Surf Noir- Surf Noir Trailer 001 - ⍟
The light reflections on the kid's face in the first shot are an ok gen. Overall this is a mess of still images with a text that's obviously GPT generated. Very bad. The story is about a kid who wants to venture beyond the waves of a futuristic island city. Ok. But there's no tone, no worldbuilding, nothing to ground the narrative outside of this simple setup. Stock chill beat background puts me to sleep instead of getting me engaged with this trailer. Trailers are an interesting form in and of themselves. Godard opening sequences are better than most movies including his own. But he obviously has an attention to the cut and the edit that is entirely one thousand percent lacking from this junk. This is what I would make in middle school for a project if I was uninterested and turning it in last minute.

Pegasus vfx - Escape - ✧
This person knows a little more about creating a narrative. The artist is posed in his chair at first slumped, to indicate exhaustaion or lack of inspiration in front of his blank canvas. The single-frame animation style reminds me a bit of The Snowman (1982) which I hold close to my heart. But to compare the two is not ok. ESCAPE is also bad and fails at the same test stated above. A painter walking into a painting to paint a flower tells me nothing about the real situation of art. It has the same understanding of art as a decorative canvas from Home Goods, which could lead to interesting results if leaned into, but instead of leaning, this falls. The transition from the painting back to the real world is also lazy, rushed, and choppy. The sound design is funny though.

Sam Hains - Bullet Heaven [YOKO] - ✧✧✧✧.5
I love a demo as opposed to the final, as it suggests a work in progress which positions the player not only as a player, but a test who should maintain a shrewd or even critical attention. I can play this microgame multiple ways, either clearing all the bullets as they arise, or I can allow them to build and cover the screen before accomplishing a huge combo wipeout. Both are equally compelling, but allow me to think duration and accumulation in different keys. This is a masterclass of the new aesthetic category, the Satisfying. Manapool tracks are translations of visually feeling, bullet sprites are all beautiful and interesting as they modulate and blast across the screen. I hope to see more microgames in this vein for the future to come.

0xfff.eth - You Are Here - ✧
This kind of thing does not interest me. Why is there a genre of "onchain conceptual-generative artwork," to use this project's terminology, that desires to map transactions, relations between wallet address, or etc. I guess it is an easy subject to make a bunch of boring lines feel like they portend to something real and essential to the medium. But as have attempted to say before, just as American USD is not the essential medium for Painting, the Blockchain is not the essential medium for NFTs, the Image is.

Aly - Bloody Bag [Goodie Bag Vol. 1] - ✧
Pop production cannot make up for cringe raps. I couldn't listen to the full thing. A grab back of random nonsense pop rap flows. Overall with the music category, it feels strange to lump pop music in with these other visual art genres. Not sure whose idea that was, I assume they have a couple musician friends.

thepark.eth - becky v2 - ✧✧
I am not mad at this song if it came on in an NTS mix I would not bat an eye.

Mitchell F. Chan - Web3 Buddha - ✧✧✧✧
Congratulations Mr. F. Chan. You made something I don't hate. I actually quite enjoy it and increased my ✧✧✧.5 to a ✧✧✧✧ when I thought about how it would make you feel. The quartet while shooting bands at Buddhas before Pepes hail down is funny. I hope me saying you are funny makes you feel good. This is funny / silly in the same way rolling up a skyscraper in Katamari is, which I mention because I think you probably like that game. My advice for the future is you continue to set the limits of your games according to simple but thoughtful terms as with Web3 Buddha. I would have like to control the camera though.

Shavonne Wong - Whirlwind of the Waking Dream - ✧
Interesting both 1/1s involve spinning cameras. The spin here is supposed to represent a loss of control as the subject tumbles through dream states which are supposed to flex the different styles the artist has control over and reflect the multimodal chaotic nature of 21st cen technological reality. But this isn't actually what it feels like. Again fails the test of would I make this last minute in middle school for a project I didn't care about.

Jim Spindle - Little Fellow - ✧✧✧✧✧
Isn’t that sick tho Spindle.

