2c:null 2d:["$","title",null,{"children":"Final - GenArt | John C | Observable"}] 32:T8ae,

One day I just came across Aaron Siegel's article (listed above) in which the author talks about why auto-destructive artworks are in physical forms and why auto-creative artworks (a.k.a "generative" artworks) are usually in digital forms. Then I started to think, what a digital auto-destructive work, or self-destroy work, might look like. The first thing that came to my mind is the self-destruct website (also listed above). It is a very interesting and touching work. However, it hasn't actually destroyed itself, yet, and even if so, its destruction is an instant, like wiping out a hard drive. Thus, it might not be qualified as an auto-destructive work defined by Gustav Metzger. Another artwork(?) I found is Tokenize This, which is more like sarcasm toward NFTs. But again, the process of destruction is missing.

So I came back to tangible self-destroy pieces. The most famous recent works must be Girl with Balloon by Banksy. Although the shredding process is not very interesting and is more performative, it shows a very similar message that Gustav Metzger put in the auto-destructive manifesto. From this, I got the idea: to make a digital auto-destructive piece, I can try to destroy an existing piece with an algorithm.

Then there are two problems. Firstly, does it count as a generative artwork? Aaron Siegel argues in the article that generative art is a modern form of auto-creative art, so it should be creating something, not destroying them. But why not? As Camus said, there is construction in destruction. Some messages are delivered and some points are made during the destruction process, just like Ai Weiwei's action of dropping the Han dynasty urn. Also, it still fits the broad definition of generative art: using rules to create artworks. So I would say it can be a kind of generative art.

The second problem is more fatal. What is the meaning of destroying a digital object? Does it mean to delete the object (just like the suicide website and Tokenize This)? But this process is invisible and boring (and physical, actually). What can be another interpretation of destruction for a digital object? That is the key to continuing the project.

33:T872,

Let's think about the destruction in those physical auto-destructive works in another way. After shredding, Banksy's drawing "is still there", but just in pieces. After years, Metzger’s installations "are still there", but just less organized forms. This approach might be a bit tricky and absurd. But it gives another possible interpretation of destruction (which might relate to human perception): the visible increase of entropy.

How to apply this interpretation to digital objects? A simple idea would be: consider the digital object as a highly organized sequence of bits, destruction would mean rearranging the sequence in complete non-organized order. Take an image as an example, the destruction of a digital image can be the process of rearranging the pixels to make it looks like a screenshot of TV noise. That seems to be a simple solution. But, how to create this process in an interesting way (i.e., make the process aesthetically interesting)? and how to quantify the noisy level so that the algorithm knows when to stop? It seems to be natural to associate the last question with Shannon entropy. We can calculate the Shannon entropy of X, which is the difference between a pixel and its neighbors, as the representation of the entropy of the image.

Another approch, which is more human perception-oriented, is to use a sorting algorithm to sort all the pixels. Although the result would be highly organized for a machine, or a computer, it means nothing to human beings. I like this approach because it also pointing out the ambiguity of order, sense and meaning in nowadays' digital world. But there is also concerns about whether it is destruction or not and would it bring too much unrelated stuff in.

At the end, I decided to use the second approach because I think it works better in deliver the idea of the image being cut into pieces. To make the visual more convincing, I chose to use the blocksort algorithm (also one of the fastest algorithms) and wrote a customizable function for it (you can check it here).

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Final - GenArt

E-Shredder

JOHNC, 2021, SoftWare

Visit The Work

\n

Visit the NFT of This Work

","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"html","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"","database":"$undefined"},{"id":93,"value":"

Overview of the Project

E-Shredder is a webpage/piece of code, which shows you copies of the most recent sold NFTs, and gradually \"destroy\" them.
More interestingly, it itself is an NFT too, so if you buy it, you can witness it destroying itself.","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"html","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"","database":"$undefined"},{"id":210,"value":"

Video Demo

Screenshots

\n The Social Conscience of Generative Art by Lindsay Caplan
\nGenerative Art as a Response to Auto-Destructive Art and a Result of Technological Determinism by Aaron Siegel
\n(News)Banksy art burned, destroyed and sold as token in 'money-making stunt'\n

Related Artworks

\n This Website Will Self-destruct by Femme Android
\n Tokenize This by Ben Grosser
\n Girl with Balloon by Banksy
\n DIGITAL SELF-DESTRUCTION by Dragan Vojvodic
\n Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn by Ai Weiwei
\n Homage to New York by Jean Tinguely
\n

Initial Idea

","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"html","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"","database":"$undefined"},{"id":71,"value":"$32","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"html","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"","database":"$undefined"},{"id":106,"value":"

Why NFT

\"Destory\" an NFT is usually called \"burn it\", which actually means put it somewhere that no one is bored enough to find. The interesting point of using NFTs in this project is the truth that NFTs are designed to be non-changeable, so all the algorithm can do is to \"destroy\" a representation of it. It is fake. It is just a perfermance. It makes the project more absurd and ridiculous.

Entropy?

","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"html","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"","database":"$undefined"},{"id":88,"value":"$33","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"html","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","providerMetadata":"$undefined","attachments":"$undefined","output":"","database":"$undefined"},{"id":146,"value":"

OpenSea

\n I choose OpenSea because it is the largest NFT platform and it provides free and simple APIs for fetching data. They haven't updated their APIs for a while (about one year) and some options seem to be broken. But, still, it is good.\n

Technical Stuff

\n The system is, kind of, simple. The soruce code is on GitHub, here. Everything is happening at the client side, i.e., in the browser. The steps includes: 1. fetch metadata from API; 2. fetch NFT image; 3. break the image into pixels and use a customized block sort algorithm to sort them, creating animation; 4. after sorted, wait for 60s to fetch another NFT image and loop all steps.\n

Technical Reference

Using: p5.js, howler.js, jszip, can-autoplay.js, FileSaver.js
\nUsing OpenSea API

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