Doomscrolling

When I was approached by the PROOF collective about potentially working on a project together, I knew I wanted to do something for Grails.

For those unaware, Grails is an exhibition event wherein 20 artists are selected to submit a work of art. Individuals can purchase a "mint pass," which acts as a ticket to purchase any one of the 20 artworks. The twist is that they are neither titled nor described, and artist names are not provided. Experimentation is encouraged. Presenting a new style of work to be examined closely by bystanders attempting to figure out who made it is quite a unique experience.

In my eyes, Grails is an explicit invitation to surprise people with something different. For me, that thing was a looping, hand-drawn 60fps animation titled Doomscrolling.

Background

I quit social media for a while in late 2020. Quarantined at home with my wife and young child prior to that, I recall spending a ton of time sitting around flipping through twitter, addicted to the seemingly endless deluge of bad news.

After a while, I started to notice that the habit was changing me. I was feeling impulsive, angry, pessimistic, and a little neurotic. I deleted twitter from my phone and stopped paying attention to it completely. My family and I packed up and moved to Vermont, where I went without internet for about a month before settling in. After that, I felt more present and started feeling better. I started a new job and got on with life. The social media break didn’t last forever, but I’m a lot more guarded about endlessly scrolling now.

All that said, that time of life (mine and many others) was dominated by this awful black hole of bad news. I wanted to make art about that.

The Process

When I started making art full time, I quickly realized that I wanted to incorporate my hands into my process more. After working as a software developer for a decade, the balance of computing vs. non-computing time shifted pretty dramatically when I quit my day job. I spend most of my time away from computers these days, and the process of creating Doomscrolling reflects that new balance.

A template for the animation was created using my personal framework for making generative art, built on top of the graphics library Cairo, interfaced with via a Haskell package. The smooth scrolling on an iPhone involves applying a constant friction to the force implied by a finger swiping upwards. I have involved physical simulations like this in a bunch of my prior work, and I thought I could mimic this behavior pretty closely using the tools I had on hand. The original idea had “DOOM” on each line of an imagined social media feed and I tried a few variations of that, making the words and letters ebb and flow in a perfect loop.

After some trial and error, I changed the animation from the original “doom on every line” to simpler imagery. From there, I fiddled around with how many “swipes” were emulated and tweaked their intensity so that the animation ends perfectly at the “M.” Once that was done, I rendered out the 300 frames individually and got to work.

Charcoal

All of the completed frames of Doomscrolling filed away.

I took an 8 week live figure drawing class this past Spring. I learned a few things about myself from that course. I missed drawing immensely, I love drawing the human figure, and I love using charcoal.

My original idea for this work was to paint each frame of Doomscrolling — an idea picked up from William Mapan, whose hand-painted processing sketches are killer. As I thought about it, though, I realized that painting 300 individual panels would take more time than I had. So I prototyped a few frames in various media and loved the aesthetic of charcoal. You can cover a lot of ground fast with charcoal. It’s cheap and produces a strong texture. It’s easy to use. So easy, in fact, that my 3 year old daughter was able to pitch in for a few frames (the V is her signature for those wondering).

Early experiment with blue conte crayon

A still from Doomscrolling

Doomscrolling frame 81, made by my daughter

I printed all 300 frames on regular printer paper, traced each one somewhat frantically in charcoal, and stored batches of 20 in a file array. I photographed each one later on my phone in natural light and compiled the images using ffmpeg. The numbers in the bottom right of each frame helped me keep the photographs straight. I tried omitting them and ended up with duplicate and missing frames, so most of the frames are numbered.

One reason I structured this project the way I did was to stop wasting time on my phone and replace it with something similarly mindless but productive and fulfilling. It worked — I spent about 15 hours drawing the 300 frames in the final product, and a few more hours photographing and in post-production. Filling those printer sheets with charcoal was a meditative time for me. You can watch me carry out this process in real time below.

