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A Time to Reflect on the Past, Examine the Present, and Prepare for the Future
The past year has been a turbulent one for NFTs: from the heady highs of last year’s boom, to the recent lows of the cryptocurrency crash, with Luna crash-landing and centralized currency inflation making everything worse. Still, even in this bear market, art is being made. Art that pushes the boundaries of what is possible, art that marries the meaning-making genius of humans with the creative power of computers.
In this issue, we further explore the possibilities of generative art: a closer look at the Spectral Beings project, the idea of “deterministic chaos,” the origins of generative poetry, practical applications for generative art, and the case for on-chain. We venture into not only the past and present of generative art but also its future. Last but not least, we interview Proof of Beauty, a pioneer in the generative art space.
The crypto space moves so fast sometimes, it can be easy to forget where we have been and not see where we’re going. The bear market can be seen as a fallow period, a time to step back and take stock of what the past year has won and lost. Only by taking a closer look at our past and present are we able to really see what we should take with us into the future, and what we should leave behind.
ABOUT ARTWORK
Destructed City Plans by Proof of Beauty Studios
An abstract piece born from whimsical engineering. "Destructed City Plans", like its name, is a collection full of paradoxes. Stylistically, we pay homage to brutalism: harsh textures, minimal colors, visuals that won't be out of place in default MS paint settings. Each piece is a smattering of one geometry: rectangles, each placed in a way that barely implies a grand design. One would imagine, that with such limitation, artwork would feel "engineered", "planned", even "bureaucratic". Instead, with an embrace of unintended bugs in the design process, each piece appears to be a civil engineer gone crazy with the planning of a new suburbia. In minimalism, chaos still can thrive.
