{"access_artwork_files":"With proof of purchase, access to complete artwork and supplemental material is granted through creating an account on feralfile.com or Feral File’s official web address at the time of purchase. Files are redundantly stored on IPFS. If the official Feral File domain is no longer accessible or active, contact the present-day custodian of Feral File’s archive, the artist studio, or artist estate.","animation_url":"https://ipfs.feralfile.com/ipfs/Qmb6dfbCb45t3LdjxZt4XzAwSqAbeESLUZ5GmmQH4DocXz?edition_number=9\u0026blockchain=ethereum\u0026contract=0xF51bFC40C10289246e5BBa7afEDeB8cF976c3250\u0026token_id=4045563695846915711900312409516322895108670601\u0026token_id_hash=0x340e760b621e3e18565f992d23ca7987130136e097a9c53b4d24daffeb125610","artist":"Daniel Catt","artwork_index":9,"artwork_name":"#10","attributes":[{"trait_type":"Exhibition","value":"Feral File - N=12"},{"trait_type":"Series","value":"256 Kill-Screen"},{"trait_type":"Artwork of","value":"144"},{"trait_type":"Artist","value":"Daniel Catt"}],"collection_name":"N=12","collection_uuid":"b568cb2d-07bf-4019-b484-cb4b017eeede","creator":"0x29B2f895343CAdfB3f5101BEF6484B1F01c83Dc9","description":"Daniel Catt’s animated work “256 Kill-Screen\" poses the question “what if the World Wide Web was never invented and computer bulletin board systems (BBS) were the dominant interface of the internet?”\n\nThere is a lineage of faces rendered with ASCII text which includes Waldemar Cordeiro’s print of The Woman Who is Not B.B. (A mulher que não é B.B.) from 1973. Catt’s contemporary work builds on the computer interface directly, embracing its dynamic movement as well as the glitches inherent to it.\n\nThe colorful text can be traced to an infamous glitch in the 256th level of the original Pac-Man game. An 8-bit integer with a fixed range of 0-255 is used to count the current level, but the 8-bit counter for the game’s fruit element is 1 higher. This means that the fruit counter overflows on level 256, causing the game’s visual output to devolve into random characters.\n\nLayers of modern digital tools were used to construct “256 Kill-Screen,\" each influencing the next. Initially, a story was generated using ChatGPT (GPT-4). It was told to “imagine itself as the BBC Micro (an 8-bit home computer) user guide attempting to escape from hell, using the BASIC coding language as a method to open a portal to this world.” The resulting story was then converted into a Markov chain, a type of stochastic model which can be used for word prediction in a manner common to modern text messaging. The ChatGPT story is also fed into Midjourney and DALL-E 2—image generators powered by artificial intelligence—to create hundreds of outputs. These outputs are converted into raw data contained in Javascript files which can be read by the artwork script. The final artwork builds on these images and displays new stories using the Markov chain while being slowly corrupted and repaired over time.","exhibition_info":{"note":"N=12 is an experiment in building intentional community, with twelve artists collaborating across seven time zones. Contemporary computer-based artists create their work while connected to an effectively infinite network of information. This affords artists the capacity for infinite input and collaboration, leaving them to distill these disparate connections and experiences into their artwork. Distinctly, the computer artist’s principal tool for creation is also a means for connection. This exhibition leans into the inherent proximity of computer users by explicitly asking twelve artists to create work while in constant dialogue with one another. In doing so, the show makes audible the “wonderfully silent conversations” between artists that Frieder Nake referred to in his foreword to Casey Reas’s \u003ca href=\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9h469--G5OwYWt4XzF3OHNBd2M/view?resourcekey=0-p_2Z2gUGGskN_sjlLmK9OQ\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\"\u003e“CENTURY” catalog\u003c/a\u003e of 2012. \n\nFor N=12, the artists had direct and active conversations with each other. \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/annaluciacodes\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\"\u003eAnna Lucia\u003c/a\u003e, \u003ca href=\"https://www.visualcinnamon.com/\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\"\u003eNadieh Bremer\u003c/a\u003e, \u003ca href=\"https://revdancatt.com/\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\"\u003eDaniel Catt\u003c/a\u003e, \u003ca href=\"https://www.revafyw.com/\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\"\u003eReva Fan\u003c/a\u003e, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/ElsifThen\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\"\u003eElsif\u003c/a\u003e, \u003ca href=\"https://www.liacoleman.com/about\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\"\u003eLia Coleman\u003c/a\u003e, \u003ca href=\"https://piterpasma.nl/\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\"\u003ePiter