Speculations

Once Doomscrolling went on view for the Grails IV exhibition, I couldn't help but lurk on Discord and wonder what people would think. A couple of days in, an initial survey hinted that a lot of people thought that the work was made by XCOPY. XCOPY’s digital work often consists of short loops with strong textures — boxes Doomscrolling does tick. However, they’re also usually figurative in some way and involve bright colors, which disagrees with the aesthetic of my animation. I was pretty surprised by the strong consensus.

That is, until I saw this.

DOOM by XCOPY, 2019

Although it might be hard to believe, I had never seen this artwork before I made Doomscrolling.

I’m familiar with XCOPY, but not this particular piece. On one hand, I’m a little embarrassed to admit that. On the other, I’m glad I didn’t run into the work earlier. It would have deterred the pursuit of my own project. To guess that Doomscrolling is either an homage to this work, or even a new work by XCOPY himself, seems reasonable enough to me. However, it is neither: that we depicted the same phenomenon in similar ways in our work 4 years apart is a complete anomaly. It is uncanny, though, and I’m here for the synchronicity.

The work was in some ways influenced by Jake Fried, whose black and white, sketchy animations have caught my eye, and it seems that influence was picked up by some. And while I love the idea that MF DOOM came back from the dead to create the work, that isn't true either. My personal favorite guess was William Kentridge, who makes these amazing charcoal animations. I wasn't aware of his work until now and I'm grateful for the introduction by means of the exhibition. I had a lot of fun making my own guesses as well, and learned a lot by watching other collectors make their own guesses.

I’d like to thank everyone involved in putting Grails IV together as well as the collectors who dove into my work in an effort to figure out who made it. It was a very special experience.

Death to doomscrolling, long live Doomscrolling.

The making of Inertia

My latest series, titled inertia, was written in Haskell, where I have built up a sizable library of generative algorithms over the years. Working in Haskell enables me to throw all of these techniques together to achieve a more natural feeling result. I'd like to detail the journey that brought me to inertia and talk about some of the techniques I’ve used in it here.

Rectangular subdivision

Rectangular subdivision is a very simple generative technique. The idea is to cut a rectangle vertically or horizontally to produce two rectangles, then rinse and repeat on the target rectangles a number of times. It's a flexible technique I've used in a ton of works, the first being Cluster Bubbles from 2017 (which combines the technique with circle packing):

Cluster Bubbles

In inertia, I'm using a version of rectangular subdivision that tends to keep the rectangles as square as possible by weighting the cut axis by the rectangle's opposite axis length:

subdivide :: Rect -> Generate [Rect]
subdivide r@Rect{..} = do
  ctor <- weighted [(Vertically, rectW), (Horizontally, rectH)]
  a <- getRandomR (1,3)
  pure $ subdivideRectWith (ctor a) r

This technique is easy to see in inertia, as it forms the basis for the composition of each image.

Untitled (from inertia)

Poisson disc sampling

One of the first things I noticed when I started working on generative art is that stippling (filling a space with dots) in the "obvious" way doesn't look natural whatsoever. That's because randomness is unintuitive. When we stipple by hand, there is a natural bias. Poisson disc sampling is one technique used to get closer to that natural feel. It works by creating donut-shaped discs around each generated point and generating new points only within those discs, making sure not to place any point too close to another. I used this technique to achieve a stippled feel in my works growth and wire from 2018:

Growth

Wire T

In inertia, this technique is used in a much subtler way: it's used to space the attractors and repulsors (discussed in the next section) an appropriate distance from one another to avoid too much turbulence within each pattern, which keeps each pattern from becoming a muddy mess.

Physics simulations

In my early searches for "natural" feeling generative work, I decided to explore actual physical simulations in my work. I thought, if this is (an approximation of) the way the world actually works, maybe it will elevate the humanity in my digital work. This is a treasure trove, in my opinion. Wire actually uses this technique by placing a repulsor (repelling orb) between the wires to push them around, but the technique is most obvious in my work Good Night from 2018, and its successor, Edifice, from 2021:

Good Night

Edifice #141

Inertia uses two types of orbs. Once a pattern is generated in each rectangle, attractors and repulsors are spawned in an evenly spaced pattern within the rectangle, then pushed in a random direction for a few iterations to create subtle wave-like variations within those patterns.

