UNIT-ON-CHAIN: Iskra Velitchkova, Emily Xie & William Mapan on Creativity and Randomness in Generative Art

Unit-on-Chain is a podcast series from Unit London offering a ground for critical discussions for artists and thought leaders from the Web3 ecosystem.

Season 1 of our podcast coincides with In Our Code, a highly-anticipated exhibition of generative and digital art in partnership with AOI, on display from 13 September – 16 October exclusively at Unit London.

For Creativity and Randomness in Generative Art, the third episode of the series, join us in conversation with artists Iskra Velitchkova, Emily Xie and William Mapan about historical artistic movements that inform their process, long and short-form generative art, and randomness in their practice.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE on Spotify and Apple.

On Creating Texture Using Algorithms

Emily: I think what’s really fascinating to me is that sense of materiality in generative art and I think that’s a really interesting discussion that to think about as you’re making your art as an artist, because in the space, particularly, because at the end of the day, your medium is literally intangible. What you display on the screen is just pixels on a screen. So I think it’s really fascinating as an artist for me to explore that sort of dynamic. What does it mean to create texture? What does it mean to create something that’s so material when at the end of the day, it’s just bits.

And so, that’s why I’m so fascinated by it. But the process itself really takes advantage of that generative aspect of generative art. Really leaning into the machine’s capabilities. That means for me to create texture, it means creating fake primitives over and over and over again, lightly at very light opacities and overlaying them on top of each other. And using that to generate texture and oftentimes doing that according to natural looking distributions.

Iskra: In my case, it depends on the project. I feel sometimes digital art doesn’t need texture, it feels very natural without texture because it’s not material. And sometimes I just like to embrace the digital nature of them, which is so clean.

For me, it happens when I work with concrete shapes, even if it’s a being or a building. But when I play with landscapes, try to represent sky, or sea, or grass, or something that really tries to get into the world around and represent something familiar to us. I like to play with textures there and I do, like you said, Emily, it’s nothing more than adding millions of lines, millions of shapes, playing with opacities, overlapping and then playing with different browsers to see the difference, because that affects the result a lot. My process is that at the end, playing with scales, actually. If I put the right scale, you’ll see a shape, but if I put a very crazy scale, for example, you’ll go to the very, very detail without knowing which shape it is. So at the end, you go to a very little detail which actually is just noise that you can use as texture. So this is my process. 

William: I really like what you were saying. I think it is the same for me, depending on the project and for something when the subject is fully digital, sometimes you don’t need texture. It’s good and clean as it is.

In my experience I’ve started art with classic stuff like gouache, acrylic, and paper. Producing this texture with code is for me a way to link my practice from the physical to digital. But with the generative art possibilities, you can just enhance what couldn’t be possible with real life. So for me, it’s like a bridge I’m building. I really tried to think a lot about this because this question comes up a lot from time to time.

I think for me, it’s about being grounded to what I’m doing in physical. And because I really like to play with texture, light and colours because these three components are really at the core of my practice. I still need to explore, but I feel my brain needs to reproduce what is seen in real life to connect with me and with others so it’s really communicated. I think that’s the way I approach the textures.

What I love about exploring textures, it’s all about observation and I just love to observe. I could grab a piece of paper and just look at it for an hour and say, okay and take some notes and say “Yeah, there’s this little sparkle, a little grain.” And, it just makes a good base to work on and a good challenge as well, to do it with code. For me it is about challenges and communication.

On Having a “Signature Style”

William: I’d like to not have signature styles in a specific thing, like, “oh yeah, William can recreate paper texture perfectly.” I don’t want that. I would like to specialise myself in texturing, but as a concept, so maybe if you see something with very great texture, you think, “oh, maybe it’s William.”

I think that I would prefer people to identify me as a concept more than a specific thing, like a specific colour or specific texture, because as you say, I think I’m still evolving. I’m quite a young artist. I think an artist evolves his or her heart for life, it’s a lifelong thing.

It’s not something you develop and “boom”, you are the master at it. Maybe today I have style, but in two years it will change. When I go see artists I like in exhibitions, sometimes you see the progression. Maybe at year one, it was this style and at some point it was another style. And at the end of the career, everything merges and it makes sense. So I’d like to, for me, I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m going somewhere. It will make sense at some point.

Iskra: I do like to have a style associated with myself. I think in long-form projects I am trying to figure out what my style is. Is it one of the editions, or it’s the whole project? We have a lot of constraints in the long-form. We have to make it diverse. We have to build it consistently. We have to play with a lot of different outputs. So at the end, that also challenges your own style because you have to make such different things. This for me challenges my own style. 

So I think more than having a style, what you can find from the artist in the combination of many long-form projects is like a nuance. It’s something that you don’t really know what it is, but there are artists who play with very very soft colours or very soft shapes, or there are artists that play with stories and you see that story.

So it’s not a very simple question anymore about your style. It’s about maybe the way you code. So for me, it’s a hard question about the style of someone today in terms of generative. 

Emily: Personally for me I do care about having a signature style. I think “signature style” is an interesting way to put it. I’m not sure if I would call it that, but maybe more like visual evidence of what I care about.

