Gorilla Recap 10

Hey everyone 👋 and hello to all new subscribers that joined since last week! Thanks for signing up and joining along for the ride! This is the weekly newsletter, in which I recap everything noteworthy from the past week. Hope you have a good stay!

Genart Updates

This week has been bonkers again, as there's a number of new things that I think are worth sharing. Obviously this is never an exhaustive list, because there's always too many things to cover in one newsletter - if there's some other cool stuff I missed, let me know in the comments at the end of this post!

7k on Twitter! 🤯

This week my Twitter account reached 7000 followers! 🥳 That's an absurd amount of people to be followed by - a big heartfelt Thank you! to each one of you!

What will this profile look like in a year from now? Who knows 🤷‍♂️

I'm not very good at celebrating these milestones - I genuinely think that the best thing to do, is to double down and keep working on improving the quality of the weekly posts, the website and my generative art.

You could argue that it's just a number - what's the difference between 6000, 7000 and 8000? From an outside perspective there isn't much difference. However, seeing so many people interested in the things I do gives my work so much more meaning and purpose, and helps me keep going even when things are difficult and tricky.

But ultimately, it's still just a number - so, instead of celebrating a number, cheers to creative coding and generative art instead! And to many more months, years and decades full of creative coding and generative art! Thanks for being part of this journey 🙌

And now to some actual content 👇

Le Random Launches

LeRandom (opens in a new tab) describes itself as a digital institution for the discovery and appreciation of on-chain generative art - and they just published their site this past week:

What I'm most excited about is their upcoming timeline of generative art history, it seems like it will be a very nice explorative tool:

They also already published a couple of posts - especially enjoyed this interview with Casey Reas:

Arbitrarily Deterministic interviews Matt DesLauriers

Kenconsumer (opens in a new tab) strikes again with another banger episode of his podcast, this time he's joined by Matt DesLauriers (opens in a new tab) - a force of nature in the generative art space. You might know Matt from two of his works in recent years Meridian and Folio. Both of them stunning pieces.

If you're not familiar though, then I really recommend this episode of Arbitrarily Deterministic (opens in a new tab):

Fxhash Redeemables, Joanie Lemercier's Nuages and fxhackathon 2023

FxHash is steadily chugging along, rolling out new features. In the last fxfam discord call they announced a new feature called Redeemables, which essentially is a fxhash native method to automate the distribution of IRL merch/prints/items that are tied to generative tokens.

It's still in development, but Joanie gets the chance to take it for a spin with his first drop on FxHash: Nuages. Aided by Quentin Hocde, another awesome generative artist, they created some beautiful stippled clouds - each minted iteration obtains a real life plot. Due to the pointilist style these plots take quite some time to be created, in the ballpark of 10 hours.

If that isn't enough FxNews yet, then there's more! FxHash is kicking off a hackathon centered around fxparams, and to be precise the hackathon will revolve around building interactive minting interfaces on top of fxparams. This has been pioneered by Piter Pasma's Universal Rayhatcher and Alejandro Campos pensado a mano, both of which gave a lot of freedom to the collector in shaping their custom iterations.

If that sounds something you'd want to participate in, check it out. At the very least you might have a look at some of the workshops that will be held:

Jesus Christ, it's Richard Bourne... on Raph's stream!

If you've frequented openprocessing at all in recent years, then you've most likely came across a user by the name of Richard Bourne - that has by now become a bit of a legendary poweruser, and has without a doubt the largest number of forks on the entire platform:

What's more is that Raph actually managed to get a hold of the legendary poweruser! He'll be live on stream with Raph tomorrow at 16:00 CEST - and if that isn't enough yet, Sinan, the creator of Openprocessing, will also be a cohost of the episode! If my writing style in this section hasn't conveyed - I'm super excited!

Also if you missed it, Sinan was on the show last week (opens in a new tab) - it was a very interesting conversation around Openprocessing, how it came to be and what's in store for it in the future:

Interesting Reads

I've got quite a few reads for you this week!

