What changes when everyone sees the world through screens and filters?
People watch live concerts though their phones while there. Meals can't be eaten until the food's been photographed. We exchange direct experience for something mediated. We flit amongst the enhanced and colorful scenes that the algorithms serve.
The Exposures series shows people navigating a wild and vibrant abstract world, yet somehow trapped and distracted.
The pieces combine different characters and attitudes, forming relationships within a digital world.
Under the hood the project populates a 3D scene with transparent characters posed, exposed, and juxtaposed. The scenes are rendered as paintings of a sort, snapshots of modern or classical figures reacting to their surroundings. The attitudes of the characters' limbs or torsos often match the angles around them as they try to blend in.
The characters are low-poly geometric models that I created, animated, and embedded into on-chain code.
This project combines themes from my previous projects, blending the sharp geometries of Inspirals (2021), Eccentrics (2021), and Ballistics (2023) with the flowing organic curves of Windwoven (2023). As with Windwoven, Exposures artworks feel somewhat natural but are undoubtedly digital in their use of colors and maximalist compositions.
The Concept
For years I've been thinking of creating generative artworks that aren't purely abstract. I love abstract art, but it's a rare abstract that really makes you ponder.
In generative art in particular it's far easier to create abstracts than representational works, especially if you limit yourself to creating everything with code, on-chain, as traditional Art Blocks collections do.
But representational works do appear in otherwise abstract series. In my own Eccentrics series' randomly-placed sets of circles suggested faces or staring eyes.
Other examples are the swooping bird of Emily Xie's 'Memories of Quilin' #388 (above left), or one I call The White Door from Thomas Lin Pedersen's 'Screens' series #966 (above right).
I wanted each artwork in this new series to have some kind of representational resonance and tell a story somehow -- even if the story was different for each viewer.
Lost in Abstraction
How can humans inhabit an abstract world?
Braques, Picasso and the Cubists separated figures into composite geometries of a sort, to isolate core elements of the human form (ref. Picasso's "Girl with a Mandolin", 1910). I went down a similar road for a bit, building figure-like shapes from geometric primitives, but it wasn't nearly as evocative as the works of those masters and didn’t have the impact I hoped for.
I had built characters from basic geometries before, in the Eccentrics Playing Cards project in 2022. The face card characters are heavily abstracted, composed of simple squares, circles, and triangles.
It was surprisingly effective for that project, but didn't carry much emotional weight beyond that. The lines are clean and precise and lacked humanity.
I researched other ways that artists have incorporated figures into abstract compositions, like M. C. Escher's tiled figures of contorted humans or animals or Pedro Friedeberg's humans layered over surreal architectures.
This all led to the idea of angular humans somehow orienting themselves to fit into an abstract geometric world, while retaining their humanity to a degree.
To make this work, this project needed to go 3D.
The Flattening: From 3D to 2D
I made some quick studies with a high res 3D character model placed within geometric 3D patterns. The model looked out of place. Its curves were too smooth. It seemed that the models needed to be more angular and similar to the sharp geometries around them.
In addition, a high-res 3D model needs megabytes of storage space. I wanted this project to be 100% on-chain so there wasn't much storage to work with.
I dusted off some old game development skills and modeled the low-poly 3D characters from scratch, making them angular and stylized, only about a thousand polygons each.
Primitive though they were they fit better in the environment. But their sharp lines and angles when rendered lacked some expressiveness. I looked for ways to soften their edges and make them more elegant; to find those expressive lines among the facets.
It was also clear that with such simple characters, their poses were the only window into what they are doing, thinking or feeling.
Posed, Exposed, and Juxtaposed
There's inherent drama in a scene where a small figure gazes at a huge environment around them, or where someone seems off-balance as they enter a new space.
Even one character in an artwork implies a narrative that can add extra meaning. If you then add a second character with a different pose, it can tell an even deeper story.
Generative art is often about creating a system to randomly apply elements and find surprising and beautiful combinations. Extending that technique to human figures, combining people with different attitudes in the same scene, can expand the narrative in unexpected ways.
What does it mean when one character dances freely but their companion's eyes are glued to the phone? When someone looks afraid but their friend just looks away?
The narrative complexity increases rapidly. With 72 different poses, this series can tell over 5,000 different stories with only two people.
I hope that each work in the series can reach beyond its random color and composition choices and tell its own unique story.
A Human Touch: Gestures and Rendering
Skilled artists can convey a gesture or attitude with a few expressive lines. I explored ways to find gesture-enhancing curves among the 3D vertices of these character models.
I also wanted to add a human touch to the rendering style, to make the works seem more natural and less obviously computer-generated.
This led to weeks of binge-reading computer graphics research papers on topics like 3D edge smoothing and photo contour detection. I experimented with shader coding to implement some of these ideas in a custom post-processing pipeline for the project.
As the brush-stroke rendering style developed, it was most effective when the scene had many gradual shifts in color and light. Gradation gives contour-seeking algorithms a lot more to work with. Making everything in the scene transparent or translucent provided lots of color shifts as panes or shapes overlapped. It also created wonderful color blends, especially neutrals that combine other colors from the chosen palette.
The search for gradation also led to a vertex-coloring technique that creates smooth gradients between those colors when rendered.
Imagine hundreds of panes of colored glass placed at different depths and angles, blending the light as it passes through them, and you have a good picture of how these environments are built.
This approach created images with a sense of movement and interest at every scale. Zooming into any part of an Exposures artwork reveals layered colors and swirling brush strokes, like miniature abstracts within the larger composition.
Composition and Color
It takes extra effort to give generative artworks compelling lines and highlights for the eye to follow. As with my earlier projects, the Exposures algorithm first chooses a composition 'template' to apply to the new work. The template suggests general area where elements should be placed, usually with lots of leeway for randomization to keep things interesting. It also suggests the lighting elements to add and which sets of models and poses to choose from.
In many compositions the characters find themselves alone in an alien environment.
Other arrangements show people in dance or martial arts poses fitting themselves to the angles around them. This calls back to certain M. C. Escher works where the contorted characters comprise the tiled pattern itself. But in Exposures the characters stay more human, even as they dissolve into the geometric world.
Color schemes and palettes are chosen randomly. Many of the works use a specific color palette containing from 6 to 20 different pigments. Naturally many more colors are created by the light passing through the layering and blending transparent shapes.
Other works use generative colors, selecting a limited spectrum of hues and colors, sometimes coloring the elements in hue order across the image.
The characters are semi-transparent too, taking on the colors of the digital world and sometimes blending in like chameleons.
Abstract Reflections
Exposures has been a challenging project. Technically, I’ve enhanced my generative coding toolset to encompass 3D models, new composition and color blending approaches, and complex shader-based rendering among other things.
Overall the project combines cool geometries, a warm and dirty rendering style, and the potential to generate visual narratives that provoke thought. It casts an eye toward our new normal of attention deficits and digital distractions.
As a digital art series it's one of the distractors too. It's easy to spend time exploring the possibilities without considering the story of each "1 of 1".
But maybe these works can also offer moments of pause – opportunities to explore them in detail, see ourselves abstracted and reflected, and consider the stories we're telling with our online lives.
Note: All the Exposures images shown are test images from the Art Blocks Sepolia testnet.