For me, I would say that, Memories of Qilin was an important turning point for me in my career as an artist, because for the first time, I would say it marked my transition from a creative coding hobbyist, someone who was just doing experiments and sort of playing around and learning techniques to that of an artist. That algorithm was the first time in my life that I felt I had created something that truly expressed myself that I felt like I could identify with, that I felt like, had me in it. It was the first time that I felt like I identified with an algorithm. And so I think I’ve been continually latched onto that and thought, what more was there to explore? How much further can I explore myself?

Using aspects of this, or something I realise I care a lot about is textures and patterns bringing disparate elements together into a final piece. I care a lot about variety and colours. So I hope that’s evident in my work. I hope that “style” is there because I do think that really underscores a lot about what I care about. And I think though, of course, to William’s point about evolution, I expect myself to go through different movements of my own visual aesthetic. At some point I know that I’ll want to explore other things and I expect to bring parts of what I’ve cared about in the past into this new “style”. I think it’s important to always have a part of yourself in your algorithm, for it to show through visually.

Randomness as an Agent in Generative Art

William: Sometimes people don’t understand that generative art is about randomness and how you control or let go around the mess. And I think that’s a really interesting concept for us because I don’t know if a lot of other practices have this concept while creating, whereas for us it’s the core of the practice.

A bad thing about long-form generative art is you can control a lot of randomness while when you just produce one unique outputs. You can be surprised yourself by the randomness, but it doesn’t matter, everything that is not good, won’t be seen by other people. But with long-form you can’t let your algorithm do its life. Whatever happens it’ll happen because there will be some stuff that is not conveying what you wanted to say. So randomness is a very important component of our practice.

I’d like to say when I do generative art, I’m expecting the unexpected, I want the unexpected. I want all the conditions to be surprising. I don’t want too much control at least at the beginning of the production, because the idea is my idea. But I think my role as a generative artist is to let the machine talk to me as well. What are the boundaries? Because we can’t see it. We can’t even imagine it with our brains, because there’s so many parameters, so many stuff we don’t see, we can’t understand. So I think it’s very important as generative artists to let go and to not be too much in control because we can’t know what’s to come.

Emily: I absolutely loved what William just said and totally agree with it. Randomness is such an important part. I think it’s often-times about defining the parameters of randomness too. It’s like a delicate dance with the machine. It’s a conversation that you’re having back and forth as you’re developing.

And for me, a lot of the time it’s about telling the machine that when you generate this, for a series, particularly long-form, there will be a parameter space that you explore. You’re defining the bands of it. Maybe it’s a narrow space that traverses; maybe you’re allowing the machine to go through a much wider space and for different parameters, that space is gonna be different. And I think a lot of long-form generative art is about defining the boundaries, I guess.

Iskra: Yes, I thought this is the first time in history that art doesn’t actually depend on the artist itself. So even if you’re thinking about the recent years of contemporary art, the most crazy abstract things, the jokes about it – “this can be painted by a kid.” Artists have huge freedom in the pieces sometimes. But even in these cases, artists are the one who throws the paint and the brushes.

But now you are just giving a small percentage of control and then the machine gives you something and that’s for the first time something (like this is) happening. 

We are just giving some clues to how we want to be surprised. So that’s, I think the first time. And it’s not easy to understand, even for us, not to mention, the rest of the people how this work is being presented? This is something very different.

(Scroll to bottom for full transcript)

Emily Xie is a generative artist and engineer based in New York City. Her artistic practice blends her passion for programming and aesthetics, exploring the infinite creative possibilities of generative artworks. She holds a BA in History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University, and an MA in Computational Science and Engineering. 

Iskra Velitchkova is a self-taught artist from Bulgaria, now based in Madrid. With a focus on the interplay between machines and humans, her works speak to the limitations of the human conditions in contrast to constant evolution of new technologies. Her practice is influenced by Balkan and Mediterranean culture, while exploring the artificial intelligence industry in tandem with the nuances of artistic process.

Based in Paris, William Mapan serves as a pioneer in the digital art space with an artistic practice that spans over 12 years. With a background in software development, Mapan combines his technical skills with his passion for pigment, light, and textures. Often alternating between various explorations of materiality, Mapan is recognized for this distinct style which invites the viewer into an ethereal world. 

Abigail: Welcome everyone to Unit-on-Chain today. We have three amazing artists here with us. We have William Mapan, Iskra Velitchkova and Emily Xie. Welcome all.

Iskra: Hi everyone.

Emily: Hi, thanks for the welcome.

Abigail: So, we’ll jump straight into it today. We have quite an exciting roster of questions, but just to get started, I wanted to get into each of your background and I’ll start with you, Emily. You have a background in Art History and Computational Science and Engineering. Can you give the listeners a brief overview of that combination?

Emily: Yeah, so I did study History of Art and Architecture in that discipline and that was for my Bachelor’s. And within that discipline, I focused a lot on Modern Art actually. And then for my background in Computational Science and Engineering, that was for Master’s. I focused a lot on Machine Learning and graphics.

And so I suppose you could see the ways in which that informs my practice. I would say that a lot of my art references, maybe styles, works that have been done in our past are part of Art History in a lot of ways. And I would say that my studies in CSE have also influenced my work by teaching me techniques that can be applied.

And another part of my background is that I also spent time as a software engineer. I worked until somewhat recently as a full-time engineer and that certainly has informed my practice because it just gave me years of coding experience, I guess.

Abigail: Thank you. Iskra, can you talk about your background in data visualisation and information design and how that influences your artwork today.

