Dear Readers,
What follows is hopefully a semi-regular feature for this Substack; a flash exhibition intended to capture the state of a space in the crypto art world frozen at a particularly interesting moment in time. This exhibition considers fxhash, a generative art site on the Tezos blockchain still in beta. Since the success of Tyler Hobbs’ Fidenza, and the launch of the curated site artblocks, some big money bets on the Ethereum blockchain have focused on generative art by mostly well-known artists. But fxhash isn’t intrinsically about big money bets— although some of its pieces have incidentally exploded in monetary value, it’s inherently designed as an experimental space for generative crypto art that values the art itself not merely as a financial asset.
At the start of the weeks over which I assembled it, the site was mostly artist-focused, with a small friendly discord server and many intriguing non-mainstream pieces that pushed the boundaries of the form. Fxhash currently seems to be entering a period of rapid acceleration and outside investment, but it is nonetheless exciting to see something so genuine flourish in the underground NFT space. The tempting thing about minting generative art on fxhash is that it’s super cheap – usually from about 1-3 TEZ. The code the artist has designed to make your token runs the moment you mint it.
This feels somewhere closer to handicraft than normal NFT sales listings often do, which perhaps explains a buyer fondness for art made on faux and real plotter, simulated risography or ballpoint pen, and uses of implied materiality that make an algorithmic process object feel individual and quirky. Artists, who appear frequently and casually to talk with buyers as peers on the discord, can also hone their craft without the pressure of failure being a financial deal-breaker. This drew me to the site, because an exciting failure is often far more aesthetically compelling than a safe success.
The title of this exhibition is ‘Architexture’ because I’ve collected a variety of pieces that fall into the categories of built environments, spaces, topographies and landscapes, and abstract plots that evoke architectural elements. Perhaps because of the nature of coding generative images in Javascript and Hydra (the two most popular languages on the site), these seem to be relatively common themes, as does a kind of semi-abstraction. Each small generative piece, in virtue of its pseudorandom nature, feels a little like turning over an interesting pebble or a shell on the beach. The pieces in Architexture appeal as tiny wonders with nuanced details barely visible to the naked eye, even as they mimic the forms of gigantic structures, and sometimes entire planets, that also elude a single gaze in their scale.
Many pieces in this exhibition are animated. These pieces are noted with the Unicode star symbol ☆, and you should click on the link in the title for the piece to truly experience it— this also applies for seeing all the pieces in higher quality, in which they are better viewed. You can either read through the caption text embedded here in the Substack and click to see the full images on fxhash itself, or try to view the exhibition in oncyber.io metaverse space, where I’ve mounted on virtual ‘walls’, but which does not have enough space to display the captions I’ve written.
Neither of these curation modes is ideal and I’m looking for better ones in the future for Tezos pieces specifically. Suggestions here are most welcome as is any commentary or questions on the exhibition via my twitter or email. I’d also love to curate on more public platforms and for other collections than my own, so please contact me if that interests you or you know of an opportunity to do so.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Every piece for this show was purchased on a strict budget, usually of about 3-5 tez per piece, so naturally I have focused on emerging artists and pieces I could buy at initial mint or shortly thereafter. I therefore have not included many excellent, and now increasingly well-known, major fxhash artists, but this is intended as a snapshot, not as a comprehensive picture of the whole field.
Enjoy the show!
Xx ‘til the new year
A
p.s.— There would normally be an issue of conflict of interest here writing about something I owned, but unfortunately, a Temple wallet recovery issue with Chrome extension lost me access to the tokens in this exhibition. I won’t be selling them, ever, or indeed have access to them again— despite the heroic efforts of many artists, buyers, and even the fxhash founder in the Discord. I did enjoy getting to know the community even under duress! Everything I bought during this period is preserved at the page I made for Tokens of Affection. This experience, and the risk involved, is part of early crypto.