Colors sourced from paintings

Mastering color is hard. It's especially hard when you have every RGB color available to you to choose from. I've tried a lot of different techniques for generating and sourcing colors, and the one I've been happiest with is this: make a physical painting, take a photo of it, and sample that (manually) to develop palettes from.

This was first explored in my 2021 series Glim, where I applied these randomly generated palettes to a simple triangular subdivision algorithm:

Glim 777

With inertia, I searched for duotone palettes within one of my paintings that worked well together. Some of these duotone palettes are on display in my 2022 color study:

Color Study A

The colors in the color study tend to work well together because they all come from the same source (the painting).

Non-noise-based flow fields

"Flow fields" refer to a technique wherein a particle is let loose in a vector field, which then follows its current and traces out a path. It is a very popular technique within generative works, but most commonly, a noise algorithm is used to determine the backing vectors. I actually didn't even know how to use noise the first time I used this technique, so I wrote my own algorithm generating a vector field and walking through it, and it gave a unique flavor to the work. Discrete Flow from 2017 is my first incantation of this technique:

Discrete Flow

I used a newer version of it in some unpublished work recently as well:

Untitled (2022)

In inertia, this technique is used to displace the points in each pattern. There's a backing vector field that shifts each point just enough to make them imperfect, but not enough to completely disrupt the pattern.

Line drawing with convex hulls

The convex hull of a set of points is the shape you’d get if you wrap a rubber band around them. It always forms a convex polygon that contains all of the points in the set.

For this project, I was inspired by the aesthetics of linocut prints. With this type of print, linoleum is carved away from a sheet to create a sort of "stamp" which is covered in ink and pressed into a sheet of paper. One thing that tends to happen with these prints is that lines don't retain perfect straightness, or perfect width. They don't necessarily have a ton of texture associated (like a charcoal drawing or painting would), but the solid patterns themselves have a distinct character to them. In order to achieve this aesthetic, I used a new technique I developed, which uses convex hulls.

The idea is this. For each point in a path, generate a small number of dots in a disc around it. Then, pair up adjacent point sets and take the convex hull of all of their generated points together and fill it. Do this for every pair of adjacent point sets, and you have a jagged line.

Untitled (from inertia)

I have only used this technique in unpublished/unfinished work. Inertia marks its first usage in published work for me, and I’m quite happy with the result.

Releasing Inertia

Inertia will be available as a hand-selected generative edition of 75 NFTs on Foundation through their new Drops mechanic, on November 17th. Because this algorithm is written completely in Haskell (not Javascript) and uses a ton of sizable algorithms, the series is not a good fit for a fully on-chain, long-form project. Instead, I curated a large set from an initial sample of 10,000 images down to the 75 in the final series. This task itself took about a week - it’s atypical for me to go beyond a dozen or so outputs for a curated series.

View the collection here.

Moving Forward

Inertia would not be what it is without using all of these algorithms in subtle ways. I think it's important to lay out that even when things appear simple at first glance, there might be a lot going on under the hood with generative work. For generative artists, I hope this sheds some light on the intricacies that go into the craft, and inspires new directions. For appreciators and collectors of the medium, I hope this inspires you to ask questions about these kinds of intricacies. Generative art, to me, is most interesting because of its nuance. I hope this essay encourages you to dig deeper.

A draft for art: The 100 PRINT experiment

What is 100 PRINT?

My latest long-form generative art series is called 100 PRINT. It is an Art Blocks Playground project consisting of 100 algorithmically generated NFTs. I worked with Bright Moments to display the full set as framed prints in their New York gallery in May 2022.

With most Art Blocks projects, buyers mint a randomly generated NFT. Nobody, including the artist, knows what they're going to get when they hit the mint button. 100 PRINT took a different approach to the drop which puts more power in the hands of the buyers.

An overview of the work

I began working on 100 PRINT in November 2021. I was digging deep into M.C. Escher's sketches and generally thinking a lot about perspective trickery, which I had begun exploring with Edifice's "weird" dimensions trait.

