fortunately, Flexasaurus thought it was great too, even he has been thinking about expanding his explorations of geometric art into the generative realm.

KAZMIR

So we started working on the ideas we wanted to share. It was clear that we wanted to show geometric art based on the basic shapes of rectangle, square, disk and triangle, which is a pure manifestation of non-objective art. The main inspiration was the growing Flexasaurus ARCHFLEX objkt.com collection and in particular the KAZIMIRFLEX, CHROMEFLEX and GEOMETRICA series, which were created as a reverence to the work of avant-garde artist and art theorist Kazimir Severinovich Malevich. Suprematism was coined as one of the main influences on our work.

BRUTALISM

The next line of influence was Brutalism Architecture. Many of you don't know that my Web3 name @brutalisti aka Bruta aka is inspired not by being "brutal" but by the Brutalism movement in architecture and design. What can I say, Ive lived in those little grids of windows, whole life and I still live in one of them. Sometimes that can be depressing, but it can also be a humbling experience. As I grew up, I went from hating to finding beauty in the simple, ordered basic shapes. Later I even accepted brutalism design as a major influence in my professional work as a designer. The influence of Brutalism is also evident in my FXhash genesis "Brutangles" (https://www.fxhash.xyz/generative/1427) and also throughout my artistic work in my desire to convey my messages with raw imagery and minimal embellishments. Just pure Bruta truth.

MONDRIAN

The third line of influence is a non-objective artist, whose works I like to admire. One of them is Piet Mondrian, who is certainly an inspiration to every creative coder out there. His words in 1914 were "Art is higher than reality and has no direct relation to reality. To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual. We find ourselves in the presence of an abstract art. Art should be above reality, otherwise it would have no value for man." are so important about abstract art and also creative coding because it's abstract by nature. You can feel the "Mondrian" in every rectangular recursive division out there, just like it is in the iterations having the "recursive" composition feature in my work.

ROTHKO

Last but not least. The texture and colors are influenced, though not directly, by my love of Mark Rothko's work. They aren't meant to represent any of his work, but to convey dramatic feelings through texture and color, just like his works do. However, the texture and color are quite different as they followed my desire to be born out of the very digital in its nature "dashed line".

The dashed line

As you may have seen in the description, I associate dashed lines with a sequence of 0s and 1s, true and false, something and nothing. When I started working on the textures in the artwork, I used this simple code:

  for (let y = apoint.y-size/2; y < apoint.y+size/2; y += abs(dashSize + gapSize)+1) {
    for (let x = apoint.x-size/2; x < apoint.x+size/2; x += abs(dashSize + gapSize)+1) {
      
      
       if (drawingDash) 
        {    
        line(x, y, x + dashSize, y);
        }
      
       drawingDash = !drawingDash;
    }
  }

This code simply traverses the dimensions of a rectangle and checks whether a Boolean variable called "drawingDash" is true. If it's true, a small line is drawn. If it's false, nothing is drawn. Each time this operation is performed, "drawingDash" changes to the opposite and the result is a rectangle filled with dashes.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Every texture you find in "Non-objective Cliché " is based on this code. Of course, sometimes these little lines are circles. Sometimes their ends wiggle randomly. Sometimes they're ordered by a two-dimensional Perlin noise function, they can be thick or thin or of different colors, overlapping or vertical, they can be very long or just a dot, and all these little variations result in an infinite number of textures that arouse different associations, evoke different emotions ...

"Non-objective Cliché "

One of the things I find most exciting about this work is the way it invites interpretation. Although the shapes are abstract, they suggest something different to each viewer. Some may see a cityscape, others a landscape, others a microcosm of cells or molecules, space or a situation or emotion. The eye is drawn into the forms and follows the interplay of color, shape and texture.

At its core, this work is about the power of algorithmic art to create something beautiful and thought-provoking from simple building blocks. It's a testament to the endless possibilities of generative art, and I am excited to share it with the world.