Evil Biscuit - Drifella 2 - ✧✧✧✧
Putting Drifella on the cross inaugurates a new epoch. The hyper overlay mania of Drifella has leeched onto the face. Mask abundant. “Imagine Fentanyl Here” is the finest poetry I’ve read this year. Great text, asset choices, especially the chainmail king guy “noble.” But far and above I am most moved by the vignette overlay. Biscuit knows how to create noise and spectacle full of passion and diversity but will always find a way to slice it in the generation with a visual pattern that moves entirely against the grain of the other assets. This is what made the first Drifella project so significant, I am thinking of the riot shield, though I am sure there are more. Biscuit’s use of cascading overlays is the real technique that gets a victory lap with this sequel.

Miles Peyton - harpfeeder - Forever Projects - ✧✧✧✧.5
Harpfeeder is an FPS game about having sex on a deserted ocean floor with the last living organism by spraying it with bloodworms. The results of that sex are mainly sonic. By shooting worms and bringing the Harpfeeder to Plume, its individual appendages bounce against one another to generate bassy oscillator sounds. I am coordinating music by having sex with an organism FPS style. Even after I stop shooting, it reverberates against itself in what I must imagine is nutritive pleasure. I want to watch the worms squirm about the harp, so I pull the camera in, unfortunately too close, the noise shader bitcrushes itself and it feels like I took a handful of Benadryl. Obaa and Harpfeeder both are created with a neotenous minimal style, but both are very erotic. Maybe it is something about the loneliness of the ocean floor. I leave the Harpfeeder window open while I write this and eventually either someone else comes on and starts shooting worms or an idle autopilot takes over. My older bloodworms turn grey, the Harpfeeder must have sucked all the blood out. I am glad I could provide nutrition.

Supermetal Bosch - Little Swag World - ✧✧✧✧.5
The stable checkpoint as a final filter is an important contribution to the field. Handmade assets but individualized. Extremely polished and thoughtful trait sets. Everyone wants a Blue Eyes, but everyone has Something Special. Spiky headgears are all favorites. Like Bosch’s previous Overworld for Yeche Group Auction, but even more so, Little Swag World feels like it is part of a larger vision I hope to see play out in time. I want to walk around as an LSW. Do farming quests and socialize in a tavern.

Ed Fornieles and Fini Studios - Fini Episode One: Adventures in Symbiotic Love Tyranny - ✧.5
I am going to hire two interns for New Art Program that I can manipulate. They would first fall in love with me, as I would hold power over their lives through asserting my vision of contemporary life on the screen. My vision would flood theirs and allow them to not only speak on but sense the world in an exciting and vibrantly saturated new mode. They would fall in love with the way I see the world. But I would assure them because of my power over them we could never shift our business relationship into a romance. I would slowly suggest in private to each of my interns that the other one is in love with them, which would cause each of them to fall in love with the other in an attempt to satisfy my vision for their futures. Then I would tell them they could never date because it would compromise the New Art Program work they were doing, which would only intensify their feelings for one another. If Fornieles wants to get real, he needs to first be willing to drop a sextape with a Fini. Putting a marshmallow guy in a blender means nothing to me. Feels like the Looney Tunes bit where the illustrator takes over and starts erasing and changing characters, except instead of rotoscoping, they chose to use a shoddy green screen. Instead of sticking to the slapstick of Looney Tunes, they went with the vacant charm of Disney, which rhymes with the Fini Rebrand. I preferred the awkwardness of Finiliar.

Harm van den Dorpel - Struggle for Pleasure / Swallow, Only Shallow - Verse - ✧✧✧
I am glad the writing is there, and I do enjoy watching the images load. There is a difference between Pointilism which is about putting optical theory into practice for the sake of a Greater Image, and Pixels which are how screens work, worth spending more time with. Pixel Art is a non-category because of course all images on a screen are made of pixels. Like calling Paintings Paint Art. I should think about this more though. We should collectively spend more time thinking about what Pixels really are. Thank you for bringing my attention to this. Pixels are just squares. An aside, the reflections on the floor of the projectors are nice, but I don’t think Verse needs to keep doing the boring installation.

