GLACIATIONS BY ANNA LUCIA
This was part of an ongoing series of articles that released was digitally in November 2022. They were first published in the print edition of the Bright Moments Quarterly that was distributed at NFT ART CDMX in Mexico City.
Malte Rauch: Thanks for taking the time to do this interview, Anna. I would like to begin by asking how you get started on a new project: do you begin with the code, with a mood board, a drawing or something entirely different?
Anna Lucia: For me, the work always starts as a puzzle. I taught myself software engineering through creative coding. And my approach to learning was always to pose myself puzzles that I had to solve: how can I recreate an artwork or design element with code? The puzzle is all about breaking the aesthetic of something into its elements and to recreate it in code. And this puzzle persists in my creative practice until today. So I begin with a visualization and ask myself: how can I capture this in code?
What are your main creative and artistic inspirations?
When it comes to code, I get a lot of inspiration and learnt a lot from fellow generative artists. But inspiration is never an isolated thing for me; it is multi-facetted. Textile art and the craft of weaving is something that always inspires me. The technicality of weaving patterns seems to have a deep connection with generative art. Moreover, the fact that textile production is often considered a “craft” (and not art with a capital “A”) and the product of female labor makes it even more interesting for me. Associating with this influence is like a beautifully indirect critical comment.
In terms of visual art, I feel a connection with the very early abstract paintings from artists like Piet Mondrian and the general trajectory of geometric abstraction. But I also relate to Bridget Riley and Frank Stella’s work from the 1960s. Lastly, I also love the work with textiles that one can see in the work of fashion designers like the recently passed away Issey Miyake.
Your professional background is in engineering. What led you to generative art, which is a fascinating combination of engineering and creativity?
To be honest, I rather accidentally stumbled on Processing. In university, I studied engineering and I always had to solve mathematical or physical puzzles. When I started my first job after graduating, I realized that I missed these puzzles. Work was all about routines and processes, but there weren’t any challenging and intriguing puzzles to solve.
Back then, I did not realize that I was looking for something that is both rational and creative as you say. But what I missed about puzzles is precisely this: the use of technical skills in a creative fashion to solve a riddle. I cannot remember the details, but I found Processing through a random Google search. Shortly after I had discovered it, I went through the written tutorials on the Processing website where they had these little exercises that were very much like the puzzles I solved as an engineering student. After a year or so, I discovered the tutorials on Youtube and that accelerated my learning even more.
Once I felt comfortable with my use of the tools, I started posting my art on Instagram. This is how I first discovered generative art. By following the right people, I quickly immersed myself in the scene and connected with many fellow artists a few years before the NFT hype took off.
If one compares your generative art projects, one of the things that stands out is your use of color. You often rely on rich colors and quite complex compositions. How do you choose these palettes and what is your thinking around color?
As a generative artist, you can copy-paste color palettes from websites, which are often composed of five colors. I always felt that these selections are extremely arbitrary. And, similar to the default image ratio on Instagram, these predefined color schemes felt incredibly limiting. The color palettes are aesthetically pleasing, but artistically uninteresting. They feel as if they were made for UI/UX design – and they are great for that. It’s as if you bought a pre-made spice mix: the outcome is not bad, but you always stay within a predetermined range.
One of the central motivations for my work was to expand this limited range of colors. But most of all, these rich color palettes are something that I intuitively gravitate towards, something that I enjoy a lot. For me, the brilliant colors are strongly associated with a sense of joy in art.
Generative art combines computational determinacy and chance in a unique way. How do you relate to these two poles – control and chance – as someone who transitioned from engineering to creative coding?
With long-form generative art in particular, there is this constant dance with chance. But there is the pressure that every output has to be good. Each output has to be able to stand for itself; it should be self-sufficient. You know, it is quite hard to get this balance right, but it is a very interesting challenge to deal with.
In regard to this, there is something that I want to achieve for the Mexico project: I want to continue to surprise myself. As an artist, I know the space of possible outputs very well, since I have been working with the algorithm for an extended period of time. In the emerging outputs, there is a lot more going on than in the features and variables that are listed as traits. And I want to retain a dynamic in the algorithm that allows me to be continuously surprised by the outputs.