Iskra: Yeah, sure. I think in everything. Actually I studied economics, which apparently has nothing to do with what I’m doing now, but, at the end, economics was for me a tool to understand the world around me. At that time I thought that maybe that would help me to understand. But at the end was something that didn’t really interest me so much.

So I found, I think it was two years before finishing my studies, I talked with the professor in the university and he told me about data visualisation. In economics, you are always doing graphics and showing information somehow. But he told me that maybe I would be more interested in something more creative since I was more creative at that time. So, yeah, I just got a bit into the space . There was a small hype here in Spain, at least of adding data to journalism and to show information in a different way. So actually, we both created a studio when I finished my studies and we stayed there for a few years.

And then we stopped, let’s say the activity in the studio and I ended up in a big corporation here in Spain, the the centre of excellence, a huge bank here. And things became more free for me, I have a lot of resources there to do things. I was surrounded by a huge team of scientists there.

And I started to believe that what I really wanted to get in was more in the algorithms, more in the data itself. So I became an activity of philosophy of technology or something like that. Something that I just made up for myself to be happy in the company. And then I got so much interested in how the algorithms work itself; how could I display more in that visualisation; how could I tell the story about how we are shaping society with these kinds of algorithms. And I was the translator between the scientists and our customers. So yeah, that’s my history, and at some point I just quit that activity because I needed to get further with my research and the big company was not maybe the best place to get this freedom.

So yeah, I just switched more into generative art which is the same thing actually for me, just I’m not constrained by any data, any concrete result. I’m just exploring myself the possibilities of visualisations at the end. So this is a connection.

Abigail: Yeah, I think with this roster of artists with you both, we’ll have William join us in just one moment. Your backgrounds have played such a major role in your art today. Meaning it’s become a perfect full circle of serendipitousness that we’re seeing with these, I think for everyone. And the stories that we’re seeing pop up, and that’s what we wanted to cover here today on Unit-on-Chain with all three of you, is I think three of you really are masters of narratives in your artwork, both short form and long form.

And my first question jumping into that theme is. How do you start an initial project? Is it a research phase or is it just an idea pops in your head and how, where do you go from there?

Iskra: Okay. I can go with that. It depends. I think to follow the first question from data visualisation here, when I was working more in data visualisation, I had to have a clear idea of what I was going to represent, like a representation of circles; how many circles would be; how there would be displayed in the axis and everything had to be super clearly sketched before with the pencil and a piece of paper.

And then my work was finding a way to actually do that. Now it’s quite different and more exciting for me because now I have maybe very vague idea of what I wanna do. And then I start working with the machine and actually in the project that I’m presenting in this show. It’s so clear this method. Let’s say you just bring an idea, you set that idea to the machine and then you obtain some kind of an expected result. And then you start tuning that result into something that becomes a loop. You know, you have an idea and then the machine gives you something bigger than your own idea. And then you start playing with that. So it’s like you give something very little to the machine and then the project becomes bigger.

This is at least the most common way for me to deal with that.

Emily: Yeah. So I would say the process for me I think it depends, I would say with my last couple of projects that I’ve worked on, the process has been very much like, “oh, I have to make something. What do I wanna make right now?” And for me that is sometimes really hard to articulate. It’s really hard for me to put into words.

So a lot of times what I end up doing is I’ll start creating mood boards to assemble what is it that I’m feeling? And that conveys it in a visual language for me, so that process, that inspiration process of just aggregating a bunch of images, aggregating textures, aggregating all these different colours and themes.

Usually in that process, subconsciously, what I’m inspired by surfaces. And so I will often take a look at those mood boards and then look at things and think a little bit algorithmically. For example, I looked at the last mood board I made and I realised that a common theme that came up was flowers.

I felt really inspired by flowers and florals. And that made a lot of sense for me because I am a huge plant mom. I own so many house plants, I love taking care of them and I also love seeing flowers bloom. They’re just so beautiful and so I think when I realise that’s what I’m feeling right now, that’s what I wanna express.

You then tinker around with how can I do that algorithmically. And for this last piece for flowers and bloom I ended up just doing a circle packing algorithm and going from there. And as Iskra was pointing to that continual iteration process, that back and forth with the machine that came to rise in that process for me as well. But really I think like there is a lot of upfront work in my process, a lot of initial exploration. 

Abigail: Perfect and welcome back, William. Would you like to introduce yourself and your background of software development and you also teach. How does that impact your art?

William: So yeah, I’m going from a software engineering background. Actually, I really started my career with Motion Design at the very beginning. At some point I was coding a lot of my tools for Motion Design.

So at some point I was like, yeah, maybe I should just, code, for a living. So I decided to do that. For the past 10 years I’ve been a developer and based in small studio in Paris. And I’ve been teaching as well in Paris. The same school I’ve been, it’s called Goblin and it’s classes where you develop at the same time you do art and design.So it’s a very mix of both.

We have some pretty good projects every year coming out from this school and I just wanted to give back my teaching as well there to continue the wheel basically. And at some point, I felt like developing wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to go further than that and explore art basically.

So I had some art classes back in the day, but I wasn’t really attentive, let’s say. It was a bit boring to me. But this past year has been really eye opening, I would say. I thought “Oh yeah, this is what the web teacher wanted to say back in the days” and I started to develop my own things here and there. And here I am. So I try to combine my software engineering skills with art basically more or less.

