Artist in Focus: Maks Surguy
Artist in Focus is an ongoing series featuring hic et nunc artists. Interested in being featured in the series? Please complete this form.
PT: Tell us a little about yourself, including what brought you to hic et nunc.
MS: I’m Maks, a plotter enthusiast and creator of Plotterfiles.com and DrawingBots.net. I like to experiment with interesting technology to make plotter-friendly artworks and have been sharing my learnings with others on my Patreon. I discovered hic et nunc on Twitter thanks to Mario Klingemann (@Quasimondo) and decided to mint my artwork there instead of on other NFT platforms because of ethical concerns around energy waste associated with Ethereum.
PT: What’s the story behind the piece you selected to share?
MS: A couple years ago I created an open source tool for making generative SVG art called “Flow Lines”. With this tool, you can make an infinite number of interesting plotter-friendly artworks and even share your creations using the URL in the browser. For my vector field series, I used Rad Lines to explore a set of mathematical formulas with interesting visual results and then used those formulas in Blender (with the Sverchok plugin) to create a set of unique artworks.
PT: Can you share an element of your creative practice?
MS: My artworks are mainly made with Blender and the Sverchok node-based scripting environment. For many years I’ve been exploring generative vector art, and this setup gives me the freedom to experiment and try new ideas quickly. I get inspiration from many fields — mathematics, biology, history — and try to make something beautiful using that inspiration.
Sometimes I push the technology to the edge to make interesting things and that comes from my experience with drawing machines. Machines don’t care about the complexity of my artwork and can materialize ideas into physical objects, so I can get really creative with how much detail is in the artwork.
PT: What’s a recent work that you collected on hic et nunc that you’re excited about and why?
MS: The work is titled “square haze #05” and features generated faces made with AI. The artwork is by “NEURAL HAZE,” and I’m excited about it because it combines a lot of my interests into a single piece: AI, unlimited variations guided by some constraints, Javascript, and more.
PT: What is something you’d like to see for the future of hic et nunc and NFTs?
MS: More ways to stay connected with artists you like (following, notifications, etc).
Maks Surguy’s collections
MS: This collection is titled “AI Helper,” and it was created using a special AI program that colorizes pictures guided by my directions. I like how AI can augment artists, and this collection highlights the potential there.
