Through the Window

Reva's genesis generative art project on Art Blocks

· Essay

After three months of hard-working on my project and one month of reviewing and preparing, my genesis work Through the Window is ready to open at 10 am CT on Nov 23rd(北京时间11月24日零点). For me, this is a milestone in my journey of crypto art. 

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This is the time when #0 was minted. The project was still in the process of staging at that time.

I do know Art Blocks quite early. It was about in January I saw the project on Twitter. I was immediately attracted and joined the community. At that time, there were only six projects on it. I really love the mechanism that uses the transaction hash to mint unique NFTs. I think this is specially made for generative artists and it is exploring real crypto art. Art Blocks has utilized the blockchain as a medium to create art. The NFTs are the collaboration of the creators and the collectors. It has made a significant difference between crypto art and digital art. 

As an artist, I don't have much experience. I was once an algorithm engineer in the IT field so I self-taught generative art in Sep 2018. This is the beginning of my art career. So it means a lot for me to get approval from Art Blocks.

Other than the description on the Art Blocks, there is a long version in my draft.

Inspired by traditional Chinesearchitecture and Chinese painting, this project uses algorithms to generatewindow lattices with different patterns and blossoms and trees with different postures. Together with the possible rain and snow scenes, they constitute a corner with oriental aesthetic charm. These scenes are dynamic, such as slowly moving window frames, tree-growing, raining, and snowing. The window lattice is an important aesthetic element in traditional Chinese architecture. The various patterns on it will decorate the landscape through the window like a painting. Such a picture synchronized with the four seasons is embedded in the deep memory of many people, condensing people's daily impressions of traditional culture. We can imagine being indoors, watching the shaky tree shadow outside the window, or looking into the window from the same perspective as the current picture. Maybe we are looking into memories, maybe we are looking into hopes, anyone can write their own poems. 

About the project itself, I would like to say that I truly want to do this topic though it's risky. You can see from the appearance, it is oriental. It may not appeal to many people's aesthetic and doing so as a Chinese may be seen as unconfident or deliberate. Simply saying, it is not international. But I've been interested in window lattices for a long time. It's from ancient times and very traditional, but it has a very neat geometric beauty. I think it would be interesting to explore it from a algorithmic perspective. It's like a dialogue between ancient and modern, a collision between random and deterministic.

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Some outputs of Through the Window on the testnet

In fact, the first two pieces of crypto art I sold were themed with the moon and window lattices. I found that many traditional Chinese decorative patterns contain a lot of generative art logic. So I think it's an unique topic in generative art. Especially in mainland China, there are not many generative artists.

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Chasing the moon. These two works are animated. Click to see the details.

Anyway, I am really happy and honored to show my unique project on Art Blocks. The only regret is that Through the Window is not a curated project.  But I will keep exploring, both the generative art and the theme of Chinese culture.  

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