From the creation of Adam by Michael Angelo to the Wheat Field with Crows, by Van Gogh, there is nothing comparable to looking at a piece of art that moves you deeply.
Beautiful as art can be, several issues, such as inaccessibility, deterioration, and theft to mention a few, ar issues facing the art community and affect our enjoyment of art. However, with digital collectables, art can be experienced differently. One can be in the comfort of one’s home and access (and own) some of the rarest pieces in the world.
Although complex, the concept of generative art is quite simple. To create a new piece of art, a human artist simply enters keywords or sentences into an artificially intelligent model that then uses algorithms to analyze millions of works of art and produce its images as a visual interpretation or representation of the original text.
Since Eduardo McEntyre and Miguel Ángel Vidal emerged in the late 1960s, generative artists have increased in their numbers, producing captivating art using artificial intelligence. Now, we have excellent generative art like beauty and feminine iconography by Lulu xXX and Generative painting by Holger Lippmann, to mention a few.
Here are some of the best generative artists you should follow.
Erick Calderon (aka Snowfro)
Erick Calderon, also known as Snowfro online, loves to work with physical and digital media, including ceramics, 3D blocks, LED art, and digital art. He is famed for his generative art NFT project, Chromie Squiggle.
The 10,000-piece NFT collection features a squiggle per piece. Each squiggle has unique attributes about its start and end color, color spread and direction, height, segments, and steps between segments. The most expensive Chromie Squiggle is #3784, which resold for 750 ETH.
Erick founded Art Blocks, the first decentralized platform for creating and showcasing generative art pieces. Art Blocks enables artists to upload code to a smart contract. Chromie Squiggle was the first project to be released on Art Blocks.
Arhiz
The anonymous Brazilian computer scientist artist who goes by the pseudonym “Arihz” is an accomplished generative artist with several NFT collections. While little is known about the man behind Arihz, he enjoys fractals, complex systems, and programming languages.
Three of his biggest generative art collections are Avid Lines, Pulsquares, and Framergence. Each collection is unique in its artistic style, yet all three rely on the mathematical exploration of shapes.
Tyler Hobbs
The creator of the 999-piece NFT collection, Fidenza, is based in Austin, Texas. Tyler creates custom algorithms to generate digital art in a style that balances the cold, strict structure that computers are associated with and the natural, daily chaos of everyday life.
Fidenza is based on a flow field algorithm to create neighboring curves that never overlap. Tyler’s success with Fidenza has led to his art being showcased on Art Blocks, the first platform dedicated to generative content. The current floor price for Findenza is 69.69 ETH, or approximately $190K.
Tom Baccei, Creator of Magic Eye
The Magic Eye books were one of the beloved crazes of the 1990s, in the same league as Game Boy and Beanie Babies. In 1991, West Fairlee, Vermont native Tom Baccie’s optical illusion books became an overnight bestseller in Japan and the rest of the world.
He studied math at the University of Connecticut. But he described his studies as “modern algebra, sets, and groups, layers of abstraction that built on each other,” a fair description of what generative artists do with computer algorithms to create their works of art.
The technical term for the Magic Eye illusion is an autostereogram. Baccie’s method of creating them involved procedural generation. Beginning with an initial pattern on a strip, he generated the images using a depth map to produce a random dot autostereogram.
Ben Kovach
The creator of Edifice is based in Burlington, Vermont. He has been creating “procedurally generated artwork” since 2017. Ben was inspired by combining code with his manual art career as a way to reduce tedium and save his stylistic choices for future reuse.
Ben is best known for his generative art NFT collection Edifice. Edifice consists of 976 pieces that explore building structures being eroded away under various conditions and reconceptualized and reconstructed. Each image is progressively constructed in front of the viewer’s eyes to show every step of the process. Edifice last sold for 5.54 ETH, or $14.6K.
Mad Dog Jones
“Mad Dog Jones” —Micah Dowbak of Ontario, Canada, is one of the best-selling digital collectable generative artists. The scope of his work and the power and reach of the Ethereum blockchain has propelled Dowbak to international acclaim in the digital art world.
His talent for digital illustration is only part of what makes Mad Dog Jones’ work so compelling to the blockchain and art communities. The other key ingredient to the success that made him the selling artist in Canada’s history is how he used programmable smart tokens to add fun and quirky randomness, turning his NFTs into generative art.
For example, his claim to fame, The REPLICATOR, an NFT, sold for 4.1 million dollars. Now, it generates new versions of itself every 28 days with unique designs and attributes.
That’s not all.
The blockchain artwork depicting a 20th-century fax machine telecopier is intentionally programmed to glitch. So the generative process is algorithmically designed not to be perfect. Still, to be imperfect, the way DNA transcription in life is imperfect, giving rise to the mutations that have made life on earth so splendorous in its variation and diversity.