Abigail: And William, I was just saying I think all three of you are very much masters with narratives in your practice, and that’s very evident in all of your works. And another thing that I think really comes to the top of all of your works is that texture plays quite an important role in at least in your past projects.

Especially your long forms and Iskra, I would say your work is much, you can see the textures within the lines. And William, your signature style is graphite as well as paper. And then Emily paper has played quite a large role specifically in Flowers in Bloom, as well as your other past projects with Bright Moments and ArtBlocks. Can you guys talk about how this space of texture plays in coding, because I think a lot of the traditional art crowd would be like, how do you create texture when you’re just writing a line of code.

William: Who wanna go first? Emily, maybe.

Emily: Sure. So I think what’s really fascinating to me is that sense of materiality in generative art and I think that’s a really interesting discussion that to think about as you’re making your art as an artist, because in the space, particularly, because at the end of the day, your medium is literally intangible. What you display on the screen is just pixels on a screen. So I think it’s really fascinating as an artist for me to explore that sort of dynamic. What does it mean to create texture? What does it mean to create something that’s so material when at the end of the day, it’s just bits.

And so, that’s why I’m so fascinated by it. But the process itself really takes advantage of that generative aspect of generative art. Really leaning into the machine’s capabilities. That means for me to create texture, it means creating fake primitives over and over and over again, lightly at very light opacities and overlaying them on top of each other.

 And using that to generate texture and oftentimes doing that according to natural looking distributions. So yeah, those were my thoughts on texture. I’d be curious to hear from William and Iskra, because their work is also just so phenomenal in the level of texture. 

Iskra: Yeah, I think in my case it depends on the project. I feel sometimes digital art doesn’t need texture because it sometimes feels very natural without texture because it’s not material. And sometimes I just like to embrace the nature of them, of something digital, which is so clean.

For me, it happens when I work with concrete shapes, even if it’s a being or a building or something. But when I play with landscapes and something that tries to represent sky, or sea, or grass, or something that really tries to get into the world around and represent something familiar to us.

I like to play with textures there and I do, like you said, Emily, basically, it’s nothing more than adding millions of lines, millions of shapes, playing with opacities, overlapping and then playing with different browsers to see the difference, because that affects a lot. My process is that at the end, playing with scales, actually. If I put the right scale, you’ll see a shape. But if I put a very crazy scale, for example, you’ll go to the very, very detail without knowing which shape is because you’re not 20 times the scale. So at the end, you go to a very little detail which actually is noise at the end. So it’s a bit of a mess, which you use as a texture. So this is my process. 

William: I really like what you were saying. I think it is the same for me, depending on the project and for something when the subject is fully digital sometimes you don’t need texture. It’s good as clean as it is. In my experience I’ve started art with classic stuff like gouache, acrylic, paper and all.

And I think producing this texture with code is for me a way to link my practice from the physical to digital. But with the generative art possibilities, you can just enhance what couldn’t be possible with real life. So for me, it’s just like a bridge I’m building. I really tried to think a lot about this because this question comes up a lot from time to time.

And yeah, I think for me, it’s just about being grounded to what I’m doing in physical. And because I really like to play with texture and light and colours because these three components are really at the core of my practice. And I think I couldn’t get, maybe I could, maybe I couldn’t, I don’t know. I still need to explore, but I feel my brain needs to reproduce what is seen in real life to connect with me and with others so it’s really communicated in a way. I think that’s the way I approach the textures. What I love about exploring textures, it’s all about observation and I just love to observe. I could grab a piece of paper and just look at it for an hour and say, okay and take some notes and say “Yeah, there’s this little sparkle, grain.” And, it just makes a good base to work on and a good challenge as well, to do it with code.

So, yeah, for me it is about challenges and communication. I guess.

Abigail: Yeah. I think that word observation that you just used is really an interesting point, because I think for all three of you, that’s very evident in how you build your works as well. And I would say all three of you very much pull inspirations from the past, or if not inspirations, you discuss how various movements and figures have impacted you as a person or the project you’re creating or singular work.

Can you guys talk about the research you guys do on that side or how you’ve been inspired by leading figures before you, because I think all three of you have, at least from my knowledge extensively discussed some people that have influenced you in your work

Iskra, we can talk about your work specifically in this show with Lines and Bones, because I know there’s one Art Historical figure that you have a direct conversation with?

Iskra: Yeah, well I would like to, but it is an intent to talk with him. I think even if we are not aware of that, we are of course influenced by many people from the past, actually now with generative art. I know everyone has its own style, but at the end we are playing with shapes with colours, and that’s something that we take from the past century actually. The Bauhaus and the Suprematists before.

There is something that is just inside of us even if we don’t realise that. So I think that’s an influence that we all have. Regarding Lines and Bones, my project for the show, for me your approach was a very beautiful approach and it made a lot of sense for me, this kind of game with input and output; what can we put in the machine, which will be the output of the machine, which is our input based on our influences from the past. So all these, makes of things made a lot of sense for me. So, my project in short is about this kind of relationship with nature and how with the very, very few lines of code something emerges from there, which is very organic, in this case a human eye. It’s five lines of code.

So this thing is something that really impresses me, of our way of dealing with the machine. So I wonder who could I ask, from the past, “where are we going with this?” And I immediately thought about Kazimir Malevich, he’s someone that inspired a lot of us in a way that maybe we are not realising actually. This kind of search for the truth; for what’s behind nature; the basic shapes. All these things made me think of him. And I wrote a letter to him, A very humble letter just to express him because he was so interested in this kind of research about the connection between us and the context around the truth.

