NFTs - Select blockchain projects
Tide Predictor, 2022
LoVid's signature video work mixes handmade analog synthesizers with digital tools in immersive Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) compositions that celebrate luminosity, chaos, relationships between craft and engineering, and connections between body and tech.
Tide Predictor, LoVid's first onchain generative work, builds a bridge from video synthesizer patches to algorithmic code-derived imagery. This collection is formally and technically inspired by hardware-based image generation, and places experimental moving-image, circuit boards, and electrical signal-based video art at the conceptual roots of generative art.
Tide Predictor is a modular video synthesizer patch model, designed to reflect the analog spirit by working with three channels: RGB. Tide Predictor reimagines NTSC-encoded, oscillator driven electrical current based video synthesis while adding digital randomness/unpredictability, and transformations based on code, along with each mint's unique content.
In the late 19th century, mechanical analog computers used rhythm and repetition to anticipate the rise and fall of water levels. In addition to "tides", which are low frequency oscillations of the ocean, higher frequency changes or "waves" are frequently discussed in reference to both water and electrical signals. By working with looping - and explicitly addressing the period (=1/frequency) for each RGB color - Tide Predictor extends analogies between the flow of water and the flow of electricity.
LoVid's Tide Predictor brings these relationships from the blockchain, through your screen, straight to your retina!
Augury, 2023
Augury is a festive collection ranging from vast sorbet-colored landscapes to dense pattern iterations.
Augury remixes frames from LoVid's red, green, and blue (RGB) luminous moving image work. For over two decades, LoVid has been making audiovisual works using custom-built handmade analog video (and audio) synthesizers. In addition to moving-image media, LoVid's outputs capture stills (frames) from generative video and incorporate these into digital collages, textile designs, wearable works, prints, and more. An essential part of LoVid's process involves translating signals and experiences from one medium into another. This conversion/interoperability appears critical for living in an interdisciplinary, intermedia, intersectional mixed-reality world.
With Augury, LoVid continues exploring on-chain processes that are inspired by the mechanism and aesthetic of analog synthesis. This collection builds upon LoVid's first analog video synthesizer-inspired collection: Tide Predictor. Each output in Augury grabs frames from the Tide Predictor algorithm (using a unique new hash) and arranges them on the screen based on a set of instructions, possibilities, and limitations. The generative compositions in Augury are therefore both procedurally related to and visually reminiscent of quilting, tapestry pattern designs, and tactile weaving. They use visual elements that LoVid often employs in static works: mirroring and repetitive looping, abrupt changes in intensity and detail, overlapping recycled patterns, and a colliding playful mix of lines and signals buzzing in different directions.
The rules applied in Augury are primarily set around placing variable levels of density on the borders, the edges of the work, creating a sense of dynamic movement and discovery. Focusing the viewer's gaze outside the center encourages shifts in perspectives, literally and symbolically. Augury is inspired both by the ideas and aesthetics in the Pattern and Decoration (P&D) movement and Glitch art.
P&D emerged in the 1970s as a response and challenge to a predominantly white male aesthetic that dominated the artworld and historically marginalized art forms and practices of women and people of color. P&D took a feminist approach by shifting the conversation around crafts and decorative arts, placing them on an equal canonic level with western-style paintings. Augury expands this conversation to generative art and challenges hierarchies and relationships to status, economy, and desire.
Glitch art refers to artifacts that were created by machine error, intentionally or by chance. Glitch as an art form originally emerged as a response to and celebration of loss in signals "fleeting artifacts that momentarily offer a glimpse into the inner workings and complexities of storage, display, and communication technology" (Iman Moradi, 2009). In Augury, LoVid incorporates a color palette, textures, and shapes inspired by both digital glitches and inherently unstable analog outputs. Aesthetically and viscerally, Augury finds beauty in discarded marginal dysfunctionality.
This collection's title, Augury, refers to the practice of interpreting omens/predicting the future based on the behavior of birds. Complex systems and environmental signals inspire and require attention. LoVid's Augury harnesses and embraces this chaos, the turbulent flow of data, to bring you a sweet and colorful feast for the eyes, food for thought and beyond!