Pasma\u003c/a\u003e, \u003ca href=\"https://ralenarc.com/\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\"\u003eRalenArc\u003c/a\u003e, \u003ca href=\"https://www.bartsimons.com/\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\"\u003eBart Simons\u003c/a\u003e, \u003ca href=\"https://nicolevella.com/\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\"\u003eNicole Vella\u003c/a\u003e, \u003ca href=\"https://ippsketch.com/\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\"\u003eippsketch\u003c/a\u003e, and \u003ca href=\"https://www.melissawiederrecht.com/\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\"\u003eMelissa Wiederrecht\u003c/a\u003e convened and collaborated online over several months, sharing their code and artistic processes while fostering a co-creative microcosm enriched by weekly meetings, aesthetic critiques, code reviews, and vibrant discussion. In doing so, they generated work with a dozen distinct fingerprints.\n\nThe participants in this exhibition were selected through a democratic process from the \u003ca href=\"https://www.genartclub.com/\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\"\u003eThe Generative Artists Club (genartclub)\u003c/a\u003e, a behind-the-scenes group of over five hundred generative artists founded in 2018. This group has become a nexus for artists working with systems to discuss works in progress, debug code, share mental health journeys, and connect with other creators from around the world that share their passion for generative art. This group is just one example of artists aggregating their collective efforts; many well-known groups throughout history such as the Batignolles Group (1870s), the Dadaists (1910s), and Fluxus (1960s) have seen artists collaborate to push their respective mediums forward.Unique to digital art, the mediums through which these artists interact are the same mediums through which artworks are created, completed, and distributed. By creating an environment for this sort of organic exchange of ideas, N=12 can serve as the basis for future groups to experiment.\n\nCollaborative creation—from a place of trust and vulnerability—spurs new aesthetic directions, strengthening both the work and the relationships. For example, Elsif initially pursued a composition of mountains in pointillist style. During group discussion around black and white outputs she drifted towards a more visceral aesthetic and shifted the entire work to monochrome, then in reaction to that starkness reintroduced color and found a new impressionistic sense of subject and texture. The idea of collaboration itself influenced multiple artists: Reva Fan’s intersecting collisions, ippsketch’s twelve interconnected shapes, Anna Lucia’s woven textures, Piter Pasma’s groupings, Nadieh Bremer’s overlapping lines, Nicole Vella’s clinging forms. \n\n“You put in fragments of an idea… something unexpected always comes out of the machine, and you try to piece it all together.” - Lia Coleman, creator of Emergence\n\nThis cross-pollination of ideas pushed each of the artists towards new technical and aesthetic innovations. Each of their works is created with code written by the artists themselves. This has required artists to be equally comfortable ideating with infinite imagination and instructing a machine to translate these ideas into reality. The \u003ca href=\"https://www.experimentsinartandtechnology.org/\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\"\u003eExperiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)\u003c/a\u003e of the 1960s normalized the collaboration of artists and engineers. In contrast, the artists of this show and of Feral File’s Ecotone—indeed, much of this generation—are themselves all hybrid artist-engineers. Not only do they critique each other’s aesthetics, they also debug each other’s code. In such a context, variables, functions, and logic are as open to influence as color palette. These artists are not just sharing outputs with each other, they are sharing their innermost processes.\n\nWhen viewing the resulting artworks, only the final output of the story is revealed, obfuscating the alchemical process of each of the artists. N=12 is a testament to the power of collaboration throughout a networked world that enables individuals to create something more than they could conceive individually. ","note_title":"The Influence of Confluence"},"external_url":"https://feralfile.com/series/21cbc74d-faf2-4c7c-b0c7-41b79eb8bf2d","id":"4045563695846915711900312409516322895108670601","image":"https://ipfs.feralfile.com/ipfs/QmX28S4BB2jM6H2xQwY7RbZ1WzpTLY3PcUnpYcZJKixvEd?","medium":"software","metadata_version":"v1","name":"256 Kill-Screen #10","royalties":{"decimals":4,"shares":{"0x2033606bE146405870F92Ea3144ef5057b9DEA48":250,"0x29B2f895343CAdfB3f5101BEF6484B1F01c83Dc9":750}},"series_id":"0xF51bFC40C10289246e5BBa7afEDeB8cF976c3250-2","symbols":"","timestamp":"2023-07-25 05:05:31.989864178 +0000 UTC m=+42817.598516085"}