But also he was so against technology or this is how I understood his thoughts. So I really wanted to, in a very poetic way, write a letter to him and tell him, “Okay that’s how it was more than 100 years ago but now we have this Machine Learning technique, we have this huge collective source of memory. Let’s say a source of knowledge that we can use to get deeper in us. So, I try to make it an approach to someone that we have to take things from him in what we are doing now from him and from many other people.

Abigail: Yeah. And for the listeners just going into what Iskra is highlighting of her work alongside the digital work will be a physical giclée print, as well as Iskra has provided us the napkins that she originally wrote the five lines of code and her letter to Malevich. So those will be framed alongside the artworks, physically in the show.So you’ll be able to see that whole relationship at one time. 

Emily, how has art history – because you have quite a knowledge and you talk about this – played into your works. And I think your past project specifically, you can really see shapes that have been pulled from inspiration from the Bauhaus, for example, if you wanna speak to that.

Emily: Sure. You’re probably referring to the last project I released which was Off Script through Bright Moments. And that project definitely leaned into my studies in Modern Art. I think it’s pretty evident that there’s pretty direct inspiration from Matisse; there’s inspiration from Picasso, it’s a lot about studying this idea of composition, and shape and form, materiality and texture and colour – distilling all the elements of an image down into its fundamental parts. And that’s what a lot of those modernists were doing at the time. They were all discussing medium and material. At the end of the day, Matisse doing his cutouts, it was about distilling every, all of his art knowledge into one fell swoop of the scissors, right?

Taking all of that and sort of transforming it into just like a line cut. And so I think I wanted to also explore that pure medium and material exploring that in 20th century, modern art means something totally different than exploring that when it comes to generative art where your medium is code.

And so I thought that’d be a fascinating discussion. so that was what that piece was all about leaned into that. And I think in other past art historical figures that have influenced my work would also be Japanese woodblock artists, like Hokusai. Probably most famous for The Great Wave of Kanagawa. That sort of influence, that sort of reference played into, for example, my work with Memories of Qilin. So yeah, definitely continually drawing on examples in the past. I truly believe that art is always in dialogue with itself with its own past. And so I think roping that into the discussion is important for me.

Abigail: For sure. William, I would love for you to speak about the figures that inspired Anticyclone because it was in a Twitter thread that you outlined various women in your life representing the different colour palettes. And it was just a beautiful story that I would love for you to take a couple seconds to highlight.

William: Yeah, definitely Anticyclone was a really good way to convey what made me, in terms of colour and intention and also the story. Because there are two sides, there are other side of the colours and what inspired the colours and also the worst side of, because the tornado is all about negativity and usually they have women names and I was like, that’s f**ked up.

And I wanted to pay tribute to that and to put a spotlight on women with this. So it was a good way to convey this idea. And then I think the most impactful figures who impacted the Anticyclone colour was Sonia Delaunay. I think it’s a big influence on me, how she used colours and mainly primary colours.

It’s amazing what you could do with just this and some advice. And it’s very inspiring. And yeah, I think about other figures, cause I have so much because it’s really funny because I started art many years ago and then I forgot everything. And now the piece of art I do, I really see how the past influenced me.

So, it’s like a retrospection, to go into the past, but within your own eyes. So it’s really funny to see how you’ve been influenced without knowing it. So yeah, there’s so many (influences), I don’t know, like Malevich, Paul Klee, Klimt, de Kooning. Their works were amazing to me. And I often try to do it in code. I often fail, but one day, one day I’ll succeed. Matisse obviously. Art studies is a dialogue and it’s in constant evolution.

So you can’t go from A to Z. You have to do all the later in between. And I think with digital art, we are just starting to scratch the surface and we don’t know yet where it’ll be in 20 years. And sometimes I see people criticising generative art or digital art, which are replicates of what we’ve been seeing in the past.

But I think it is just like a natural evolution, you can invent something brand new from scratch. You always have a starting point. So this starting point is always different for everyone, but there is so much art history that is normal. And I think at some point we’ll convey somewhere that we don’t know yet, but it will.

Abigail: Yeah, and I think we’re in a very interesting time within the NFT generative art community, because with art on chain, essentially like long form, it’s been probably two years since it hit the mainstream NFT world I would say, it’s still not in mainstream art world. But I would say all three of you have a recognisable style now.

I don’t wanna say a mature style because you guys are all experimenting and constantly moving forward. But would you guys say that you’ve created a signature style or agree or disagree with that? Because I think if someone put a work in front of me, any of three of you, I could be like, “Yes, that’s an Iskra work; yes, that’s an Emily work; yes, that’s a William work. And so do you think you have a signature style or want to have a signature style?

William: I’d like to not have signature styles in a specific thing, like, “oh yeah, William can recreate paper texture perfectly.” But I don’t want that. I would like to specialise myself in texturing, but as a concept, you know, so maybe if you see something with very great texture, you think, “oh, maybe it’s William.”

I think that I would prefer people to identify me as a concept more than a specific thing, like a specific colour or specific texture, because as you say, I think I’m still evolving. I’m quite a young artist. I think an artist evolves his or her heart for life, it’s a lifelong thing.

