Organic machines is a series of computer generated, human-curated, digital artworks that explore and play with contrasts that occur in the natural and designed worlds, and those that exist with computer native art forms.

A few months ago, when I was struggling to come up with ideas to work on – instead of my usual reliance on references, I decided to challenge myself to approach my art from first principles. It was a challenge to be wholly original using the skills I've picked up over the years – drawing a brush stroke with code. For me as an artist, the goal I set out to achieve was to utilise recreation and reinterpretation as a way to experience and create art.

Whether pop, expressionistic, or minimal in nature, every genre of art has seen fit to investigate and question the brushstroke as applied to the flat canvas surface.

And thus, Organic machines began to take form. This project is the result of countless hours tweaking parameters and experimenting with different techniques, in pursuit of the perfect recreation of a brush stroke. A frustrating pursuit at that, where no matter how hard I tried – there was always something inherently machine-like about the end result.

At first, I saw this as a failure - a sign that I wasn't quite good enough at emulating the organic nature of brushstrokes. But after some reflection and conversations with peers, I started to lean into it and see the machine-like quality as its own kind of beauty.

The results were sometimes surprising, and always interesting. I found that these machine-like strokes could be used to create patterns and textures that would never occur naturally. Once I had accepted this new-found direction, I noted what I liked about this algorithm and leaned into these qualities even more so – the expressionist undertones, the otherworldly colour palettes, the sense of scale etc.

Speaking of otherworldly palettes and scale – a lot of this early conceptual direction was my natural gravitation towards cosmic megastructures portrayed in sci-fi and media I have enjoyed in my formative years. The Imperial Star Destroyer from Star Wars, the spacing guild ships from Dune, the Dyson sphere etc. This wasn’t really evident to me when I first started refining this creative direction, but once I introduced The Stranger (a spacefaring motif I’ve been working with in my non-generative practice since 2019, pictured in 2. Recreation) – it was hard to unsee the sci-fi influences in this work.

For as long as I can remember, recreating and reinterpreting the work of the greats – both past and present, has been my chosen way of learning a new craft. Be it Sameer Kulavoor's oil pastel sketches or Fan Ho's street photography. I took these recreations quite seriously and immersed myself in whoever it is I was obsessed with, dedicating that phase of my life to whichever medium it is that I was working in at the time.

I always enjoyed this process, and the newly acquired skills were a big plus; I did however struggle with the imposter syndrome that comes with this way of working. It eased up a little bit when I started using my own work in one medium as reference for another medium, but it hasn’t really gone away.

Unsurprisingly, when it came to code based art – my first experience with it was recreating title card animations from popular TV shows in 2013. Years before I’d re-explore these interests more seriously. More recently, it was the work of pattern artists like Annie Albers, Daniel Buren etc. and modern generative artists like Snofro and Tyler Hobbs that has shaped how I approach, experience and appreciate generative art.

zond is the online pseudonym of redacted, a self taught computer artist and multi-disciplinary designer based in Amsterdam, Netherlands.He is one half of the experimental on-chain art collective, onChainCo as part of which he worked on Flowers and Alt Nouns.

His work is always in a state of flux – an ever-evolving metaphorical generative algorithm, made up of fragments of other algorithms he's worked on over the years, observing the emergent generative aspects of the natural and designed world around us. The art he creates is a constantly evolving tapestry of these influences.

This collection is a culmination of a year of trying to push the boundaries of what SVGs (scalable vector graphics) are capable of as a medium for artistic expression, but more importantly, generative art. The technological challenges of working in the medium however require a deep understanding of the SVG specification and the capabilities of various SVG rendering engines, as well as creative and somewhat hacky ways of using the basic shapes available for use in this medium. organic machines for example, are entirely composed of <path> tags – an SVG tag otherwise reserved for simple vector diagrams.

At its core, the algorithm that generates organic machines is quite simple. Each piece is composed of thousands of paths arranged originally, in hopes of recreating a brush stroke – evolving into more mechanical forms with time. The algorithm utilises randomly generated bezier & catmull-rom curves confined within the canvas and duplicates these paths thousands of times along a curved path of its own – giving the impression of a brush stroke in three-dimensional space. Variance is introduced by the algorithm by means of path rotation, displacement along the x/y axis and a few other factors. The color palettes have been carefully chosen to help express the hidden three-dimensional depth of these purely two-dimensional shapes and image format. Some pieces may feature the stranger, in pursuit of solitude.

As an early participant in and proponent of on-chain non-fungible-tokens, a world dominated by pioneering developers and artists such as Larva Labs (CryptoPunks, Autoglyphs), Dom (Loot, Corruptions), cxkoda (Strange Attractors) and many more – the avant-garde nature of SVG based generative art has been a core driving force behind Organic machines, and my hope is for it to be considered within that context.

Organic machines will be minted on a Manifold ERC-721 contract in small batches periodically, until the collection size hits 24. New pieces will be auctioned off on Manifold Gallery.

The algorithm may thoughtfully evolve over the duration of this project to incorporate new sources of inspiration while maintaining the cohesiveness of the collection.

Fully editable source .SVG files available on request.

This project would not be possible without the thoughts, experiments, and work shared freely by those who came before me:

Special mention to Tyler Hobbs for encouraging me to explore my reverse engineering interests and Aaron Penne for his help reframing how I think about my work. And this would definitely not have been possible without the support and encouragement of Yenargy, ImperfectLine, Stevey, Polo, Casa, Steve and everyone from Token Club, DEF & onChainCo. Eternally grateful <3