☆ 1. Metabolism 51 / Shinzo Noda
Conceived as an explicit tribute to Japanese postwar architecture and design via Yusaku Kamekura, this piece was catnip at first sight to me because of prior academic interest in the period. Its evocative of its objects in strange ways, and I think the generative art coding itself—with its pseudoorganic forms and changing iterations—would appeal to the Metabolist architects. The palette of this piece is a little off, and I wish it were in more classic mid-century tones instead of RGB standards, but it was my first fxhash purchase because it had a sense of its own art historical place, a rare thing in crypto.
☆ 2. Endless Architectural Sketches #36 /om4tt1a
A tribute the Bauhaus and its mid-century influences, as well as the infinite possibilities of paper architecture, this piece has fun with period hues and texture suggestive of concrete. The changing iterations of the building in the animation feel like the manipulations of an infinite, twee, Le Corbusier; almost a postage stamp-sized souvenir from an alternate-universe Villa Savoye.
☆ 3. Deep Space II #1 / Ge1doot
This mouse-responsive piece is a dive-through of a rotating deep space structure cast in varying light. For a small window, it (literally) generates the feeling of a vast universe, and is an accomplished render. The artist, already established in digital spaces and museum collections, appears to be using fxhash to experiment with the boundaries of generative art for spatial vision.
☆ 4. Illusion of safety #56 / Ge1doot
An earlier Ge1doot piece than Deep Space II, Illusion of safety is also mouse responsive. It asks what it means for a space to be enclosed, and how such enclosure makes the viewer feel. Like Deep Space II, Illusion of Safety also pushes at the bounds of what is considered architecture in the generative mode.
5. Subdivisions #160 / Jeff Palmer
As a generative artist well known on other platforms, Jeff Palmer’s drop of pieces inspired by using a straight edge for architectural drafting sold out almost instantly on fxhash. The idea of rectangular confinements combined and recombined as imagined worlds, something that many pieces in this exhibition touch on, is here refined into a single still image that suggests urban planning on paper.
☆ 6. OpenPLAN #132 / grasser_alex
Alex Grasser is a practicing architect and professor of architecture, so the theme of this piece is natural to him. Its apt use of generic floorplan symbols for modular furniture, walls, and windows, make it feel ‘real’—which raises the question of why generative spaces usually default to some sort of ‘artificial’ category in the mind of the viewer. The open plan as a conceit is meant to suggest infinitely re-configurable space in real life, and here does the same work via algorithm.
☆7. Making Mole Hills #151 / adamferriss
This is a procedural algorithm that generates an image for the viewer based on mountain peaks. Coded to vary by height and style of intersection, it plays nicely off vintage DOS and videogame colorways, and succeeds in being at once graphically intriguing and deep beyond an initial view. Fictive topographies are a popular use of fxhash, but Ferris goes so far beyond the usual perfunctory sin/cos curves on a plane, that he reminds us of the possibilities of the medium.
☆8. Intergalactic Planetary #20 / meodai
Again emphasizing the variety of the generative map from individual room to entire world, the Intergalactic Planetary series by Meodai is literally worlds, each generated with a unique surface texture. Evoking Susan Stewart’s writing about collecting both the very large and the very small, this piece, situated alongside the more intimate textural ones in this exhibition, allows a viewer to see the broad span of collecting interests in current generative art on fxhash.
9. Cartographics #34 / Mandy Brigwell
Generative art is also allowed to be whimsical, and Brigwell’s piece of fictive cartography with an illegible caption brings this feature to the fore. The sense of humor here uses the method un-self-seriously to bring serious attention to the fact that the map as a genre of image is strangely uniform even as it is by nature, diverse.
10. Plottable Mountain Moons #269 / greweb
This is a hybrid physical/digital piece, that like fxhash breakout artist Zancan, uses a plotter to print an algorithmically generated image on paper. The qualities of that paper and ink possibilities in turn inform the digital piece—which can also be purchased as a print, elegantly linking the generative art turn in NFTs back to the explosion of print as new reproductive technology.