It’s not something you develop and boom, you are the master at it. Maybe it’s today I have style, but maybe in two years it will change. And that’s what I like with some of the artists I named before. When I go see them in some exhibition, sometimes you see the progression. Maybe at year one, it was this style and at some point it was another style.

And maybe at the end of the career, everything merges and it makes sense. So I’d like to, for me, I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m going somewhere. It will make sense at some point.

Iskra: Well, in my case I do like to have a style associated with myself. I think Abigail you’ll be able to talk about long-form projects. I think we were discussing before about long-form projects and, I don’t really understand what is exactly a long-form project, because of course I know what it is. I think in long-form project where we are trying to figure out now what it is for me, I have a lot of questions. It’s one of the editions, it’s the whole project. What’s exactly your word there? Before getting there, we have a lot of constraints in the long-form. We have to make it diverse. We have to build it consistently. We have to play with a lot of different outputs. So at the end, that also challenges your own style because you have to make such different things, but at the end they have to be your son or daughter. At the end, it’s like from one algorithm. But this for me, challenges my own style. So this is talking about one long-form, but when you release 5, 6, 7 long projects, you have a huge mess there.

So I think more than having a style, what you can find from the artist in the combination of many long-form projects is like a nuance. It’s something that you don’t really know what it is, but there are artists who play with very very soft colours or very soft shapes, or there are artists that play with stories and you see that story.

So it’s not a very simple question anymore about which is your style. It’s about maybe the way you code, or not. So for me, it’s a hard question about the style of someone today in terms of generative. 

Abigail: What about you, Emily?

Emily: I think personally for me I do care about having a signature style. I think “signature style” is an interesting way to put it. I’m not sure if I would call it that, but maybe more like visual evidence of what I care about.

For me, I would say that, Memories of Qilin was an important turning point for me in my career as an artist, because for the first time, well, I would say it marked my transition from a creative coding hobbyist, someone who was just doing experiments and sort of playing around and like, learning techniques to that of an artist, because that algorithm was the first time in my life that I felt I had created something that truly expressed myself that I felt like I could identify with, that I felt like, had me in it, it was the first time that I felt like I identified with an algorithm. And so I think I’ve been continually latched onto that and thought, what more was there to explore? How much further can I explore myself?

Using aspects of this, or something I realise I care a lot about is textures and patterns bringing disparate elements together into a final piece. I care a lot about that. I care a lot about variety and colours. So I hope that’s evident in my work. I hope that “style” is there because I do think that really underscores a lot about what I care about. And I think though, of course, to Williams point about evolution, I expect myself to go through different

movements of my own visual aesthetic. At some point I know that I’ll wanna explore other things and I expect to bring parts of what I’ve cared about in the past into this new “style”. But yeah, I think it’s important to always have a part of yourself in your algorithm, for it to show through visually.

William: Yeah. I definitely agree. I think style is more about your personality and what you want to communicate rather than a specific effect. Sometimes you see an artist and even if it’s not the same visual style, you can recognise the composition, how they put the shapes together and the colours and how they build relationships in the composition.

And I think that’s what style is, rather than specific aesthetics.

Abigail: Yeah, and I wanna shift the conversation slightly, cause I think a lot with generative art is often only the visual outputs are discussed and in reality, the medium of generative arts, is not the visual, it’s the coding. And it’s really hard obviously when discussing these artworks to know the nuances of code.

And I think a really interesting thing to consider is you guys could have a signature style. That’s just obviously not visible as a visual output, but we can’t see it in the code unless we read the script. I think it’s super interesting to consider as well as an audience that we might not even know.

There might be a certain function that Iskra loves to use repetitively. And we might just not know that because we don’t know the connection visually, which I think is a really interesting thing to consider in this new movement. And I wanna circle back to long-form. And so for the listeners, I wanna establish a couple things with you guys.

What is generative art? And to my understanding, is the use of an autonomous system. So you put in a code or you can train a system in the case of AI to create an output. So you input a data set or parameters in those functions, the autonomous system can imbue itself in an active randomness, however, the parameters you guys decide as coders, and then it creates a visual output. Short-form, in my understanding, has what we’ve always known since the 1960s of generative output. It’s a singular work. And then long-form generative art has recently emerged with the use of blockchain.

And that is when you can create a series of work from a line of code. And you guys can correct me on this as well. And I’d love for you to correct me in these definitions. Cuz I think viewers and listeners who don’t have the technical background are very very interested to hear these understandings of these terms.

If anyone wants to chime in on your technical backgrounds with long-form and short-form definitions?

William: Maybe I can start and we can discuss. I think long-form, something is very undervalued is how consistent long-form series has to be and how much energy we have to put in it to make it happen. Because when you do the short-form, cherry picking, it’s more about, you can explore and have a lot of trash, as I would say, maybe a lot of fails and say, okay, maybe not this one and this one and at some point it clicks and say, okay, I’m gonna stay on this one and work on it. Long-form and on-chain art is different. I think that’s not something that is really understood. A lot of time when I talk with collectors and people outside of coding, they don’t understand the value compared to something very crafted for one single occasion. But at the same time, I think it’s interesting because if you don’t understand it yet, it means it’s groundbreaking. It means there is something here to work on and there’s an evolution in our practice. 

Iskra: I think there are two very different approaches to one work. I mean in my case, when I develop a system, I begin to observe the result of the system. I actually know if I wanna go through a long-form or just stay in 1/1s. Because sometimes it feels like there is a story that should be told through a long-form.