100 PRINT uses the principles of constructing 3D scenes - like 3 point perspective, for example - to create nonfigurative imagery. On top of that, each one mixes at least two different perspectives, leading to emergent mixed-perspective spaces that make it hard to ground yourself in the work. It is a maximal mish-mash of patterns in a confusing world that viewers can lose themselves in.

Why a draft?

In order to avoid gas wars, Art Blocks projects typically take the approach of running Dutch auctions. In a Dutch auction, the price to mint gradually decreases to a final resting price over time, and participants can buy in when they are comfortable. If you really want a piece from a set, it may make sense to spend a premium to guarantee that you don't miss the mint. However, you may end up paying several times the auction's sellout price in order to do so. You may mint a so-called “grail” early - or you may not mind spending a relative premium on a project from an artist you love - but in the average case, there will be people who get burnt.

Thinking about this, I came up with a different approach. Instead of running a Dutch auction for randomly generated mints, what if I ran a Dutch auction for choices? In this model, higher bids get to choose from the full set of NFTs earlier, and thus have more control over what they end up getting from the set. There's still an element of mystery associated with buying in (which is part of what makes collecting on Art Blocks fun), but the buyer is given some power over what piece they end up with. This just felt fair to me from a collector's standpoint, so I wanted to give it a try.

Why print and hang them all?

Many early Art Blocks collections hovered around 1000 mints. In contrast, my largest series to date before Edifice was 8 works. I am still discovering and re-discovering my own artwork from Edifice 6+ months after its release - it’s just a ton of art, and it’s hard to grasp that scale.

In the first week after accepting Edifice print orders, I received 13 orders. That may not sound like much, but preparing them kept me busy for a few days. It's a surprising amount of art. One key goal behind 100 PRINT was to emphasize the sheer size of these projects. 100 PRINT is a collection of 100, a full order of magnitude smaller than Edifice. And yet, the prints cover a massive gallery wall stacked 3 high. The result is a huge space where the viewer is completely immersed in art. It’s hard to look away.

When I started making generative art in 2017, I focused on prints. 1/1 prints from lots of my early work are floating around. Since then, I have learned a lot about what makes art print well and what sorts of things to avoid to retain print quality. Prints are also much more dense than screens, making small details come alive, and can be comfortably viewed for long periods of time without eye strain. They are a fantastic medium for generative art, and I wanted to present this to my audience.

Zoom out from 100 PRINT #29 👀 pic.twitter.com/AsYyEjlNP8

— Ben Kovach (@bendotk) May 17, 2022

Set engagement

Say you're making pick on draft day. Which one do you choose?

Many participants took this way more seriously than I ever would have guessed. The level of analysis of the 100 PRINT set, especially from people with early picks, was just off the charts. I think there are at least a dozen people who understand the full set even better than I do.

Between rarity rankings, aesthetic choice, inter- and intra-set pairings, talking with me, talking with other collectors, and myriad other statistics, there was just so much to consider with each pick. This led to an extremely vibrant atmosphere around the work. One buyer recalls spending hours analyzing every aspect of their top 20 picks only to make an unranked, emotional choice when the time came. I couldn’t be happier to have facilitated that kind of experience.

Personal attachment

When I released Edifice, it felt a little weird, almost like the work didn't originate from me. Rather, it felt like they were created out of thin air and appeared in collectors' wallets without me being in the mix. Over time, I got a handle on the set and formed an attachment to it, but I missed the experience of living with an object before eventually sending it off to its buyer.

100 PRINT gave me that experience back. I felt a sense of calm spending 10 days with the mints before they went to their owners, and 3 days in a space with the prints. I feel comfortable sending them to their ultimate homes, and that brings me peace.

Derivatives

The original, framed prints from the 100 PRINT collection are labeled as first editions. When an NFT from the 100 PRINT collection trades hands, the next edition of its print will be available for purchase by the owner. Please contact me for inquiries.

All in all, 100 PRINT was a successful experiment and an absolute blast. A massive thank you to everyone who supported the project.

100 PRINT on OpenSea, Archipelago

Concept

What is Concept?

Concept is a 10,000 by 10,000 grid of transparent pixels, sold as an NFT as the genesis mint in my "Single Editions" collection on Foundation. It was listed for 0.1 ETH and, after a 24 hour auction, ultimately purchased for 1 ETH (roughly $2,500 USD at the time) on March 5th, 2022 by proper.

