The artists describe the work here.

Toccata

ecologías - C

ecologías - B

ecologías - A

all that remains

el inefable momento

"There's beauty in simple things." — Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez in the project's liner notes.

An artist-programmer often follows a known trajectory to advance their skillset: a journey to deepen complexity, expand narratives, or mesmerize their audience with ever more ingenious twists and novelties. 

However, any aspiring master regularly revisits the fundamentals of their craft. And indeed, there may come the point when they make the fundamentals themselves the focus of a piece, often leading to a body of études.

simple things by Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez is just such a return to the basics, by a master of his craft. In this piece, the artist sends streams of circles across the screen. The number, sizes, speeds, and direction of movement vary. The color palettes range from monochrome to the explosions of color that Soria-Rodríguez has become known for. At first sight, that appears to cover most of the artwork’s offerings.

However, an ongoing theme in the artist's recent work is the subject of playful learning. So it is also present here: sending groups of circles across a screen is a staple of graphical programming when it comes to teaching the fundamentals of working with arrays.

9.4: Arrays and Loops - Processing Tutorial

It’s incredibly satisfying to see these basic shapes jiggle across the screen in a seemingly uncontrolled fashion, and it is this excitement that simple things first elicits. It may also remind older viewers of the amazement of experiencing a simple mouse pointer trail effect many decades ago: using a computer can be playful while also being practical.

Part of generative art’s intrigue is how it often represents the complicated (i.e., human-made technology) and the complex (such as the organic, emergent, chaotic properties of the natural world). So, while "there's beauty in simple things," we perceive that beauty because there is more than meets the eye. 

The longer we look, the more we see that various complex principles govern the motion in simple things. Dots become placeholders for things we remember or imagine: they appear like fish jumping out of water or bugs engaged in a mating dance and mosquitos frantically circling a light source. They are dandelion seeds carried away by the wind or pollen patterns formed on a stream of water, rendering visible the turbulence that animates them. Look long enough and they depict broader systems at play – bubbles emerging from the depths, cells flowing through organisms, or simply a primal expression of life force.

Like many Soria-Rodríguez pieces, the viewer/learner/user can experiment with its settings, creating subtle to radical variations.

The "extra" feature (hint: type it!) gives the piece yet another appearance. We are reminded that a simple thing may reveal a nourishing depth if we let our attention sink into it. Or, in the words of the musician Robert Fripp, "just below the surface of our everyday world lie riches."

On Simple Things

simple things

For a high quality version to print, please see instructions in the Project Description.

aprendizajes

Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez, or msoriaro as he’s affectionately known on fxhash, released his first mint on the platform just as it opened for beta use. 

contrapuntos translates to counterpoint, a music theory term describing the relationships between lines of music. Using counterpoint, a musician can create sonically dependent or independent lines of music that can stand alone or be loomed together into harmonious sonic textures. In contrapuntos #241, the use of various lines of color strung together in a temporal arrangement exemplifies the alone-togetherness of counterpoint theory and, perhaps, life itself.

Despite looking and feeling like the first clear winner of the fxhash beta era, contrapuntos took a while to mint out. Early fxhash collectors spent incredible amounts of time debating the project’s perceived high edition count and exorbitant mint price of 5 XTZ (which, at the time, was the most expensive fxhash mint price yet).

Personally, contrapuntos was the first collection released that left me speechless and obsessed with completing a full-color set. A set of contrapuntos entails six colorways: black, red, light red, gold, white, and light blue. There’s also an array of XYZ, which differs in width, length, and clustering, giving rise to spacious outputs like #280 below.

The truly beautiful aspect of this release lies precisely in the depth of variety between iterations. Each output is clearly unique from its peers yet simultaneously expresses structural similarity, or harmoniousness if you will. As such, the resonance within and between each contrapunto is apparent, allowing one to zoom out on the collection as a whole, allowing it to play like a sublime orchestra. 

My love for contrapuntos is such that I gifted my parents a printed iteration after painstakingly poring over the right printing method (giclée according to msoriaro himself). But I know I’m not alone in my deep appreciation for the collection — there’s an entire community built around msoriaro’s work in the fxhash discord. Come and join us sometime to talk contrapuntos!

1. Open your piece in live mode and copy the “operation hash” from the end of the URL (everything after "fxhash=") 

2. Paste that string on the end of this URL:  http://marcelosoriarodriguez.org/genart/contrapuntos/res/index-res.html?hash=  

3. Visit the link and your piece should show up. 

4. Press 2, 3, 4 or higher numbers to load a higher resolution output – caution that at some point your browser will become unresponsive.

5. Press s to save the image and wait for the browser to respond. If no image is saved, try pressing a lower number and then "s" again.


Note that the noise pattern may change from the piece you originally collected. This is so because the noise pattern in the original piece is not set with the hash, but rather it is depending on the time elapsed.