Artifact 001 #459/1749

Almost every year, we capture ourselves in a way that no photo or video is capable of: with a photoscan. If you dig through our archives, you'll find many of them and can see exactly how we change over time. Sam Gorski, Creator | I wanted to find the oldest scan of myself and put him side-by-side with Sam from the present. While it is hard to look at it and not miss the years past, at the same time, this gives me hope for the future by embracing and cherishing the change in my life. How would I have gotten this far without him? About This Piece | Sam on the left was captured in 2014, while Sam on the right was captured last week (2021). This work represents the personal, creative, and emotional journey in all of us, and the hope that ourselves tomorrow may be better than ourselves today.

Each day, a new composition for the Master is generated autonomously using a data feed of Bitcoin's last 24 hours of price action. Each hour's price programmatically controls rotation, scale, and position of a correlating layer. Astute viewers will surmise the day's price volatility simply by examining the artwork. While the daily image generation is the result of autonomous API calls, utilizing an algorithm the artist wrote, the artist has chosen to retain a control token. This token allows him to fine-tune variables associated with his algorithm, in addition to addressing aesthetic concerns within the life-cycle of the artwork. Layer state, alpha, hue, saturation, and brightness are elements the artist has retained control of in order that this artwork remain a living work-in-progress. An earlier iteration of this artwork was featured as a nightly projection mapping video on the face of the Daniels Fisher Clocktower, as part of ETH Denver 2020. Access to this and additional exclusive content awaits the master token owner at the artist's NFT Portal: https://collect.mattkane.com/minted-works/right-place-right-time-bitcoin-hourly-price-offset/

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An anthropomorphic figure stands, wide eyed, staring at the viewer; its body masculine, muscular, and humanoid. Its “mind” dissociates into a conglomerate of structures resembling feathers, grain, teeth–as well as a radial flower “node”, casting linear rays throughout the composition. To his left, a vat of bodies gesture and writhe in a kind of amniotic soup, attended by a video game robot. The bot's red display reads “uWu”. Behind the robot and filling the left side of the composition is an archaic figure composed of a variety of vintage objects and symbols. Among them are a hardbound book with ancient cuneiform scripts, indicating barley, beer, bread, ox, house, and sky, behind which is a grimacing, salivating jagged toothed maw; and an old Commodore floppy drive. The figure’s head tilts toward an illuminated crescent moon, suggesting the Egyptian Sacred Bull. The archaic figure is composed of a variety of mutating cells, which shift in color, and pattern; eventually breaking free into an ephemeral broadcast of bubbles which move across the background. The work came into being against a psychological introspection, which included associations to pop culture such as alien abduction and pod people, as well as quite a bit of reflection on grains as a symbol of civilization, agriculture, sustenance, life, and imbibing (mainly whiskies).

Welcome to the ‘Beautiful worlds’ where nature and technology have merged into a single entity. These are Ai generated and hand finished visions of solarpunk future in which I would really like our future generations to live and prosper: the future we might have if we took the very “alternative route” which now lies before us: replacing states and corporations which free federations of communities and cooperatives, using decentralist and ecological technologies to create a world beyond economic scarcity and social hierarchy, defined by autonomy, mutual aid, diversity, and inclusiveness. The long-term goals of solarpunk are freedom and well-being for all by adopting and developing such ecological technologies as: solar, wind, wave and geothermal energy rather than oil or gas to generate electricity; a world of decentralized eco-cities, permaculture and vertical farming, free and open-source software, open-source hardware, small-scale fabrication laboratories, micro-manufacturing, 3D-printing, and countless examples of commons-based peer-production online: meeting the maximum amount of needs, in the shortest time, using the minimum possible amount of energy. It’s a world of decentralized and confederated eco-communities, using technology for human-centric and eco-centric ends rather than for accumulating power and profit – mending the metabolic rift between first nature (the natural world) and second nature (human culture) – and where social hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, and disability are considered horror stories from the past “oil age”. Solarpunk desires societies of polycultural ethnic diversity and gender liberation, where each person is able to actualize themselves in societal environment of free experimentation and communal caring; This philosophy proposes that in order for the social and natural worlds to reconcile, humans must first transform their relations to each other – recreating society along egalitarian, cooperative, and democratic lines – and then transform their relations towards nature – adopting an attitude to cooperation, rather than domination, towards the planet and its nonhuman forms of life. Text by Connor Owens. This artwork took me a year to create and for you it will take a year to discover. Master autonomously updates once a day at 12am with one of 366 original artworks. Enjoy!