SOL — The Making of 365 Generative Sunrise Paintings
What is SOL?
SOL is an attempt to pay homage to the styles of art that I cherish, impressionism, pointillism, and surrealism, while providing a personal experience to the collector. At its core, SOL is a series of 365 generative paintings, created with nothing but code that captures a precise real-world future moment in time — when the sun is rising above the horizon somewhere on planet Earth.
Project Breakdown
Before I started working on SOL I was contacted by Foundation to be a launch partner for a new feature they were developing. The feature allows artists to upload many digital works at once for minting on the same smart contract. This allows all Foundation artists, programmers and non-programmers alike, to use the feature. The outputs are curated by the artist ahead of time. When the collector mints, they do not know which output they will receive. This was an exciting opportunity to work on a more long-form project. Previously I had only released 1/1’s on Foundation.
I had recently come across Andy Warhol’s Sunset, a series of 632 unique screen prints of the exact same composition. Warhol only varied the colors used for each screen, of which there were only three, to create this magnificent series. This seemed like something a generative artist would do!
I’ve photographed hundreds of sunrises and sunsets so it was a visual study that I was fond of and familiar with. I therefore decided to focus on a series of generative sunrises.
For this project, my aim was to use code in long-form fashion. I had been experimenting with long-form for several months and now felt like the right time and opportunity to turn my experiments into a full fledged project. The concept started simple enough, produce 50 to 100 generative sunrises.
I was excited by the variety of outputs I was getting but I still felt something was missing. I was an astronomy nerd growing up. I would comb through Burnham’s Celestial Handbook to find the next interesting astronomical object to look at in my telescope. At some point it dawned on me that I could represent the angle of the sun in my outputs to match the real angle of the sun at a given date, time, and location! Taking it one step further was easy. I could create 365 outputs, one for each day of the year 2023, for a different global city and enshrined that information visually on the piece and as attributes stored as metadata on the blockchain.
Data and APIs
Figuring out how to make the sun a certain angle above the horizon in the digital artwork based on all the APIs was just as hard as writing the code for all the visual components. The steps involved were:
- Use the latitude and longitude and date to get the timezone, GMT offset, and if daylight savings would be in effect.
- Get the elevation of the city using the latitude and longitude, important to get a more accurate time for where the sun will be according to the local observer. Most published sunrise times calculate using 0 elevation (sea level) which would give you the wrong time if you were a local observer.
- With all of this info you can use SunCalc.js to calculate the angle of the sun in the sky for a specific time. I setup my own node server to process this locally on my computer as each output was created.
Closing
It feels special knowing that each work of art represents a real future moment in time that will never happen again. If I was going to do generative sunrises, it felt necessary to somehow connect the outputs to some place or day that might have meaning to a collector.
Using real-world data in my code represents a new way for me to use art as a tool to connect us more to nature and our surroundings. It can move each of us to find beauty in something so common as a sunrise.
Mint SOL: https://foundation.app/collection/sol-365
Website: https://www.coryhaber.com/
Attributions
- List of cities with latitude and longitude provided by: https://simplemaps.com/data/world-cities
- Timezone data provided by: https://timezonedb.com
- City elevation data provided by: https://open-elevation.com
- Sun angle and time calculations provided by: https://github.com/mourner/suncalc