Billy Rennekamp and Joon Yeon Park - Suika Stay Home - ✧✧✧✧
I hope to see more no-player games like this in the future. What is the difference between a no-player game and a video? When you mint or reload a Suika Stay Home, you insert a coin into a plinko. There is probably no skill involved, but it still requires a player who becomes responsible for the probabilities instantiated by the subsequent events of the game. Plinko is a game which is about visualizing power probabilities, which is not what Suika Stay Home is about. There is more satisfaction here, watching coins gather and make more and more efficient use of space. Time ensures Space becomes more and more Value-Dense, which is not the way of Our Universe, but is the way of Fantasy. My favorite coins are the bunny puzzle and the frog. The reason I want to see more no-player or small type games is because they are more poetic by virtue of their compression. If Suika Stay Home were a sonnet, its volta would be the part where coins switch from numerical to representational. One could spend time thinking about that switch or spend time rewatching and feeling its effect. Within the context of a larger game, this transition would be of lesser significance, but in a small game, attention is allowed to focus and linger in the simplicity of the structure.

Evil Biscuit - MILADY AURA2 AFTER DEATH - ✧✧✧✧.5
A new era of Avant Dark Formalism where I can no longer be sure how each layer is ordered. This is the realm of the Trickster. A Trickster born out of a manic desperation for the entire project of the PFP to become more than a social hedge against image saturation. I now understand the Evil in Evil Biscuit. Layers bleed, fade into, and create new space out of one another. Aura-area sometimes acts as a relief and other times as a window into an image illuminated as if from behind the figure. A childhood desire to take a hammer to drywall so you can see not the room on the other side of the wall but the even more mysterious inner-workings of the wall itself. Biscuit excels more than any other at creating images that dramatize the collapse of figuration and abstraction. This is in part by a command of image-set variety but also through an innovative and masterful use of multiple background traiting. The minting experience created a Real Egg Hunt. A numerological foray developed by Biscuit since Drifella’s Dragonites, leading into the Crucifella Saga, and now culminating in The Eggs. From Evolution to Martyrdom to Rebirth. This suite of projects operate individually, but threads connect between them forming the basis of transfigurative poetics where IPs are reconstructed not only to present technically and aesthetically impressive images but also the beginnings of a Real and Individual Body of Work.

Jan Robert Leegte - Mountains and Drop Shadows - Verse - ✧✧
MacOS update environmentalism. The intuitive story would be to say that the latest suite of preloaded hi-res MacBook backgrounds capture a landscape that their own next-gen hyper threaded processors, energy sinkhole GPUs, and cobalt mined high capacity batteries will all decimate through the event of their production. Each update burns a different rainforest by memorializing it as a Home Screen. A piece of the update is lost in translating the ever-cycling 2013 browser-based work to an NFT. The original was more about movement whereas this project is more about the shadow itself. When you look at IRL vistas there is often an irresolute feeling between the depth of space and the flatness of the image triggered in your eyeball that Leegte’s drop shadowed mountain is a joke about. I do like them, but I recognize that's just because I like looking at images of mountains and I also like drop shadows.

BRG - Affirmational Posters - ✧✧.5
Even affirmation, an agreement about the present state of affairs and a willingness to modulate that state with positive potential, is disgusting. I stare at my screen, scrolling pictures of you staring at yours, texting you while on a hike through the alps, and I no longer see the glow of the cathedral windows, but instead a deep and pure exhaustion of keeping up the illusions that we want to be communication at all. Where the motivational invents a freedom from precarity that transforms the future into an object to be claimed by force through ten step real estate lifehacks, the affirmational invents a present within which anxiety and doubt are reversed into reverence for a supposedly timeless but thoroughly outdated millennial state represented by images of pastoralized screens and screenspaces. It’s not that these ways of interrupting or substituting the present for something else, be that an image of the future or of a self which can exist in accordance to the present, is bad per se, but moreso that these pseudo-fantasies lack the emotional ferocity that make fantasies worthwhile at all, instead they prefer a barred out experience of the world because to get upset or desire would be unsurvivable.

World Peace Coin - Fijis - ✧✧.5
Why is desire unsurvivable? The longer I look at Fijis, the more I am taken by their Disney-voided stares. They seem overwhelmed by the AI trait maximalism the point of self-emptying, which feels appropriate given the entire premise of the project seems as if to accelerate trait density and variety using Stable cocktails to the point of annihilation. And yet the trace of the trait remains. Background styles move between Vaporwave to server rooms to Fortnite maps. Many Fijis hold weapons, books, power crystals. But there are no real traits. Along with Biscuit’s latest, Fiji registers as an elegy for the dream of the PFP that was never fully realized or fully felt, wherein the portrait would push beyond the figure through to the figured. And yet with Fijis, I never get the feeling they would be capable of wanting more or putting anything up for risk. Which is to say I cannot imagine them having sex.

