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!

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 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:

Casey Reas on the History of Generative Art - Part 1

In Part 1 of this three-part series, the Le Random team speaks with Casey Reas: artist, UCLA professor and co-founder of Processing and Feral File. We discuss the history of generative art: the overlooked importance of experimental video art, unexpected catalysts of the movement and more.

two articlesLe Random — A Digital Generative Art Institution

Arbitrarily Deterministic interviews Matt DesLauriers

Kenconsumer strikes again with another banger episode of his podcast, this time he's joined by Matt DesLauriers - 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:

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 - 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:

fxhash - How Generative Glasses were made

After 4 months of coding the Generative Glasses is ready! I gained a lot of experience along the way and I really liked the creation process, so now I’m sharing with you how it was made…

fx logo

Making of Astronomic Comics by Frank Force aka killedByAPixel:

fxhash - Astronomic Comics – Generative Comic Books

Astronomic Comics generates space themed comic book pages entirely from code and basic drawing functions. In this post I give some background behind the piece, explain how the features work, and share some of my favorite results.

fx logo

Making of Rotation by .conatus - it's in japanese but translating the page with your browser works just fine:

fxhash - .r🜨tation

.r🜨tationの日本語版の説明（＋補足、＋裏話）になります。この文章は全文日本語で暗号化されています。

fx logo

Samuel Yan also wrote about his generative Koi ponds:

Similarly eziraros published a write up on their stunning piece as well:

『台灣建築記憶』の話｜eziraros

ezirarosです。よろしくお願いします。 最近作ったジェネラティブアート作品『台灣建築記憶』が、2023年6月17日から6月25日（日）まで『Proof of X - Blockchain As A New Medium For Art -』で展示されます。 今回はこの作品を紹介しようと思います。 作り始める前に 5月にfxhashのDiscordサーバーでこのメッセージを見ました。三週間ぐらい完成できるかと心配していたが、やっぱりこのチャンスを見逃したくない！と申し込みフォームを送りました。 「Blockchain As A New Medium For Art」というテ

ezirarosnote（ノート）

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 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:

How To (Really) Make It in Web3

For graduates of the VCA Residency, community is key to success as a crypto artist

María Paula Fernández

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

In Conversation with Per Kristian Stoveland

Spectrum: In Conversation with Per Kristian Stoveland | Art Blocks

We had the opportunity to interview generative artist Per Kristian Stoveland (perkwerk). In this conversation, we hear more about his project, The Harvest, his artistic practice, and the discovery of NFTs and the crypto art world.

Art Blocks

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:

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 - 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:

Optimizing Particle Systems with a Grid Lookup and Spatial Hashing

In this post we have a look at a method with which we can greatly improve a collision detection system. Using a lookup grid we can greatly reduce the number of required checks between particles. We will also look at some methods to optimize this lookup grid.

Ahmad MoussaGorilla Sun

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!

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 🌸