Concept (2022)

Concept as a reflection of value

At its inception, I thought, if a collector wants to treat my work as a financial instrument, does it even matter what it looks like? Simply owning any of my work might be what some collectors value, so who cares if it's an empty image? In this sense, Concept is a commentary on the rich history of authenticity in the art world - autographs, certificates, and now NFTs - wherein the token can sometimes mean more to the owner than the art it authenticates.

Taken alone, I felt this was a pretty self-absorbed interpretation, so I decided not to publish it. I couldn't shake the idea for several weeks, though, during which time the work took on several new meanings to me. At a certain point, I couldn't resist any longer and decided to put it into the world.

Concept as an invitation to discover

Concept is transparent. Not pure white, black, or anything else. Transparent. If you hang it in a gallery or display it on a web page, it will literally be there, but you might have to search around to find it.

This presents an interesting opportunity for digital gallery curators. If Concept is hung somewhere in your gallery, and your patrons know this, it turns the space into a treasure hunt. It is an invitation to look closely at the blank walls in the space and try to determine which portion of those walls is Concept.

The paradox of a printed Concept

Generally, my work is formatted for print. A reasonable question, then, is what a printed Concept would be, if such a thing could even exist.

Say you send the file to a printer, and they print it out at 30x30" at 300 dpi (which Concept is sized well for). You frame it and hang it on your wall. What is the artwork? Is it the blank paper? Is it the nonexistent ink printed on that paper? Is it the space between the viewer and the paper? Does the paper running through the printer somehow mark it as an edition of Concept? Can Concept be shown in a physical space without any paper at all? In other words, is a placard placed on an empty wall enough? I don’t have the answers, but I do have a lot of questions.

Concept as a reflection of the viewer

Concept changes dramatically depending on the way it is viewed, and the owner doesn't really have much control over it. For example, it will show up differently in a browser depending on the viewer's Dark Mode setting. Many image viewers will display it as a grey checkerboard. It adapts to the world around it like a chameleon. In many cases, it is blending into a world created by the viewer themselves, and it becomes a reflection of the viewer's environment.

Concept as a symbol of communication

I've been working hard for several months on a few projects, personal and art related, and I’m tired. I realized a few weeks after coming up with this idea that it partially grew out of a strong desire to create and connect with my audience after a frustrating dry spell in my creative work. I want to share consistent experiences with the viewers of my art; this is what drives me. Concept is the absolutely minimal way to facilitate such a connection. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the discussion over the piece play out, and look forward to having further discussions about it.

Concept as insight into creating

We tend to think of a brand new visual art project as a blank canvas or piece of paper. For my work, Concept is a bit closer to that blank state. It is a step further from a canvas or piece of paper, having nothing backing it. Concept is a conveyance of the very beginning of a new generative project feels like to me - a completely blank slate without even a background color chosen. If presented with a fully transparent images, how would you fill it? Concept invites you to contemplate this question.

Additionally, Concept was generated with code, much like most of my work is. Here it is:

import Sketch.Import

main :: IO ()
main = mainIOWith
  (\opts -> opts { optWidth = Pixels 10000, optHeight = Pixels 10000 })
  (pure ())

But that's not the whole story: what's Sketch.Import? What's this code doing? Quite a lot, despite the fact that the image it produces is blank.

Concept was created using a closed-source, personal generative art framework that I've been building up since 2017. It may be a blank image, but it was a blank image created with a drawing tool I have been building for 5 years. It is evidence of a machine capable of producing all sorts of images, a “hello world” from a mechanism with vast creative potential.

No Utility.

Concept explicitly has no utility. It unlocks nothing. Ultimately, it is an experiment in doing something absurd for the sake of generating questions about the nature of art. It holds a place in my heart for all of the thoughts it surfaced. I never thought that the idea of a blank image could stake such a hold in my brain, but here we are. Many thanks to all who asked questions about the work, got confused by it, spread the word, and participated in the auction.

View Concept on Foundation.