Math Art (1980-1995)

Traces

Kim Asendorf

Traces is a collaborative project of conceptual artist Kim Asendorf and his wife Jana, who has been exploring the relationship between man and nature for many years. A living image of nature and the traces mankind leaves behind. A rock, formed hundreds of millions of years ago; a plant evolving over millions of years. Both are symbols of nature untouched. Color symbolizes thousands of years of human impact on nature. Animation creates another level of traces to get lost within, an indefinite change of state, we can just stand by and watch. Photography is used explicitly as an act of digitization and as an extension of nature into the digital world. After Doppelgänger, artist and Quantum Art founder Justin Aversano’s groundbreaking NFT project, Traces is Kim's second foray into real time photography manipulation. The audience will enjoy a new aesthetic, one visually optimized to mesmerize. More importantly, Asendorf hopes this work will make the audience think about the traces they leave behind in the nature. To view the full resolution artwork, just go to the following link and replace {TOKEN_ID} with the number of your piece. `https://quantum.mypinata.cloud/ipfs/QmXEsmZAjEH9pa7ifDoViLSmqcKttiax716iXShyknGGCx/?token={TOKEN_ID}`

Super User

Kenny Vaden

Super User is a series of generative artworks that include abstract pyroscapes, shadowy tunnels, shimmering surfaces, and golden moiré patterns with characteristically dark themes for Vaden. These images represent a world full of beauty and horror, created with statistical tools commonly used for scientific research. Carefully developed algorithms were used to create unique artwork each time that they were run, with output curated by the artist.

Khuwab ki Tabeer

Maliha Abidi

Khuwab ki Tabeer ‘Interpretation of a dream’ is Maliha Abidi’s latest series. This collection of 4 NFTs follows a story of a South-Asian girl and all the things she dreams about because to her, there is no limit, restrictions or barriers that stand in her way of achieving any of it. Each of the unique art pieces celebrate Maliha’s heritage as a Pakistani-American artist through use of distinct elements native to Pakistan’s culture. The series reminds us of our younger self and takes us back to the times when we used to wonder during the nights about our dreams, what we want to be and how it’ll escape the challenges we faced as our young selves. A fifth part (not for sale) to this series is a piece which follows on from the story where the protagonist reflects and comes face to face with her inner fearlessness.

GAMUT_93

Simon Lazarus

GAMUT-93 is a series of pixel-based video paintings informed by the Op art movement, primitive computer graphics, and contemporary graffiti. Gravitating between symbolism and abstraction, the artwork whispers in micro-narratives through the use of silent haiku charades, hypnotic visual ambience, and vivid graphic techno.

Sift

Loren Bednar

A code-generated kinetic work, Sift creates an illusion of a shifting pattern. Each pixel is treated like a small entity of color, movement and feeling, softly blending into another one. Gradations ,lines. and radiating waves are not drawn, but emerge by virtue of a “color by number by time” method; each pixel is assigned a color modulus which oscillates at the same rate at a repeatable mathematical pattern. Color switching at a pixel level creates all the motion in Sift. A high-energy sine wave causes the gritty texture of the fragments. Meticulously hand-tuned by the artist, the coloring math has been adjusted for each piece to produce the desired contrast and depth. Subdivisions of brightness and saturation were chosen for a softer feel, inviting the viewer to sift through and notice small emergent elements.

SLABS

Nicolas Sassoon

How does one convey a sense of space and materiality through digital abstraction? For fifteen years, Nicolas Sassoon pursued this question through his artistic practice, using the visual language of early computer graphics. Each animation from SLABS is created using a moiré pattern technique and are rendered with streaks of hard-edged pixels and limited color palettes. The pixelated textures and colors are composed to divide the screen in horizontal and vertical arrangements, like slices of digital matter stacked against each other. The resulting animations appear as high-contrast, kinetic works that evoke natural features, geological formations, imaginary structures, or abstract compositions. At large, these compositions relate to many histories of abstraction in painting, op art, moving image, and computer graphics: from the optical paintings of Bridget Riley to the moiré sculptures of Jesús Rafael-Soto, from the experimental video works of the Vasulka’s to the pixelated maps of The Legend of Zelda. SLABS can be viewed both horizontally and vertically. SLABS can be displayed as “wallpapers” in both metaverse architectures and physical spaces.

SANCTUARY

Skye Nicolas

SANCTUARY is a collection of pixel paintings that investigate the proliferation and permeation of digitized memory in the post internet age. Its conceptually layered armature and visually poetic distillation process encourage us to experience the full bandwidth of a visceral nostalgia in locating the pulse of a lost paradise we refer to as “our youth”. Remixed source material are reduced to shimmering pixelated outlines dancing across a contrasting dark digital canvas co-inhabited by scrolling text (appropriated from 80’s and 90’s era song lyrics), functioning as internal dialogue and instinctive meta prose. These motifs operate on the subconscious level wherein the visible and symbolic merge to produce evocative allusions referred to as vignettes, which are divided into three categorical types: Moments, Objects, and Mementos. Combining these vignettes into diptychs and triptychs engenders the transmission of personal narratives and private myths. Such permutations symbolize the piecing together of fragmented memories, as if downloading one’s own recollective echo to ultimately reveal an intrinsic cerebral blueprint—inviting us to reflect and reconcile with the forces and events that have shaped our present selves.

Spannungsbogen - Stills

Linda Dounia

Reflecting on issues of discrimination in face recognition technology and the lack of representation of non western artworks in GAN generated art, Linda Dounia delivers the first large scale AI drop by an African woman. Working off her own works with acrylic painting, Dounia, who has originally caught the attention of the crypto art world as an illustrator, makes a bold move into generative art. Spannungsbogen is a series of AI generated animations which are outputs of a GAN trained with 2,000 abstract acrylic vignettes hand painted by the artist. These outputs are then arranged following an indexing system that considers form, colour, and texture. This work is inspired by the Fremen of Frank Herbert’s Dune, and the relationship of this group of people with the mighty sandworms. In Herbert’s words, spannungsbogen is ‘the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing’. It’s an ode to the invisible creatures in the cracks and crevasses of the world, patiently lying in wait for their turn to freely exist. Spannungsbogen is a conversation between artist and machine, a dialectical search for meaning between a thinking mind and a feeling one, and an ode to the quietly brewing resistances within us and throughout the universe.

LIMINAL SPACE

Arclight

In Arclight’s newest body of work, LIMINAL SPACE, manipulated self-portraits and photographs of his brother take center stage in a series of digital paintings depicting the two young men involved in mundane activities: sipping coffee while listening to a good track, hanging out by a pool, calling a friend… The surreal treatment of these banal scenes inject a palpable feeling of nostalgia. Arrows and smileys symbolize a rollercoaster of emotions and disillusionment, while flowers convey his desire to bloom. Tigers embody his sense of being out of place, since the animals are not native to the African continent. Arclight made those 20 unique pieces in an agitated period where time seems suspended until the upcoming elections: the artworks from LIMINAL SPACE invite the viewers to reminisce about brighter days.