The Generative Art Museum (TGAM): Hello Edu! Thank you very much for joining us today. How are you?

Edu Prats (EP): Hello! I am good, thanks :)

TGAM: Let’s make some proper introductions? Who is Edu?

EP: Okay, I am originally from Barcelona. I studied media engineering in the late 90s and started working on “Multimedia” projects during the internet boom in Europe. After attending the first OFFF edition in 2001, I realised that it was probably a good idea to leave Barcelona and have some work experience abroad. I moved to Berlin in 2002 where I spent 7 years collaborating with different studios but mostly with Fork Unstable Media in between Berlin and Hamburg. During these years I worked quite a lot in Macromedia (later Adobe) Flash projects combining some experimental and commercial work. I learned a lot from both types of projects. Later in 2009, I decided to move to London where I spent another 6 years. In London I crossed paths with an incredible array of talented designers, artists & coders. I worked with some of the most influential studios and individuals in incredible projects, and was part of an amazing network of people. It was only a few weeks after moving to London when I attended an OpenFrameworks workshop led by Zach Lieberman and Andreas Müller. I made a few key friends there including Filp Visnjic (CreativeApplications.Net) with whom I started Resonate Festival along with other friends a few years later.

TGAM: Can you tell us about your journey into generative art?

EP: My baby steps started in Berlin around 2002-2003 specially with some experimental projects we did in Fork Unstable Media. Creative Director, David Linderman, was my mentor there and someone who influenced me a lot back then. It was in those projects, where I started drawing with code, mostly in Flash, but also with OpenFrameworks and Processing.

TGAM: We know you have been reluctant to NFT’s and the hype around them, what was your feeling when the whole thing exploded in 2021?

EP: Yeah, you know, I was a little shocked with the whole energy consumption with Ethereum and its implications with the environment, and I was also a little reluctant about the new medium, distribution, ownership, etc.

TGAM: What made you change your mind about them?

EP: Later with Tezos and platforms like fx(hash) things changed, obviously, and I have a lot of friends and colleagues who are experimenting and distributing over there. Although I never felt the need to give it a try and be part of it myself until you approached me.

TGAM: You were part of Resonate, the extinct festival that was the first to highlight and pursue the promotion of creative coding. Anyone that knew or went to Resonate says it was one of the best experiences, if not the best, around community, technology and creativity. How did that happen?

EP: Connecting the dots as usual. I was married to a Serbian woman who had a friend in Belgrade who wanted to create some sort of new media festival there. As I was mentioning earlier in my other response, I had met Filip Visnjic in a OF workshop in London. Filip moved to the UK when he was about 16, but he is originally from Serbia. Filip was running (still is) an incredibly influential blog back then called CreativeApplications.Net. He was writing about technology and art on a daily basis and he was very well connected to the educational world, following closely diverse research projects by some of the best schools in Europe such as ÉCAL or RCA among many others and was leading a computational architecture group at Westminster’s University. “2 + 2 is 4”, as we say in Catalan… Filip was the perfect curator for the festival. We all met in Belgrade, and so the festival started.

TGAM: At Responsive Dreams we see Resonate as something that should be replicated. Do you think there’s enough interest for an event like Resonate to strive?

EP: Resonate happened in the perfect timing in a very special place. It wouldn’t have been the same if it would have been in London, Berlin or Barcelona. Belgrade was a lot thirstier for things to happen and it was somehow a way more romantic and interesting place to discover for all the international audience.

Likewise, 12 years ago, we didn’t have as much noise and junk in the social networks ecosystem. The creative dev community was a lot smaller and there was a true sense of community. Everyone wanted to meet there. It was iconic and I feel very much nostalgic about it.

I am sure there is interest. I get asked often why don’t we organise the next Resonate?… But I am not sure we’ll ever find such a perfect context once again. Such an obvious opportunity to connect the dots once more…

TGAM: You have worked with incredible projects and big names, what is the best of working in such projects?

EP: The best is surely crossing paths with a large array of very talented and diverse people. People are usually very humble and nice, no matter how successful they are. I have learned many things from such people and had a lot of fun while working on really exciting projects.

TGAM: And the worse?

EP: There is surely challenging pressure sometimes but this doesn’t have to be a bad thing and pushes you to learn. I generally have super good memories of all these projects. I guess the worse it is really when you aren’t as lucky with the people you cross paths with. I was generally lucky with this.

TGAM: “Wires” is the project you’re presenting at Responsive Dreams 2024, a piece that blends modulated geometry generators and noise functions with path steering behaviors. Can you explain a bit more about the project?

EP: Part of my work in the studio is about encapsulating certain functionalities and utilities into a set of libraries and packages. I create little code sketches to demonstrate such functionalities. This is part of my personal R&D contribution and then we re-use those utilities in several projects while we keep improving and re-thinking them along the way. When I did the WebGL hero of Dcentraland’s launching page, I created a little utility that made grass grow on top of a given geometry. There were different parameters to control the grass: width, density, weight, length, normal angle threshold (discarding grass growing on floor facing geometry faces), etc. Later I improved this algorithm for a beautiful permanent installation project we did with Domestic Data Streamers at Sant Joan de Déu child’s hospital. I adapted part of this code also for a web project we did with Unseen Studio (blueyard.com). In this case I made geometry grow along a given path combined with particles following the same path that was used to create such geometry.

These particle behaviors were written also on top of a little physics library we also have.

In Wires I am using some of these components combined with curl noise shaping functions and I am also using part of the VFX pipeline I have also built.

Oh, this is all on top of ThreeJS by the way! (threejs.org) which we use for most of our web and installation works.

TGAM: Now that you’re part of it. What would you like to see in the NFT ecosystem in the future?

EP: I want to see how it goes, but it is quite likely that I will keep publishing some personal experiments and work there. Perhaps it can also be a nice way to share code, process, talk about our libraries and at the same time partially fund such work.

Edu Prats is part of TGAM's Responsive Dreams Festival 2024, the first generative art exhibition in Barcelona dedicated entirely to showcasing art created by code.

"Wires" will be released September 5th June at fx(hash). Holders of TGAM's brochures are elegible to mint preferentially.

The Generative Art Museum (TGAM) is a non-profit organization based in Barcelona dedicated to explore, promote, and advance the understanding and appreciation of generative art as a unique form of artistic expression.