SPX6900- Project AEON - ✧.5
Only worth mentioning because the tag trait is an inventive and significant contribution to the field.

Nahiko - Bit Rot - Fingerprints Studio - ✧
Good as a visualization for a general anxiety around NFTs and archival longevity. Fun to zoom and see the different PFPs. It suffers from starting without any rot, the bills are uninteresting as images. I assume there’s nothing much attempted, though, outside of creating a kind of visual aid for figuring the anxiety. It’s too bad currency is taken out of circulation before it’s allowed to totally decompose.

John Provencher - HAHA, over-time - Verse - ✧✧✧.5
Interesting these two are grouped together, as they feel like two distinct and self-contained works. I see this as a successful risk counter to that of the Wild group show. HAHA treats the moment of mint as a publication event, inaugurated by a receipt printer. Each print fills the ledger with oscillating waveforms, rings, and helixes, which can tend towards DNA strands, leaves, planets, angel wings, and more. I would wish for more than just the repetition of haha, but I guess that, along with the receipt, is the joke. Adding in a physical instantiation just to render it digital again is pretty funny too. Similarly, but with looser geometries and a different substrate, over-time feels like a cousin of some of Jan Robert Legate’s html-based works. They remind me of the thing where a cool kid in high school would fill out the standardized test so that it revealed an image of a smiley face instead of actually taking the test. Within that act is a desire to transform the event of disciplinary control, intellectual evaluation, and standardization into a moment of delight and freedom birthed of constraint. There is another joke with over-time about forms. The animation is impressive.

Emily Edelman - Twos - Artblocks - ✧.5
Needed to do an Artblocks one, but they've been so boring it's hard to find the right one to make it work. Especially when compared to Provencher’s, this just feels like an uninspired attempt at a typesetting demo. If you’re going to go full typeface-study you have to throw some radioactive sludge on it and tattoo it onto a frog to make me interested. The Jasper Johns paintings I assume this is in part inspired by has the convenience of being a painting and of depth by superimposition. In comparison, this is less visually stimulating, and in a medium which is even more brutally competitive in its attentional expectations. Some do interesting things with depth, implying three dimensional cylinders or folds, but overall they feel like they miss out on an extra step.

Travess Smalley - Coordinates - Folia - ✧✧✧✧
Coordinates gets the first Art rank because of the way its viewing interface obscures the primacy of any one framing for each image. Each iteration evokes an array of potential visual systems, an overworld, rug, maze, circuitboard, or some combination. We typically think of digital images as mapping data to representations, but Coordinates suggests by its title an inversion, where images are transformed into maps. Instead of revealing one’s position however, these maps beget dislocation. I cannot tell what the edges of each image are, which level of zoom is the furthest and most objective, where I am, except when my cursor switches to zoom-in and the patterned frame of each image is revealed. The conventions of the screen are used and disrupted to create a physical effect of disorientation in the viewer. This is repeated in the image selection design, where resizing the window semi-generates a wavelike animation using the list of edition and owner. The barometer for Art is feeling something viscerally.

