its a hobby

Defining and implementing abstractions is more practice than elaboration. Interfaces built through formal languages are shaped by a shared praxis whose consensual lessons are established as standards. The use of such normalised means to create art pieces is hence an intuitive deviation: tools fashioned as means to an end are often used for purposes that appear to be the exact opposite of their raison d’être. Recent technosocial developments have enabled the tentative burgeoning of an economy nurturing these deviant applications. A new wave of the so-called “generative art” milieu is attempting to mobilise both factors of production, capital and labour, to augment the manufacturing of such algorithms. While the nature of each factor is apparently unremarkable, their intersection in this space does yield an idiomatic result. Humans and tools which are engaged in this practice, because they are incentivized to systematically share the outputs of their research, participate in the transformation of both factors and, as such, in their own. The generative art milieu is building an attempt to seize the means of generation.

We released the seeds at midday, following our best computer predictions, hoping against all odds that they'd travel far, re-seeding the earth, sowing a future for us. It was months since the fall, since that terrible moment containment failed; quarantine failed; humanity itself failed. We called it ‘The Last Days’—unoriginal, perhaps, but descriptive all the same–and shook our heads in despair at our hubris, at the price we'd paid. This would make it all right. Our computer model, proving we still had hope, that we'd make it all go away. The seeds would float on the wind, drifting into the tortured air, and carry with them new life. And we would live again.

I published "adrift" on fx(hash) in September 2022 as a creative collaboration with Adam from Tender Art. The essence behind it is the depiction of human habitat through algorithmic processes. I divided the article into sections corresponding to the simulation phases: terraforming, choosing potential settlement locations, establishing possible connections between cities, and calculating the final urban landscape.

s p e c t r u m s o f o u r e n t a n g l e d h o r i z o n s — We all live in the same Minkowski cone.