February Generative Art Picks on fxhash: NFT Highlights

February is the shortest month of the year, and we are about to enter its very last week. After a very successful Genuary, an artificially generated month of time where creators build code that makes beautiful things, it’s time to look at what generative art had to offer us in the last few weeks - and despite the short time-period, creativity is ever-growing! Here are some stand-out projects on fxhash that caught our eye:

Chris Randall - baroque

Chris Randall makes work at the intersections of sound, programming, and visuals. In a past life he may have been a musician and record label owner, leaning more towards the electronic than the acoustic - but baroque offers a collection in his oeuvre with more classical notes. In contrast with his usual geometrically sharp lines, the pieces in his baroque series twirl and twist in an elegant mist.

Luke Conroy - Hash Nos

Hash Nos is a series of works that asks you to pick your adventure, and you have two options. You can choose to read the works created by Luke Conroy as abstract digital art pieces, generated out of 481 unique PNG elements unevenly placed across 36 different layers. Or, you can choose to see Hash Nos as a nose-based PFP series, in which case the abstract shapes are merely there for decoration. Can you spot the noz?

Public Domain Gallery - Posters from the Past

The Public Domain Gallery has dedicated itself to highlighting hidden visual gems that exist in the public domain by giving them a new home on the blockchain. For its latest series, it has taken posters designed over the past decades for the American National Institutes of Health, minting a forgotten graphic treasure into a contemporary spotlight with each of the 15 editions in the series. Don’t hesitate to find out whether your poster will tell you to “prevent ether peroxide formation” or “wear your hard hat!!!”

H. C. Turk - Five-Word Animal Stories

Literature and NFTs are still an unlikely combination, but author H. C. Turk has taken the plunge. His series Five-Word Animal Stories tells an ultra-short story with each mint, revolving around ‘puppees’ and ‘horsie-cows’ and Noah’s arks full of other creatures. Examples minted so far include “countless feral puppees escaped downhill”, but also “numerous captive toads wriggle organically”. It’s an exciting foray into the artistic overlay between technology and words.

Anna Lucia - Art For Walls In Public Spaces

Anna Lucia’s genesis collection on fxhash sold out in no time, as was to be expected. But that does not stop us from still admiring the beautiful Art For Walls in Public Spaces series, even if filled with envy at those who did manage to snag a piece. Described as “moving inanimate drawings generated with code”, the collection presents 144 works of shifting multi-colored tiles - almost like morphing geometric rainbows. We cherish the hope that Lucia’s work will one day grace the walls of a subway, restaurant or street -  be that irl or in the Metaverse.

kira0 - Highrise of Homes

Speaking of streets, Kira0 is an artist and architect who has been active on fxhash with work revolving around topics of urbanism and city planning. The collection Highrise of Homes proposes a vertical community, inspired by a 1981 work with the same name by architect James Wines. Each piece can be zoomed into in incredible detail, revealing a construction built to "accommodate people's conflicting desires to enjoy the cultural advantages of an urban center, without sacrificing the private home identity and garden space associated with suburbia."

William Watkins - Ridge Scribbles

It’s already in the name, fullstack web developer and creative coder William Watkins’ latest series on fxhash consists of scribbles that work together to form the outlines of mountain ridges. The process behind the formation of the landscapes is quite a lengthy series of maneuvers involving shaders and algorithms. Watkins noticed in hindsight that there was a difference between the preview of the work on fxhash and the live code, and took to Twitter to explain how that came to be and share tools for other creative developers. It’s an instance that illustrates the beauty behind the scenes of generative art.

Iteration - S Y N T H W A V E Nightlife Generator

The artist Jess, working under the pseudonym of Iteration, describes herself as Glitch Qwueen. With the series S Y N T H W A V E she seems to offer us a royal glimpse into this queen’s world. The collection consists of 250 vaporwavey compositions that take turns placing various objects in a neon landscape. Think 90s cars, greek columns, flamingoes, polaroids, palm trees - with 14 main subjects, 10 backgrounds and 9 suns the options are endless.

Nikolya Ulyanov - Letters to Piet

The series Letters to Piet hides many tales behind its hexagonal shapes. Or as the artist Ulyanov puts it, the work exists “at the intersection of 3 stories from the first half of the 20th century.” Firstly, it’s a nod to the rumours that De Stijl artist Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondriaan argued about the acceptance of hexagons into the art movement. Secondly, the shapes also reference mathematician Georgy Voronoy’s diagrams. And lastly, the craquelure in the collection comes from Kazimir Malevich's Black Square. In this way, Letters to Piet bundles together various storylines that shaped the past 100 years.

Pablo Alpe - Abismo

Creative Coder Pablo Alpe’s second collection on fxhash presents various abstract 3d objects simply hovering in a gray gridded air, with simple accents of colorful cubes. It’s a serene composition whose quiet movements one can get lost in as the shapes morph and absorb. The collection’s description reads one simple, yet intriguing, line: “bottomless void in space.” Succumb to the void.