Artist Statement

Motivation

FOCUS is a 1000-image long meditation, and it is the second release in my Zenerative (Zen-inspired generative art) series. It’s meant to be played with through its interactivity, and I hope it challenges attentive viewers through its various portrayals of space and its creation of perceptual phenomena. Additionally, it can be a meditation in itself for anyone that has the focus and attempts to recreate an output manually. It relies on small sets of consistent shapes, colors, and ratios, helping the outputs to remain cohesive. However, with many millions of major trait combinations, the outputs are also varied and surprising.

Perception and Illusion

It’s important to understand that our perception of the world doesn’t perfectly reflect the world⁠—and I’m not saying this with abstract Buddhist meaning; this is science. It takes time for sense signals to reach our brains, and it takes more time for our mind to comprehend the signals. Because of this delay, our consciousness uses visual sense information to predict the world, rather than merely portray it accurately at the time the light signal reached our eyes.

Our visual acuity isn’t constant either; when our eyes focus on a point, a much more sensitive area of the retina is trained on that point (it’s called the fovea). Everything in the periphery is less acute, and in those areas, phenomena can develop as our minds make judgements about what’s being sensed.

Perhaps the most subjective element in all of art is color. Everyone experiences color in slightly different ways. Roughly 4% of the population has some type of color blindness, and theoretically, some people with tetrachromacy actually see more colors than people with ‘normal’ vision. But what is most significant is that even in the general population with ‘normal’ vision, color perception is individually subjective.

Consider “The Dress.” Viewers might make a judgement on the color of the dress based on their assumption of the lighting in the photograph. Some researchers now suggest that people can make such an assumption based on the kind of lighting they’re most used to seeing: daylight for people who are awake most during the day and are exposed to a lot of sunlight, tungsten light for those people who tend to stay up later at night and experience less sunlight.

So everyone might see colors a little bit differently, but what about a single person’s perception of color? Shouldn’t that be consistent? It’s not either. Our acuity isn’t perfect, and thin strips of color against dark or light can take on different hues. Also, highly contrasting colors beside one another can create perception phenomena based on how our consciousness ‘reads’ the whole of the image. Even something as simple as swapping two colors between foreground and background can cause our minds to interpret the colors differently.

Illusions of receding depth can be created in a flat image through vanishing point perspective, while shapes or patterns ‘drawn over’ others can create the illusion of raised height. Size diminishing or remaining constant also plays with our mind’s perception of space.

Through the use of various techniques that may be represented in the outputs, FOCUS aims to create and allow the exploration of many of these phenomena. And finally, to incorporate abstract Buddhist meaning, the exploration this project undertakes has a parallel to our ability/inability to perceive the true nature of reality⁠—which is both literally and figurative not what we see.

Emergent Minimalism

A quick study in generative art will reveal a few common threads to the genre: randomness, repetition, and recursion. In FOCUS, all these things are utilized, but with the randomness of the hash overruling the others. Although there are many features that work together to create the final image, I’ve allowed for the chance that blank features will present themselves, thereby increasing that output’s minimalism.

Two features in particular can contribute the most to the complexity and minimalism of an output: Pattern and Pattern Border. Each of these features has the possibility of ‘None.’ Also, the midpoints and pattern recursion factor can each be ‘1.’ That would result in a more minimal image as well, but with the interactivity of the project, these traits are easily changed.

If the deterministic hash results in one of a token’s Pattern or Pattern Border traits to be ‘None,’ however, interactivity will have a less substantial change. If they’re both set to ‘None,’ then the resulting image will not react to increasing or decreasing either the midpoint count or pattern recursion factor.

Nonetheless, some very minimal images will be minted from this project–possibly the most minimal that the Art Blocks platform has yet seen. I love seeing outputs that are only a few concentric shapes, and I hope that viewers will appreciate them as well. As a benefit, the majority of minimal images will have the most dramatic response to user interactivity. Going from a pattern recursion factor of 1 to 4 will result in a hugely more significant change than would a change from 31 to 34. Similarly, changes in midpoint count are much more dramatic at low numbers.

Minimalist art focuses on the essence of the subject and reduces extraneous details. I believe that the essence of FOCUS is the central shape, which will always be present in one form or another unless hidden by user interaction. It follows then that I believe the most minimal images from this series will be the most pure in execution. I can only hope that those most minimal results end in the hands of those who appreciate this randomly emergent minimalism.

Zen Aesthetic

The name of the project and its concept is ‘FOCUS’. One particular meaning of focus is the practice of maintaining a singular effort, where other things may pop up and distract but ultimately are set aside to continue pursuing the object of focus. This can be very similar to meditation, zazen in particular, where an unruly mind may populate thoughts and the practitioner must set them aside and refocus their attention. I believe that the project in itself is quite Zen for that reason, and in addition, I’ve identified a few aspects that follow common Zen art aesthetics and Zen philosophy.