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Hugs on Tape, 2021-2024
Hugs on Tape satisfies a visceral need for physical contact in the pandemic era. In the early days of the pandemic lockdown we wanted to distribute hug-simulations and share bursts of joy and intimacy. We sent a call out to friends and family requesting recordings of hugs with someone in their pod. The recordings captured tenderness and love among those spending more time than ever together, and a choreography of closeness inside the familiar frame of video, animation, and zoom calls. The series is created with tools ranging from handmade audio/video synthesizers to smartphones and digital animation software. All the patterns and colors in Hugs on Tape are made exclusively with hardware, analog synthesizers and other analog instruments from recording sessions we've made over the past 20+ years.
Bamboo, 2023
Bamboo draws the viewer into a turbo-charged landscape of digital dimensionality and analog color. Bamboo's dynamic composition is a mesmerizing display of flickering moments and spiraling epochs that evoke play and pleasure.
Pollen Punch, 2023
Pollen Punch is an audiovisual tapestry composed of very short repeating loops pulled from live video recordings. These recordings were created with LoVid's A/V synthesizer system of handmade instruments engineered and built by the artists. Rocking the Pixel Generation, Pollen Punch includes rare footage made with LoVid's 8-bit video instrument, Dragon Slayer (2004), which was created in collaboration with Douglas Repetto. This moving image collage includes naturally occurring glitched frames that were inadvertently created in the process of making Pollen Punch, while compressing each individual video tile. The melange of materials and soundscape is representative of LoVid's maximalist aesthetic when elements cross pollinate and feed into one another: pixels, sounds, video, noise, and glitch.
Upstate Summer, 2022
Spend the whole afternoon in an overgrown meadow and usher in the sunset. Split the hanging time in the wild and in the analog video synthesizer studio; at some point one blends into the other.
SOUVENIRHRZ, 2023
SOUVENIRHRZ by LoVid is a retro-futuristic collection. It's a mix of nostalgia with rainbow colored dystopia. The sixteen stills capture moments in the artists' work flow in the analog video studio.
heartsleeves, 2024
đź’–heartsleeves is a multifaceted generative video project. Part one is code-based, abstract video art that then becomes the basis for community portraits once minted. In this layered generative process, the artists take advantage of the distributive nature of art on the blockchain to elevate the community to co-creators who can generate their own portraits within the environments LoVid has defined.
The work is both a culmination and a departure point for the celebrated artistic duo, LoVid, weaving together disparate shapes and symbols that evoke projects from their decades-long career as video and performance artists. These icons are organized on grids that weave above and below each other, moving across the screen to form an abstract video fabric.
The live generator will play forever without looping, suggesting an infinite abstract plane only visible in the square window of the art object, to be passively observed. The work exploits two unique qualities of the blockchain—the ability to store code on-chain allowing for the transmission of this never-ending generative video, and the unique aspect of verifiable ownership.
The second part of this work is only unlocked by this ownership. Each video skin becomes an immersive environment in the portrait studio, but only the owner can access the specific skin. Opening the portrait studio shifts agency away from the artists, as the collector becomes the co-creator.
Through the portrait studio, the portrait sitter is pulled into the video environment created by the original code-based generative video. Faces slip inside it, get pulled in, and become defined by color woven amongst the shapes along the three-dimensional planes of the face. While the studio distorts color and projects shapes onto the face, the participant has their own agency in the portrait's color, exposure, zoom, and more predetermined elements.
This opens up a second phase of generative production. The artists leave the community with instructions and parameters to produce the final stage of the work—video portraits created in collaboration with the generative mechanic the artists predetermined.
The portrait subject transforms from a passive participant into something much more integral. They are physically present, engaged, and able to directly influence the final product. This means radical sharing of agency, as collaborative portraits created away from the artists can be automatically entered into the canon.
Digital Tapestries, Ongoing
Digital Tapestries are boisterous collages of analog, digital, and handmade visual materials. Details and patterns are emphasized by looping and juxtaposing analog video frames, painting, and sewing. LoVid's practice focuses on relationships and translations between media and material, tangible and virtual objects and spaces. Digital Tapestries are Web3 manifestations of LoVid's textile work, created through a hybrid of computer based, automated, and hand manipulated processes.