☆11. Vestiges of the Dead God #29/ Andrew E. Brereton
The Vestiges of a Dead God series are a long animated loop mimicking the pixel aesthetics of cartridge videos games. I can’t tell if these are vestiges of the face of the god, the entryway to an ominous temple, or degraded plans for that entryway, and this ambiguity at intentional lo-res makes the piece. It’s creepy in the way the novel Wolf In White Van is creepy, evoking a para-world of gaming darkness in our own.
12. walkinthepark #180 / balidani
Although the artist states that ‘mazes are context free’ in his own description of this piece, I was drawn to it because it immediately made me think of the legendary labyrinth at Knossos, Crete—designed by Dedalus to house the unfortunate minotaur. “Walk” pieces that imitate the trajectory of a wander by algorithm are common to fxhash, but the careful use of physical imitation of ink and line weight, along with dense composition here, gives walkinthepark a compelling complexity. This is as much a revealed topography as one concealed by many turnings.
☆13. Finding My Way #1 / Dobleganger
This subtle animated piece also traces a walk path, but in light coffee tones that move slowly and wispily across the generative canvas. A light touch is a rarity on fxhash and involves a lot of coding and aesthetic skill, and this piece is nothing if not that-- so light it almost feels as intangible as it actually appears on screen.
14. EYEE #153 / Kevin Masson
Kevin Masson’s EYEE series uses elliptical stippling to suggest hand facture in a wide variety of algorithmic torii. This sounds clinically distant, but in reality, each piece is either an uncanny staring eye or a rhythmic, sculptural ring that looks painstakingly sketched from afar. The use of color across the mint process is an attention to detail that serves the artist and his objects well.
15. Yuuzu #55/ Twistie
Twistie is an emerging artist I discovered through fxhash and liked enough to buy at a substantial markup on the secondary market. This piece was the most expensive in this exhibition at 11 TEZ (still very cheap for art!). The imitation of ballpoint at the limits of human vision is one of the best evocations of generative texture I’ve ever seen on the site, and to me feels like the warm red-orange boucle of a Saarinen womb chair for Knoll. The fact that I now have a sentimental attachment to this piece should speak to its strength.
16. Secret Base #6 / Orr Kislev
Kislev is another fxhash artist with an excellent sense of visual humor. These ‘Secret Bases’ are by nature both appealing and amusing.They are, of course, never secret, since they are constantly aerially surveilled from the perspective of the viewer. Kislev’s use of shadows makes otherwise abstract solid forms feel like structures on a planetary surface.
17. LOST TEMPLE #10 / Ted Gasparian
Ted Gasparian is well know for generative art outside of fxhash and dropped this experimental, hypergraphic piece recently on the site. It has a cleanliness of line that is rare in generative drawing in the sense that it seems like it could be a traditionally graphically designed print until one sees the entire series of generated forms. The use of Escher-like stairs and interconnections on a floating ziggurat teases the eye into interest.
18. Saturn's rings #7 / x0y0z0
This pseudonymous artist makes frequent experimental drops on fxhash and clearly has an evolving and intriguing practice using minimal stippling on dark ground. Here, keeping with a planetary theme common on the site, they use an arc of just a few dots to suggest the curvature implied by the title. Visually, this is the generative equivalent of neat concision, a sign of growing mastery of the form.
19. Confini #196 / Twistie
Many of fxhash’s most iconic works, like those of Andreas Rau, reference the early textile history of computing. Twistie also does so with the Confini series, adding bounded rectangles usually more common to architectural pieces to govern the pieces’ layout. The result is warm and delicately intense, a work of generative art that evokes both texture and structure, algorithmic architecture and that of the broader world. Confini is a play on the idea of confinement, but this piece feels expansive and suggestive in spirit even as strict bounds make it formally possible.