Figure31, Jeffrey Alan Scudder, Sten - MATERIAL - Wild - ✧✧
The fact of the group show seems to be obscured after the first day, in favor of individual collections which apparently sold out. Don’t look too much into it. This brings me to a larger point about the viability of group shows. The singular identity of a collection is most easily speculated on, so a group show naturally feels unviable in terms of sales. Especially when the point of the group seems not to produce a discourse around a constellation of artwork but instead to hedge against cold sales, users sense the desperation and it signals counterproductively. You have to go all in or stick to the single-author collection. It's sad because on their own, these would have had the space to develop more and establish their own identities. They gain nothing from being grouped together under the vague MATERIAL. That said, Mr. Scudder really flexing Aesthetic Computer. The paintings are nice, especially those which tend towards bitcrushed bullet hell screenshots, synthesizing his fluency in flash game golden age. “Cute White Kitty” and “Distinguished Pump” are also standouts. There is a bit of twee-affected language spread through the collection that I wish Mr. Scudder would cut. But I remember these paintings are also what he would call “demos” for the Aesthetic Computer itself, which authorizes a bit of teenage self-victimization insofar as it shows kids the expressive capacity of the software. I’ve enjoyed flipping through their creation process, not because it reveals anything per se about the process of painting, but moreso because the interactivity invites me to view each painting that much longer. This simple function is a gesture of compassion towards my attention. The audio clip is satisfying. I can’t quite place its origin but I know I’ve heard it before. My first thought is Takagi’s Crimson Room. I don’t want to look it up to confirm, rather I will believe it to be true, as rewinding a painting becomes akin to escaping a room. Unsurprisingly, Figure31 shows a new level of irrelevance that’s almost shocking in the pseudo-intellectuality of its approach and lifelessness of its execution. UN press photos transformed into color fields that look like preset photoshop gradients is a rare combination of random senselessness and boring. Is it wrong to say I cannot offer anything descriptively critical because I am so taken by the pointlessness of the endeavor? I simply don’t care about any aspect. If these pictures figure anything of their subject matter, it is the evil obscured by bureaucratic deferral of responsibility. I can only hope something jostles Mr. Figure into approaching life with less fear and more curiosity. Little Lyell Machines, on the other hand, feels accomplished and provocative in producing a link between geologic deep time and blockchain time. There is a loose poetic form present in navigating fragments within the geologic cross-section via random spatial skips that runs counter to linear premise of stratification and even the gridded map at the top of the artwork. While the design and palettes feel underutilized, the strength of Sten’s work is in the thoughtfulness in constructing a system or form. All it really needs is a reskinning and rethinking of traits and this is Newish Art. Navigation is the new meta.

Grant Yun, LoVid, ykxotkx, Osinachi, Operator, Peter Burr, Dmitri Cherniak, Kim Asendorf, Casey Reas, Sarah Friend, Sasha Stiles, Linda Dounia, IX Shells, p1xelfool, Anna Lucia - MoMA Postcard First 15 - ✧✧✧
Seems strange to write about something at MoMA but, it's too good an example of how not trying hard and just executing something cute is a quick way to a Good. Looking through each postcard, there is a range of authorial expression that seems to reveal something psychologically vulnerable about each artist's relationship to their own work. What I mean is some prompts feel more like statements that are themselves the primary work, while others feel like genuine prompt for the other artists to generate the primary work as the prompt falls out. Maybe I'm projecting though. I like the geese the most. Didn't realize the backstory but that's fun. I would enjoy a fully realized goose pfp project. It’s time to go back to the basics. Rethink and rework the pile of rubble left by the past few years. Separate fact: the best work of art involving geese is an early painting by Werner Büttner. An easy top five all time painting.

Ann Hirsch - Sacra Famiglia - ✧✧✧
I wish there were more rooms. The images alone make me feel nothing. The generated deformities are a distraction from the main strength of the experience which is its quietness. Getting lost moving through rooms with the audio track is very pleasurable. A case of the supplemental being more significant than the primary. Extra half star because every project should have a thoughtfully constructed website that informs the work.

Jonathan Chomko - Natural Static - JPG - ✧
Legacy galleries can coast on minmialisty artwork to make a quick and easy bag with something palatable to old collectors who go ah yes that looks like art! And maybe even the digital art world can do this too, in the short term at least. But it is totally detrimental for any long term survival of this failing network to try and act like there’s anything remotely challenging about this. It’s time to be honest with one another. I feel more productively provoked when i look at a 10k pfp of shark football players than more money-printer monochrome screen savers. And yet the text accompanying the work seems to suggest there is something radical going on here. I am open. I look at the work and there is nothing there for me. I read the about page for more clues and only find some ill-proofread stuff with stakes in an imaginary tradition of art. Disgust at the desperation to make generative art a tradition is the first feeling I get in my experience so far. Again, this could work in other contexts, this blatant trick, but it is a violent thing to suggest that the fact this was made by standing next to water rather than overheating a bunch of GPUs implies a radical refusal of mastery. That’s just language as cover. The following from Al Warburton's haphazard writing on Outland is particularly offensive, though I admit I am moving away from the work and instead speaking to a framing text, “Despite its sophistication, fluid simulation is more of an abstract art than a science. It’s not the real thing, it’s drag. And it’s a competitive kind of drag—a pageant.” Using drag as a metaphor to critique art that makes use of artifice, simulation, or “pageantry” is not a new tendency of sloppy writers. But it does get to the ugly side of the rhetoric used to bolster this series, which is that the refusal of mastery would not be possible without an essentialist understanding of the purity of Nature. If there is such a thing as the beauty of turbulent water, it is present in a physics simulation as it is in the middle of the ocean. Art is neither real nor fake, but stupid and potentially offensive writing like this only makes me want to side with simulation.