Various Making Ofs

With the wonderful Proof of X exhibition coming to a close, it just feels right to include some articles by my fellow generative artists that also participated!

Conatus shared a tweet in which they give a shout out to some of the Proof of X artists' writings - I wasn't aware that quite a few of my fellow gen artists also made write ups about their projects, new and old, hence I'd like to showcase them here:

Making of Generative Glasses by C4RCO (opens in a new tab):

Making of Astronomic Comics by Frank Force aka killedByAPixel (opens in a new tab):

Making of Rotation by .conatus (opens in a new tab) - it's in japanese but translating the page with your browser works just fine:

Samuel Yan (opens in a new tab) also wrote about his generative Koi ponds:

Similarly eziraros (opens in a new tab) published a write up on their stunning piece as well:

I might have missed some, let me know - thanks for the lovely write-ups!

How to (Really) Make It in Web3

The Vertical Crypto Art (opens in a new tab) residency is a learning program with the goal of fostering new talents in the Web3 space, I found these statements from their graduates on their post-residency endeavors highly motivatin:

Maybe that even sounds like something for you, check it out!

In Conversation with Per Kristian Stoveland

I keep discovering interviews with important folks in the generative art/creative coding scene - really feels like I should make some sort of index at this point 🤔

Alejandro Campos' Gen Art Journey

Alejandro Campos talks about his creations in this thread, coming from a background in Architectural design, his generative art sets itself apart with a very distinct feel to other stuff that I see contemporarily:

Edward Hopper's Art

And to conclude this section - something genart unrelated. I'm a big fan of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and always found the conversation around the artwork very interesting. Apparently the lack of an entrance to the diner seems to have some deeper philosophical meaning - whereas others claim that the entrance is just off to the right side of the canvas. What do you think?

Hopper has a lot of other stunning artworks that are showcased throughout this Twitter thread:

AI Corner

Scary applications of ML

I found this video highly interesting - Enzo Avigo talks about two scary applications of machine learning. One of them is the translation of brain activations into images, essentially constituting a method to read minds. How accurate it is, is questionable, but with enough data I have no doubt that it can be relatively accurate. A second one is the estimation of someone's position in a room, solely via the WiFi signal, meaning that everyone already has a surveillance camera built into the home.

Ivona Tau on long-form generative AI

Ivona Tau also spoke about this topic in this Twitter space (opens in a new tab):

Gorilla Articles

Gorilla on Tender's front page

Another big thing (for me at least) that happened this week was FxHash retweeting my post in which I look back on two years of making art on the platform (and on the blockchain in general):

Following the lead at the end of their quote tweet, I traced my post back to the front-page of tender (opens in a new tab) - it's an incredible honor to find my article on their front page:

Optimizing Particle Systems with a Grid Lookup and Spatial Hashing

I resumed working on the Particle System code that we started almost a month ago now, the aim of this follow-up is to optimize our system and be able to add many more particles than we were able to before:

Gorilla Sketches

This week I only had little time again to work on some new sketches, and I don't really know where it's going yet - but it always feels god to reiterate on a previous idea and be able to visualize quickly and more efficiently than before. Just a simple triangle packing idea:

Besides that I also worked heavily on my portfolio over the weekend, it's starting to feel like one of those things that I simply have to power through to get it done - but I'm very happy with the system that I've put in place and it should allow me to document my work in a much more organized manner in the future:

Hoping to wrap it up soon and have it out in the world for everyone to play with!

'The Great Traversal' is coming to Alba in less than 2 days - I'm super excited, if you collect on eth you don't want to miss this one!

Check out the project page here (opens in a new tab)

Music for Coding

Do you sometimes feel like a rabbit that hunts tigers? yes? I do too - and I've got just the right album for you! Jokes aside, the sounds on this are easily among the top 5 things I've heard in past years:

And that's it from me again this week - cheers, happy coding, see you in the next post, and consider sharing this one on your socials, or with friends and family ~ Gorilla Sun 🌸