Rhythm & The Machine by Lars Wander
Rhythm & the Machine (“R&TM”) releasing on Thursday, August 24th on Tonic.xyz is Lars Wander’s most diverse and emergent algorithm to date. Here, I attempt to do it justice with a brief description of the series and the history of its making.
The series consists of 400 generative outputs, mostly filled blobs or angular shapes featuring a few non-fill line drawings. In these shapes, I’ve come to see birds, so many birds, bulls, bears, angels, demons, dancers, pedestrians, and other human-like figures.
With origins in Lars’ Splat works (1/N, 2/N & 3/N) the development of this algorithm is the result of years of R&D. Splat was inspired by Mark Lovejoy’s printing press ink photography https://marklovejoydotcom.tumblr.com. Lars aimed to replicate paint mixing through generative systems.
After Splat 1/N, 2/N, and 3N came Gentle Dissolution 1/N. The color palette evolved and the shapes became more angular. Between these two paint-mixing studies, we can already see the roots of R&TM.
Post Gentle Dissolution Lars dove deeper into generative paint mixing. He studied the work of Šárka Sochorová & Ondrej Jamriška who developed a method to perform Kubelka-Monk color mixing properly with digital painting software & allow colors to mix like actual paint does.
This research paired with simulated paint-mixing using spectral coefficients derived from Golden Heavy Body Acrylics & computed by the lab of Roy Berns led to his break-out series How You See Me. Due to the IP of Golden Heavy Body Acrylics, this curated series was off-chain.
Since then, Lars has pulled shapes from each prior series, explored new colors & forms to explore, & threshed out the algorithm to a point where it can generate thousands of outputs that house a diverse range of visual outputs from which emerge fantastic Rorschach-like images.
Of the many thousands of works generated, 400 have been hand-curated to create the masterful series of Rhythm & the Machine. An exciting aspect of this series is that it will be the first time one of Lars’ paint color mixing algorithm gets to live on chain.
Lars narrowed down to colors that spoke the most to him. By intentionally limiting the possible color combinations he was able to pre-compute the paint mixing before the code was uploaded. This allowed for Golden’s spectral coefficients to remain secret on his computer.
How You See Me had an intensely rich level of interaction between the colors. There, each pigment was able to mix in any quantity with other pigments. This is simply too many combinations to precompute to allow for on-chain minting.
What is so impressive about Rhythm & the Machine is Lars’ restraint. It’s interesting to see what an artist can do when they limit the number of options they have at their disposal to create. By narrowing down the space Lars dove deeper into these curated color combinations.
Restraint not only rewarded the onchain presence & visual outcome on screen but also the physical. Limitation of colors allowed for specific naming of colors. This enabled printmakers to assist Lars in realizing vivid accurate colors that correspond with the digital colors.
The print process for R&TM is special not only for its color accuracy but thanks to the 3 processes involved. The first layer of the prints are printed digitally. Then a lacquer varnish is added on top. The final layer is screen printed with the named colors.
The series is aptly named Rhythm & the Machine. Lars demonstrates his ability to paint with a computer as if he was transcribing a jazz song. I see sounds: Bird, Coltrane, Miles, and Monk personified.
Learn more: https://tonic.xyz/collection/rhythm-and-the-machine/