NFT and Generative Art, the ins and the outs
How the hype has uncovered a hidden gem.
“NFT” was not just one of the buzzwords of 2021, but also word of the year for the Collins dictionary. Are NFTs still that important in 2022? To date, the merits of NFTs are many, but one, in particular, is the subject of this article: Generative Art, which has emerged from its niche of enthusiasts and now shows its potential to the world.
Digital Art has always been the Cinderella of the art circuit. Digital artworks and artists have always been absent from galleries, exhibitions, and biennials as they were considered minor art forms, which result from the work of geeks rather than from “real” artists. This outlook has suddenly changed on March 11, 2021, when an NFT by Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, was sold by Christie’s for a flopping $69 million. This episode, a milestone in NFT history, has finally lifted the veil of public opinion on Digital Art. The work entitled 5000 days is a mosaic of 5000 images, created by Beeple day after day over ten years, who, with great dedication and application, has refined his style, starting from abstract and geometric graphics to his typical grotesque and dystopian 3D artworks. For many years, Beeple may have sold only a few prints, but like him, thousands of digital artists have cultivated their passion for years without profit, except when applying their skills to commercial projects. Beeple uses the techniques of modeling and 3D animation techniques to create his most famous works but this is just one of the many expressions of digital art.
NFT technology enables the fruition of the digital art world, which used to be exclusive to the physical world: people can therefore possess something unique and, in any case, attributable to a precise style, such as a painting drawn by a famous artist inside a cycle or series. To realize this technological promise on a large scale, Generative Art proved to be perfect! A kind of art that, in whole or in part, was created with an autonomous system. Working with an “artificial DNA” defines a generative approach to art focused on constructing a system capable of generating unpredictable events, all with a recognizable common character.
The concept of Generative Art was already present in the work of some artists before the advent of computer graphics. Think of Sol Lewitt, who prepared instructions for his work through third parties. Sol Lewitt’s instructions consisted of directions to produce a work of art and an advanced visual art vocabulary that alluded to architectural specifications and mathematical equations. The indications also included basic colors, lines, and simplified shapes employed according to the formulas he invented. The instructions were relatively straightforward, and as they were open to interpretation, no two works of art by different artists based on Sol LeWitt’s exact instructions could be the same.
Manfred Mohr is considered a pioneer of algorithm-based Digital Art. When he discovered the information aesthetics of Prof. Max Bense in the early 1960s, Mohr radically changed his artistic way of thinking. Within a few years, his art transformed from abstract expressionism to computer-generated algorithmic geometry. Encouraged further by discussions with computer music composer Pierre Barbaud, whom he met in 1967, Mohr programmed his first computer drawings in 1969. Since then, all of his artwork has been produced exclusively with computers. Mohr develops and writes algorithms for his visual ideas. Since 1973, he has generated 2D semiotic graphic constructs using multidimensional hypercubes.
Many enthusiasts have practiced Generative Art “under the radar” for over 50 years. Another milestone in the history of the development of this discipline is the birth of Processing in 2001 through Casey Reas and Ben Fry, both former Aesthetics and Computation Group students at the MIT Media Lab. Integrated Development (IDE) was created for the Electronic Arts, New Media Art, and Visual Design communities to teach non-programmers the fundamentals of computer programming in a visual context.
The revolution started in June 2017, and a few lucky ones reaped the benefits. A two-person team of Canadian software developers, Matt Hall and John Watkinson of Larva Labs studio, launched Cryptopunks, a collection of 10,000 unique characters — 6,039 males and 3,840 females — made digitally scarce thanks to blockchain technology. Each has been algorithmically generated using computer code, making no two characters exactly the same, some with rarer traits than others. Larva Labs practically gave away these NFTs, but gradually, on the Open Sea secondary market, they began to increase their value. You must know that NFTs, like physical assets, are resellable by their owners, and sites like Open Sea were created to manage these purchase processes. In the case of famous and successful collections, their value tends to increase exponentially. Today, the Cyptopunks collection has generated a turnover of over 950,000 Ethers.
When Cryptopunks were introduced, one lucky guy from Texas made some of the collection’s rarest aliens and zombies. After a few years, Erick “snowfro” Calderon found himself with a fortune of several million dollars and, driven by his love for Generative Art, decided to develop a platform for the publication of NFT open to various artists. And so Art Blocks was born. A platform where a generative code — typically written in p5.js or three.js — is combined with the ERC 721 hash code of the buyer’s NFT to create a static, animated, or interactive display that will have unrepeatable characteristics in the series from the same collection.
In the previous image, we see six editions of Ringers by Dmitri Cherniak identified by these unique hash codes:
“TokenId”: “13000879”, “hash”: “0xbed59543a2ed77f22cb6ec9e56de893896caf886115c0dc5fb48ef25ac581e5e”
“TokenId”: “13000109”, “hash”: “0xf0f5ecbc73aeeeedb20eb8042307e7a50ec943e4da90645db91884732d276303”
“TokenId”: “13000074”, “hash”: “0x17e7449f812d2898d9752d3fd40fb9168f8c206e89217e4398f89038f96a1a9b”
“TokenId”: “13000686”, “hash”: “0xd7b5012127e270f15902e748ec1da2c0d72f5399504cb0b98527a97c87e1240f”
“TokenId”: “13000052”, “hash”: “0x209c5d024aee77e082edbe12bd42a30efb8eb1f6f63e92336d2e9bb7dbf35159”
“TokenId”: “13000625”, “hash”: “0x20f4db61e7707e4b43ef5627c1e970e8eb5df57950adeaddf61ecd2ea6223467”
Art Blocks have allowed the birth of a new genre of Generative Art called long-form, according to the definition coined by the artist Tyler Hobbs. Before then, the artist selected a small set of renderings for sale in printed format; with this platform, instead, the script can generate hundreds if not thousands of outputs, all individually interesting and, in any case, attributable to the collection concept.
An essential technical feature of the Art Blocks platform is that all the NFT code is on-chain[ Currently, many NFTs are hosted on centralized servers, and the token points to the server hosting a file. At best, the projects use IPFS or Arweave, decentralized forms of file storage. When you click “Live View” on a piece on the Art Blocks website, you don’t see a saved PNG or MP4 file hosted on a server. Instead, you run a script that lives on the Ethereum blockchain and gives it to the browser for real-time rendering.
At this point, it is worth asking: is buying generative Art in NFT a good investment? Despite having a long history behind it, 2021 was the year zero for generative Art because, given the substantial income, it allowed various artists to devote themselves to it full-time. We will begin seeing more spectacular, profound, and meaningful works in the next few years. These masters, who will undoubtedly find space in the art history books of the near future, will be joined by more and more young generative artists, even if it’s a path that tends to be difficult as it means mastering two culturally antithetical areas: the technique of code and visual communication. However, as an artist converted to the generative, I must say that the effort to learn to program is amply rewarding thanks to the wonder of seeing ever new results come together, sometimes even unexpected, due to involuntary errors, which then become lines of development of the work.
Generative Art best represents current times when we are experiencing artificial intelligence’s first stirrings. Understanding the relationship between man and machine and how the best can come from their collaboration is becoming increasingly significant. Generative Art represents the maximum expression of this relationship.