Nomemene - The alchemist who tried to put a soul in the homunculus didn't have a soul either - Galerie Yeche Lange - 🐟
A Program should reveal their situatedness when it comes to working with certain artists and exhibition spaces. I will designate this and withhold my scoring system with a custom emoji whenever it occurs. If you want to know what I think of the artwork, read the press release. What I will add here is that it would've been nice to put a sculptural object in the center of the Open Edition circle. A giant decaying fish trophy or something along those lines, to anchor the experience more, as its current arrangement more or less lacks a center. There was at time talk of adding a fishing minigame, and I also wish this could've come to fruition. A theme which I imagine will emerge here is that the supplemental is more important than the primary when working on screen. Though maybe I'm just feeling envy after I saw Earl posted about going on a three week fishing trip.

Jeffrey Alan Scudder and Georgica Pettus - Textfence - Gemma - ✧.5
You need three voices for a drama.You could argue the fence is the third, but its caesuric effect is too meek to do anything tangible aside form reminding me of Pong.

Mitchell F. Chan - Boys of Summer - Wild - ✧
Not sure who paid off the Brooklyn Rail to publish “The Play’s the Thing” puff piece, but I would love to be in touch with them. The funny part about fantasy sports is that the fantasy is not one of participation but of bureaucratic gambling, in essence it is a fantasy where you pretend to sit at a desk and read spreadsheets. As a video game, Boys of Summer commits a similar error, foregoing the aesthetics and experience of a beautiful game for inane and pointless abstract manipulations of data. Sure, it may be a masterfully Byzantine Excel Spreadsheet, but if that’s what I wanted to experience, I would just start including my crypto assets in my tax returns. The models look like angular extrusions of Corporate Memphis illustrations with a gross VHS shader overtop. Overall I rarely see any successful works of art deal directly with “quantification” In part because artists, especially those of the Juxtapoz Generation, are too stupid to understand what big data really means, but also because quantification is more a tool than it is a subject. It would be more worthwhile to look at the actors who develop, maintain, and purchase usage of the tool.

Jan Robert Leegte - Web - Fingerprints Studio - ✧✧✧
Leegte’s work is noble. He’s been Doing It and also Committed to Doing It. Visually, my favorite was probably Ornament, followed by Window. The palette of Web makes me feel a bit uneasy in more of a nauseous than provocative way. But the experience of navigating through the blank Web pages is actually quite incredible. My nauseous response to the color flips, as the panes begin to resemble stained glass. This is probably just a weak spot of mine. But it works and I must be 100% honest. Precise and inviting introduction on the website earns this an extra half star.

Maya Man - I'm Feeling Lucky - Verse - ✧✧✧.5
An admirable advancement from Fake It Till You Make It. Same text constraint, but the variety of composition almost convinces me these are handset rather than generative. Some are three word mantras, others are polyvocal fortunes that look like Mallarme’s “Un coup de dés…” It would be worthwhile to read these two texts side by side. To be honest I am more moved by the design than the writing, but I wouldn’t expect generated text to be moving, so I don’t actually care. My favorite moments in the writing is when it veers from one idiom abruptly into another. I locate my surprise and fascination in these moments and would’ve preferred them intensified. The black and white works well to cut out the new age astrological associations and instead feels more aligned with the Co-Star app. These are not the fortunes dictated by the stars themselves but New Fortunes by dense clusters of digital scraps, peered into and read by our modern oracle, algorithmic intelligence.All of this was immediately apparent in spite of Verse’s copy pasted Zwirner website which makes me feel like I’m in hell.