Your previous works on Eth and Tez often use the grid as a compositional structure. Straight lines and austere geometry appear like the base layer you start with and which you then bend and twist. In your work for the Mexico City Collection, this interest in the grid is still present, but the work feels a lot more organic. Could you share your thoughts around the grid, geometric and organic compositions?
The grid is a natural place that you gravitate towards as a code based artist, I would say. You always work on the x/y coordinates, and hence the grid is the place where you naturally end up. Of course, you can make the grid very small and let it almost disappear. But even a flow field is ultimately based on the grid.
In my work, I am foregrounding the grid as the medium itself. Working with digital art, there is always the idea of representing or recreating something like natural structures, textures etc. This is the reason for inventing incredible tools like Perlin noise. Now, I am certainly not criticizing anyone’s work with these tools. But I ask myself: why should I use that texture? Why should the composition not stand for itself? Why shouldn’t I foreground the constitutive elements of code-based art?
Moreover, the work that I developed for Mexico City was inspired by the work of Herbert Franke. I am exploring some of his methods. In particular, I am interested in his differentiation between two models. The first is the point for point method, where each point on the screen gets a value, one-by-one, similar to painting with a brush. The second is the integral method, and this is the model I want to use for my project with Bright Moments. Here, you have an image and you have one function that you can apply that alters the image as a whole. Here’s a simple way to explain it: I draw one or a few primitive shapes and apply the two dimensional Fourier transform to that image to receive a completely new gray scale image. I imagine this gray scale image to be a height map, drawing contour lines creating a fantastical landscape. If you take those basic images, I can’t imagine or predict what the Fourier transform would look like. This is one of tricks I use to retain the element of surprise in the algorithm.
For the Mexico City Collection, you are creating a generative project that will be minted IRL. What do you think about this “live minting” component and does it influence your creative process?
The fact certainly seeps into my creative process. It is something that I am very conscious of. My decision to use organic forms was certainly influenced by the venue and the fact that it would be minted IRL. At the beginning, I thought about how to exhibit my work. But the idea of an exhibition implies a passive viewer of the artwork. The concept of IRL minting, on the other hand, implies a more active role: minting is an experience that is lived in the moment. As such, it has performative elements to it—it cannot be replicated. That is something that is very powerful and something that I am thinking about a lot.
It also poses the question of my role vis-à-vis the setting. Do I want to be present when people mint my work? What is my role in that moment? Something that I thought about is placing myself in the space to have an interaction with the collectors.
You are currently still ideating the exhibition design for Mexico City. But can you share your initial thoughts with us? What feeling do you seek to evoke in the viewer with the exhibition design?
I think the overall feeling that I want to evoke is meditative and reflective. My personal experience of Mexico is that it is a very colorful and loud place. And the NFT ART CDMX event is probably also going to be very festive. In the midst of this joyful festivity, my room will offer a moment of silence and a space of contemplation. It will offer some grounding. Mexico does not only have a festive side, but also a very spiritual dimension to it. This is something I want to connect with and it is also something that is very present in my daily life — and I would like to share this side of my personal life with collectors.
One of the things I would like to use in the space is the formal language of the labyrinth. The labyrinth is not a maze. It is not disorienting. You make no choices, you only have to follow this path. My room will, I hope, shield you from the outside world and let you focus inward.
On-chain generative art has become incredibly popular over the last two years. Where do you see the space headed? And what are your future plans as a leading generative artist?
Something that we are already seeing is that because of the immense popularity and, frankly, also because of the financial incentives the quality of generative art has gone through the roof. And I am very excited to see that. The popularity of generative art is pushing the art form towards new heights. Quality, I think, is only going to get higher and higher as this trend continues.
In terms of on-chain generative art, I think that it will become more popular outside the NFT world: generative content used commercially to individualize products. At the same time, there will also be a stronger interest in generative art in the fine art market.
In terms of my future plans, I am actually looking forward to slowing down. After NFT ART CDMX, I want to focus on projects that have a longer maturation. I also want to focus more on physical works, which also goes together with a slower creative process. Code is fast: you do not have to monitor how materials react and you can change all variables at once. Working with physical materials is quite different, and I am interested in the temporality of this kind of work. The design might be made through a generative medium; or the technique itself will be generative. I am very interested in generative art but not necessarily in the code aspect – this would persist in my physical work.
