Gorilla Recap 11

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!

Is this the last nail in the coffin for Twitter? The announcement that caused the largest outrage this week, was one by the man in charge over at the bird site - putting in place a rate limit on all users of the platform:

Essentially, the largest part of the userbase - I assume that only a fraction of people using twitter are actually paying for Twitter blue - is now limited to 1000 tweets per day. After the initial wave of outrage hit, Elon quickly pulled the brakes and upped the limit to 8k, then to 10k tweets a day.

Although data scraping is a genuine concern, for various reasons, this doesn't seem like the right solution to combat it. Especially when the main goal of a social media platform like Twitter is to retain user engagement for as long as possible.

These limitations could be especially detrimental for smaller brands and artists that rely on the platform for their outreach. Even if these measures are just temporary I've already seen quite a few people pull the plug, and either completely abandon the bird site, or at least create accounts on some of the competitor platforms.

It's unclear at this point what this means for the future of Twitter, Elon probably has all of the numbers and has a good picture of how this change affected the platform - but I think it's unlikely that this will be the end of the bird site; too many people are just too dependent on it at this point.

Genart Updates

FxHash coming to Eth

Not just Twitter but also FxHash dropped some big news this week - FxHash is coming to Eth!

It's a bit difficult to gauge what this means moving forward - especially what impact this will have on Tezos. Although there's been some mixed feelings about the announcement, it's overall been positive. It even garnered acknowledgement from Arthur Breitman, one of the creators of Tezos:

Really enjoyed this thread by Astam, where they go into some of the implications of a multi-chain platform, and how this might affect Tezos, in a positive manner:

FxHackathon first workshop

Simultaneously, the first workshop for the FxHackathon was held by Ciphrd last week on the discord, where he presented some of the new features - I have yet to find the time to start working on my piece but I've already got some cool ideas. Here's something christopher Choffel is working on that I thought is pretty cool:

Continued prototyping for #fxhackathon
Got a LOT to do,. You can probably guess where I'm going, even though it still very early. Still very unsure what the output could look like, need to code more!#fxhash #generativeart #creativecoding pic.twitter.com/KTWQdugDtc

— Christophe Choffel (@ULuIQ12) July 2, 2023

Deca Artist Pages roll out

Recently I got a message from twitter user pravijn who pointed out that I had an artist page on Deca, which I could claim by connecting my wallet. I haven't used Deca in the past, but it's probably the best way to see your entire body of work across different platforms on Tez and Eth - and in terms of presentation it's really awesome to see all of my works side by side!

I still need to clean up the page and make some boards as well!

Tezos turns 5

Interesting Reads

Ty Vek's Self Trilogy

Ty Vek's trilogy 'self' released on FxHash, and it completely flew under my radar. The three pieces id, superego and ego revolve around Freud's model of self and give it's three forms a digital manifestation. The write-up on fxhash is an incredible read:

fxhash - Notes: Self (Id, Superego, Ego)

A statement discussing the concept and release mechanics of the Self Trilogy.

fx logo

Speculations about Ty Vek's identity also still remain.

Matt DesLauriers - Computer Archeology

Matt DesLauriers with another banger of a thread, in which he goes down a computer drawings history rabbithole:

Gorilla Articles

3 Generative Artists - 3 Principles

A little bit of a different article compared to the usual stuff that you find on the blog - but I wanted to write about some of the lessons that I've learnt from reading and watching interviews and talks by established generative artists. I think there's a lot merit to inspecting their processes and how their brains are wired, and maybe borrow and incorporate these ideas into your own workflow.

I'm playing with the idea of turning this into a series, in this pilot we have a look at Zach Lieberman, Frieder Nake and Saskia Freeke - all three of which have important words to give:

3 Generative Artists - 3 Principles

In this post we have a look at 3 principles from 3 great generative artists: Zach Lieberman, Frieder Nake and Saskia Freeke. Generative art as a budding artform has many angles of approach, and what better way to gain a deeper understanding of it than learning from the greats.

Gorilla SunAhmad Moussa

Making of Somewhere in Between

I also got around to documenting the ideas behind my project Somewhere in Between. I believe that the code has some interesting conceptual notions, particularly geometric ideas that are interesting and if you want to explore subdivision of rectangles (and convex polygons):

Making of Somewhere in Between

In this post we have a closer look at my generative token Somewhere in between and the code that generates it’s graphics. Building upon the irregular grid strategy from way back when I approached rectangle divisions in a completely new manner.

Gorilla SunAhmad Moussa

The allowlist has been updated and the remaining tickets are now available for minting, if you'd like to pick up one still now's your chance:

Somewhere in Between — fxhash

“Somewhere in Between” is part of the interactive minting experience at Proof of X with KUMALEON, Tokyo, 2023 - Blockchain as a new Medium for Art held at The Face in Daikanyama. Somewhere in Between

fx logo

Gorilla Sketches

The Great Traversal released on Alba

I didn't actually get to work on any sketches this week, as I've been quite busy with some other projects already - however, last week my token The Great Traversal released on Alba and so far 57 iterations have been minted! Thank you everyone who picked up an iteration!

Still minting here!

Gorilla Explorer

Not a sketch per se, but tangentially related - I resumed work on my portfolio page, which is shaping up to be something really cool.

It's taking much more time than initially anticipated, but I'm hoping to deliver something very polished for everyone to explore all of my works of the past couple of years. You will also likely see this explorer in another form - not going to reveal too much about it yet, but I've got some ideas. A detailed write up about it, will also be posted sometime soon - most likely concurrently with it's release.

After refactoring the entire structure of the tool several times, the code ended up being a complete spaghetti mess. Those timelines at the bottom of the explorer weren't very straightforward to put together, and doing it with vanilla javascript wasn't the best idea in hindsight. This is why I'm in the process of recoding the entire thing from the ground up with the vue.js framework.

The code has become much cleaner this way, and at the same time it's become much more manageable to make changes if I choose to do so in the future. So, keep an eye open for it in the coming weeks.

Music for Coding

This week I discovered the Future Funk genre for myself, and I think that it absolutely slaps! I particularly enjoyed this playlist titled Usagi Dreams, with it's funky bass and upbeat rhythms - puts me in the perfect mood for coding!

And that's it from this week again! If you enjoyed this newsletter consider sharing it on your socials, and with friends or family that might be interested in these topics! Cheers and happy sketching ~ Gorilla Sun 🌸