Sometimes it’s because the system does not have such a variety for me, which is the opposite of how we used to think about long-form. But for example, if there is a very linear story in the output that I have, I would say yeah, this is a great story to tell with the long-form, with a very few variations, but you can fit it into something longer.

But sometimes I just have systems that have a very strong complexity on shapes or colours or combinations or something. And for me, this is like a work where I don’t need to have 200 little beings, you know, just changing colours or something. It’s for me, this is like a 1/1 and then I start working on it.

I think it’s easier for sure working on a 1/1, but also gives you the chance to really create a story around and take your time to tune it at the end and then agree with the exact colour because there is a beauty in the long-form, which is the surprise and which is, you know, this unexpected result.This is so beautiful for me, but there is also beauty on getting into the very very final detail of 1/1. Then it’s just like a different thing. And I wouldn’t like to see the evolution of generative art being so much into just long-form because with 1/1 we are starting to believe it’s not the proper definition of generative art and for me it is generative.

So yeah, I think it depends on the project itself and it depends on what the story tells you and how you wanna express that through your work, in my case.

Emily: Oh, yeah, I agree. That was beautifully put, Iskra.

Abigail: Yeah, I think for me, someone coming from the academic side of the traditional art, it’s just such a change in how an artist occupies space when creating a work, which I think is the most interesting thing for me right now in generative art. When you code, you have this idea in your head of what it’s going to look like.

But it’s different from having a pencil or a paintbrush in your hand because the idea exists in your mind and then you have to go through all these steps and then press enter. And then the system creates the artwork. You’re almost occupying two spaces, yourself and the machine.

And it’s a completely different plane of creating an artwork, which I think when we reflect in 50 years on these amazing things happening right now, that’s what academics are gonna be talking about, it’s a shift from contemporary art where the artist is now occupying a different space.

And so this is getting more into philosophy and I’d love for all three of you to discuss the space you occupy as an artist, or if you even agree with that.

William: I would say there is even a third, very important component. It’s the random aspect of generative art. Sometimes people don’t understand that generative art is about randomness and how you control or let go around the mess. And I think that’s a really interesting concept for us because I don’t know if a lot of other practices have this concept while creating, because for us it’s the core of the practice.

How can you vary shapes? How can you look for varying colours and composition, stuff like that. And you have an idea, but you know, that this idea will be completed somehow at some point by something else that you don’t know. And I think that’s something really beautiful, to rely on randomness.

And sometimes you’re like, okay, this is too random, I wanna control it a bit, shape it. And I think that’s a thing also with long-form. A bad thing about long-form generative art is you wanna control a lot of randomness while when you just do one unique outputs, you can be surprised yourself by the randomness, because it doesn’t matter, like everything that is not good, won’t be seen by other people. But with long-form you can’t let your algorithm do its life.

Whatever happens it’ll happen because there will be some stuff that is not conveying what you wanted to say. So randomness, I think, is a very important component of our practice.

Emily: I absolutely loved what William just said and totally agree with it. Randomness is such an important part. I think it’s often-times about defining the parameters of randomness too. It’s like a delicate dance with the machine. It’s a conversation that you’re having back and forth as you’re developing.

And for me, a lot of the time it’s about telling the machine that when you generate this, for a series, particularly long-form, there will be a parameter space that you explore. You’re defining the bands of it. Maybe it’s a narrow space that traverses; maybe you’re allowing the machine to go through a much wider space and for different parameters, that space is gonna be different. And I think a lot of long-form generative art is about defining the boundaries, I guess.

Iskra: Yes, I would say, I dunno if you agree with that, but I was thinking about this during the summer, free time you think a lot. And I thought this is the first time in history that actually art doesn’t actually depend on the artist itself, like in the whole story. 

So even if you’re thinking about the last years of contemporary art, like the most crazy abstract things, the jokes about it, this can be painted by a kid. Artists have huge freedom in the pieces sometimes. But even in these cases, you are the one who throws the paint and the brushes and everything. 

But now it’s like you are just giving a small percentage of control and then the machine gives you something and that’s for the first time something (like this is) happening. So yeah, dealing with this, I like to think we are getting ready to be surprised or something like that.

We are just giving some clues to how we want to be surprised or something. So that’s, I think for the first time, And it’s not easy to understand, even for us, not to mention, the rest of the people how this work is being presented? This is something very different.

William: Yeah, I’d like to say when I do generative art, I’m expecting the unexpected, I want the unexpected. I want all the conditions to be surprising. I don’t want too much control at least at the beginning of the production. Because the idea is my idea. But I think my role as a generative artist is to let the machine talk to me as well. What are the boundaries? Because we can’t see it. We can’t even imagine it with our brains, because there’s so many parameters, so many stuff we don’t see, we can’t understand. So I think it’s very important as generative artists to let go and to not be too much in control because we can’t know what’s to come.

Emily: And I would also add that element of surprise is what lends to a lot of maybe the emotionality around making long-form generative art. I think a lot of people might look at generative art as this cold inexpressive medium because you’re programming. Right? And it’s totally logical in a lot of ways.

