Hegemony Of Screensavers (Artifacts)
Javascript, WebGL
(Refresh Composition)
A randomized composition of digital artifacts. Scans of plaster, 3D printed objects and natural stone. iPhone 5s. Inefficient GLSL. Screensaver trails. Nonlinear dynamics with Den Tsucs and Wang-Sun attractors. Distilled hours, days and weeks.
The work Hegemony of Screensavers (Artifacts) is a generative real-time 3D artwork released on fx(hash) using the Tezos blockchain. In a playful nod to art history, the title relates the mark making of a brush stroke to the ubiquitous path-trailing effects of early screensavers. This 3D “screensaver” is an endless composition of digital brush strokes driven algorithmically using strange attractors. Not content to be confined to formalism, the alluring painterly compositions are also formed from 3D scans of rocks, boulders and discarded technology, connecting two worlds apparently distant from each other. Through the act of extracting a 3D image from the land, the artwork echoes the exploitation of natural resources and the pretended immateriality of the digital realm.
Strange attractors are useful models for processes found in nature, however they are sensitive to initial conditions and often have unstable solutions. I depict technological decay and disruption as it is not clear if a stable solution exists for human technological societies and the Earth system. Humans can no longer entertain the narrative that their societies and technology are somehow separate from the natural world. They are all entangled and embedded within each other.
Stills images were minted from the generative project originally published on fx(hash) here: