Comment by kouru225 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kouru225 | Hacker News Reader

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I know no one here wants to talk about NFTs and crypto, but the generative art NFT space has been home to some really awesome creative coding. Specifically the Tezos chain. Fxhash.xyz verse.works Feralfile.com Artblocks.io Objkt.com Highlight.xyz

These are all spaces where creative coding took off in 2019-2022. The scene has died down a little, but that also means that the people who are still active aren’t just hopping in on a fad. A lot of the artists are people you might already know by name: Kim Asendorf, who created pixel sorting. Casey Reas, who was part of the original team that created processing. Karsten Schmidt, who made the wonderful open source library thi.ng. There are a lot more names and things to say about this but IMO the only reason people feel like creative coding is dead is cause it started using NFTs and crypto, and they all promptly ignored all the great output these artists had.

> it started using NFTs and crypto, and they all promptly ignored all the great output these artists had.

I know I did. The whole mess really opened my eyes to how vapid much of it really was — how little “art” there was present in the creative output.

As an aside, I’m hoping to one day see an exhibition of actual code (not output) that can be read as art. I only know of a few examples, but maybe some day.

There’s an artist named Piter Pasma that prominently displayed his code as part of the art. He made a lightweight ray tracing algorithm that uses SDFs to draw anything from any perspective. His ray tracing algorithm is only like 400 characters or something so he released it alongside the art.

Here’s his site: https://piterpasma.nl/

I'm personally kind of anti-NFT myself, but I have to admit I do like the generative art NFT scene, especially back when Hic Et Nunc was around and people were selling fun little things they made for the equivalent of $5 of TEZ.

To me the thing I hated most about NFTs was the unbridled greed and opportunism, people trying to get rich quick by making bad pixel art or stealing other people's art as their own, so it was really refreshing to see a community of people making things fun things and selling them for dirt cheap, and seeing other people buy said things simply because it was kind of fun.

HEN was popping. Those were the fun days lol

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