Ezra Miller
The creator of Solvency is a digital artist, designer, and developer. Ezra has an extensive background collaborating with electronic musicians as an art director, web developer, and visual jockey to create real-time generative art and immersive experiences. He has collaborated with brands such as Balenciaga, Alexander Wang, and Adidas.
Solvency is a 500-piece limited edition NFT series of WebFL artworks whose latest trading volume is $1.4k. Each generative NFT’s attributes are determined using a “deterministic algorithm seeded with the hash of the token.”
David Brewster, Creator of the Kaleidoscope
David Brewster was an early 19th-century scientist and inventor. He made pioneering innovations in photography and stereoscopes. He’s also famous for inventing one of the earliest seminal devices in the history of generative artists, the kaleidoscope.
Brewster was highly regarded in the academic community of his day and received several prestigious awards and honors. But he became famous among the general, non-scientific public for the kaleidoscope, which set off a craze in England, France, and the United States in the 1810s.
Though he obtained a patent for the invention, Brewster demonstrated the neat gadget to opticians before getting the patent. Subsequently, it was mass-produced to satisfy raging popular demand for the device, which made anyone who held it a generative artist with each turn of the scope.
The fixation on kaleidoscopes in the Victorian era was akin to how the iPhone transfixed people when it went on sale in the early 21st century.
Dmitri Cherniak
The creator of Ringers is a Canadian artist based in New York City. He’s also a board member of the Art Blocks Curation Board. As a board member, Dimitri is part of the integral team that selects projects to be included in the official Art Blocks Curated Collection. As an artist, he uses automation as his primary medium and is most noted for his work with Ringers.
Ringers is a 1,000-piece generative art digital collection of automatically generated “strings and pegs.” There are almost infinite combinations for a string to be wrapped around a set of pegs. Ringer’s features variations in peg count, sizing, layout, wrap orientation, and pops of color. Ringers is one of the most expensive Art Blocks projects sold, with the initial seller buying the NFT for $220. In total, it made a trading volume of nearly $73 million, with the most expensive Ringers sold for $6.9 million in October 2021.
Maria Soria-Rodriguez
Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez is yet another generative artist who is multi-talented in the worlds of business, artistic expression, and literacy. Most known for his generative art in the NFT world,
Marcelo pushes to explore how machines can produce artistic pieces that evoke emotions within humans. Sometimes, the pieces are accompanied by music composed and recorded by Marcelo.
Marcelo’s most famous digital collectable collection, entretiempos, consists of 1,000 pieces. It explores the benchmarks in time we define and perceive our lives from against the infinite, scattered time scales of our lives. Entretiempos by Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez NFTs were sold 3 times in the last 7 days. The total sales volume for entretiempos by Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez was $2.3k. The average price of one entretiempos by Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez NFT is $767.4. There are 471 entretiempos by Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez owners, owning a total supply of 1,000 tokens. Entretiempos has a current bid price of 20 ETH, or $54K.
Matt Kane
Matt Kane, a Chicago native, began his career as a painter of oils and transitioned to becoming a “painter of code” after becoming a web developer. Matt likes to create generative art the way he treats painting physical art: careful prep and interaction throughout each step. Matt spends 12+ hours on each piece, making thousands of tweaks to design variables within his code to mimic historical aesthetics through geometry.
Gazers is a 1,000-piece NFT collection that focuses on the moon. On the surface, Gazers may act as a lunar calendar, as each piece depicts a moon phase. However, Gazers aims to cultivate an appreciation of our changing perceptions of time, astronomy, color theory, generative art, and our collective goals in crypto. Gazers #788 recently sold for 14.6 ETH, or $40K, on February 3, 2022.
Kjetil Golid
The creator of Archetype is a Norwegian generative artist and system developer. His generative art projects are inspired by the question “What would it look like if…” leaving an algorithm to end the sentence “with a visual translation.”
Archetype is a 600-piece NFT collection that explores repetition as a counterweight to unruly, random structures. As of February 20, 2022, the most expensive Archetype sold was Archetype #109 for $42.9K on February 14, 2022.
Conclusion
Technology continues to make art more attractive and accessible. Now, artists can create art that will reach a wider audience and raise revenues for them. This is great compared to what was obtainable in prior years. Talk about how technology is making art more attractive.
For upcoming generative artists, the words of Sir Isaac Newton come to mind. He says,
“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
This means getting better at generative art. They are advised to follow the best generative artists out there. This way, their chances of retaining relevance, reaching a worldwide audience, and boosting revenues will be higher.