But I would say that there’s a performance to making generative art and that’s like a conversation between you and the machine and a lot of the times what the machine does is an extremely emotional thing. Sometimes you are surprised as Iskra and William bring up and sometimes when you’re surprised, you’re upset – “why did my algorithm do this, this looks so bad.” Or sometimes you’re surprised and you’re extremely delighted about it. “Oh my God, I cannot believe that my algorithm put this out.” And so I think with long-form generative art, especially there’s a lot of emotion in the sense that once you release the algorithm, what’s out there is out there, you can be upset by what it produced, you can be delighted. And that to me is in some ways, generative art is more emotional than some of the other art forms I’ve done. It’s more emotional than painting. For me, it’s more emotional than drawing. You imagine that these are the most expressive mediums where you’re directly connecting with what you’re creating, but in this machine-defined space, I think there is just so much there.

Iskra: Yeah, I would say, Yeah, exactly. Nobody talks about how stressful it is to deliver a long-form project. Because if you deliver a classic artwork, you can be stressed until you finish a work, but then you deliver that you exhibit the work and you’re fine. But then here, after months of stress, you deliver the work and then the stress comes up. “It’ll be great. It won’t be great; there would be some piece wrong or something.” So that’s like another level of stress when you finish an artwork.

William: Yeah, it’s so stressful. My God. Even thinking about it gives me chills. You know, it’s horrible. Because you don’t know if you coloured the thing well, if there is any breakage that you didn’t anticipate, did you test as much as possible. Because when you do something on the blockchain, it’s not something you can just patch easily, you know, you can’t just press a button and update it. So what you deliver is the final thing and as long as the blockchain lives. So it’s really hard, it’s so stressful to release a long-form project. 

I would say another really frustrating thing for me is I don’t know if 1000 outputs were enough. Maybe it was like 10,000, maybe 20,000. I will take Anticyclone for example, from time to time I still run it. And I’m still surprised by it. And I’m like, “This didn’t come out when it was on ArtBlocks I wanted it to show up. And it didn’t. And now I’m left with all these outputs in my folders. Thinking about what I am gonna do with it. Should I continue? Is it over? What’s long-form? Is it over when you put it on the blockchain or does it leave if you say so? I don’t know.

Abigail: Yeah. And I think these are all questions that are coming to us just now in this space. And I think what at Unit London we’re trying to do is give a space to all of you artists to explore those questions and see what you can put in presentation and experiment in those forms.

And that’s why I’m so excited for the show In Our Code is, it’s really getting to the point of that relationship, that emotional relationship behind the artwork in hopefully showcasing to the audience of what goes into a work, not just an emphasis on the final visual output. Because generative art is so much more than that and it should be, expressed like we express painting, so much writing is about the process, not just the final product.And that’s why I’m really excited for this show. And for all three of you as artists. 

We are coming up to the end. Something we do at the very end with all of our guests is we have a list of questions that we ask every single person. And the only thing we ask of you is to answer them either in one word, or one sentence and they’re purposely vague. They’re formatted to be vague, so interpret as you may just to be more spontaneous with it and just to keep it moving, we’ll go Iskra, Emily and William for responses and then cycle through it that way. But our first question and I think I’ve asked all three of you already, individually at a different point, but Iskra we’ll start with you.

What does In Our Code mean to you?

Iskra: Process, I would say process.

Abigail: And then for you, Emily.

Emily: Bringing yourself into an algorithm.

William: And for me, I would say similar to Emily’s, humanness. 

Abigail: Beautiful. And our second question is what inspires you in this space?

Iskra: Nature. 

Abigail: And then for you, Emily,

Emily: Other artists,

William: For me, colours. I always think in terms of colour first.

Abigail: Perfect. Our third question is what is one artist you’d love to own an NFT by?

Iskra: I would like to see more film directors in the NFT space. I am a cinema lover. I would like to see more engagement with the film industry and the NFTs.

Abigail: And then for you, Emily 

Emily: Probably an artist I would like to collect maybe IX shells, I really love her thinking around her art. She’s really inspiring to me as well.

Abigail: I agree.

William: I think for me to be Matt DesLauriers. I own some of his work, but I definitely need to get a Meridian. 

Abigail: And then our last one is, what technological advancements do you think this space needs?

Iskra: I think we are fine with the technology we have so far. I think our job now is to really define better the concept behind what we can do with this technology. We have blockchain behind, we have the technology to do our work, but how can we connect this? How can we make the services bigger and at the end platforms like ArtBlocks in the beginning, they defined what is a long-form, for example.

So we have the technology, but we have to define what we can do with that. So for me, it’s about the concept.

Abigail: And then for you, Emily.

Emily: I would like to see more immersive display modalities. Right now we have our computer to display our NFTs, and digital art. We also have screens, but is there anything else that we can do aside from pixel display? Are there displays that bring out texture somehow that are electronic? Are there displays that are slightly more immersive installation types? I think there’s a lot that can be done to enhance the experience of the art. 

Abigail: And then for you, William.

William: I wanted to say, but we said it already. So I definitely think it’s going too fast, so let’s slow it down a bit. NFT space at least is too fast for me. One thing I’d like to add into the long-form or even digital arts in general is the concept of time, temporarily. I’d like to make living pieces. So if I could have some sort of input of date or whatever about the means or something, I could make a piece that is living in the time. So that could be nice, I think. Living pieces.

Abigail: Yeah. Well, thank you all three for joining us today. And yeah, we can’t wait for the show and to continue watching the works you guys create. 

William: Thank you for having us. 

Iskra: Thank you.

Emily: Thank you. Thanks for having me.