The outputs are entirely and directly determined by the token’s hash value, and no computer-generated pseudo-random numbers are utilized. There’s a simplicity in that, and a truth. Outputs may be incredibly intricate or extremely minimal. The code only alters minor details in scenarios where a potentially concerning symbol may appear. Other than that, the hash creates the image in a straightforward way. By avoiding the use of additional randomness, the images can be accurately recreated manually. Even the most complex outputs can be reproduced by hand with a print-out of the algorithm, rulers, a calculator, and art supplies. The color names of the palette are meant to reflect this notion; they’re all real things, like pens and markers. I feel that undertaking a recreation would be a wonderful Zen experience (once you get past the challenge of reading code); one step after another, breath after breath. Like a spiritual practice, building as you go, little by little.

It has the Zen aesthetic of striving to create more with less. I wrote a short essay about this (and also on the next topic in this list), so I won’t go into discussion about the aesthetic here. I will highlight one example though: the project has a very limited, specifically chosen color palette. The use of the colors is sometimes sparse – many tokens will end up being only black and white; or black, white, and gold. Even on those tokens, and certainly in many others, interesting perceptual phenomena are created through color and shade interaction. Some phenomena can be appreciated across tokens as well: the green in one may look different than the green in another⁠—even though it’s the exact same shade of green in all tokens that have green. This restriction of color thereby opens new possibilities of personal experience with the project.

The outputs explore artificial space. Again, not to go into too much detail that I cover elsewhere, the images that this algorithm creates include their own unique world⁠—one both separate and different from the one we experience with our senses. Foreground and background, complexity and minimalism, transparency and solidity, and implied depth are expressed in the outputs through various trait combinations. Through interactivity, this artificial space can be explored within almost all tokens by changing the pattern recursion factor or midpoint count. The ‘default’ image of a token is not the true nature of the token; it’s only the surface of its identity.

Finally, FOCUS outputs are cohesive as a group, even though that group can conservatively have many millions of unique major trait combinations. To me, that dichotomy of cohesiveness and variety is very Zen. It’s like people⁠—billions of separate individuals but cohesive in so many ways. Outputs can certainly appear very different at first glance, with different aspect ratios, central shapes, and main color features. But there’s more that holds these together than the millions of trait combinations that separate them. For example, The sizing of elements in each token are consistent through all tokens: the ratios of line thickness, the treatment of vertices, the perceptual color ranges experienced, and consistency in structure.

Technical Info. & Examples

The Algorithm

FOCUS was written in JavaScript, utilizing the P5js library (which is an implementation of the Processing language). It was designed to work with the Art Blocks platform, taking two pieces of information that are provided by the platform: the token ID number that corresponds to the order in which the NFT was ‘minted’, and a unique transaction hash that Art Blocks generates during the minting process. With those pieces of information fed in, the algorithm takes over.

Assigning Main Features

Each unique hash looks something like this: 0x45f551cec331bbeab4fb641525e992cf5ba01be54d7d4e92ff8cc12893100318 (this is Ropsten token 0’s hash). It’s a hexadecimal number, and FOCUS pairs up digits and stores them for use. The hash is also broken into small pieces that are in turn converted into binary digits.

The hex pairs determine the project’s main features, while the binary digits are used for binary choices that some of the features have to make, ex: on/off or left/right. Each hex pair is only used once, but the binary digits may be used many times, creating a minimal pattern to the trained eye.

The main features determined by the hash* follow. (Note, examples are covered in more detail later.)

1. Shape. Refers to the central ‘focus’ of the image and dictates the aspect ratio.
   1. Square
   2. Diamond
   3. Circle
   4. Tall Rectangle
   5. Tall Diamond
   6. Tall Eye
   7. Wide Rectangle
   8. Wide Diamond
   9. Wide Eye
2. Shape Style
   1. No Fill
   2. Solid Fill
   3. Alternating Fills
   4. Lens
   5. Lines to Recurrence
3. Shape Recursion Factor (1, 2, 3, 5, 9, or 27)
4. Pattern Border
   1. Solid Line
   2. Dashed Line
   3. Circles at vertices
   4. Squares at vertices
   5. None
5. Pattern Style
   1. Grid
   2. Parallels
   3. Perpendicular from Border
   4. Lines to Recurrence
   5. Staggered Lines to Recurrence
   6. Binary Override Lines
   7. Filled Quads
   8. Checkerboard Fills
   9. Binary Override Fills
   10. Triangle Fills
   11. None
6. Pattern Recursion Factor (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, or 32)
7. Midpoints (1, 3, 7, 15, 31, or 63)

Additionally, if the stars align to create a token with specific features from the hash, a pair of new traits could be created. These each have far less than a 1% chance of occurrence, so they may not occur at all. More information will be released after the project is fully minted.

*There are a few feature overrides that are performed. For example, if the shape’s fill color is the same as the linework color, then any linework inside the shape would be hidden, so the algorithm adjusts the features that were dictated by the hash so that lines aren’t drawn unnecessarily. This also means that the features displayed with the token will be more representative of the final image than what the hash originally called for.

The first section of the hash is used to determine the central focus or shape, and this determines the aspect ratio of the resulting image. These are all examples from Ropsten testnet.