Venice —
Ultimate city of a tour around the world that started in Venice Beach and ended in Italy for a Grand Finale marked with celebrations and emotion.
The Finale was signed by 60 different artists, sharing a common piece of code that was inscribed on-chain as a single generative project on Art Blocks Engine.
Each artist was allowed to use up to 20 kBytes of data for their algorithm : much less than my usual framework would allow ( I usually need between 300 - 400 kB of code data ). For that reason, I chose to design an algorithm from scratch, starting with a blank page and coding in a already minimized form. Each character you can save, counts! I have been using a lot of compression tricks, several of them inspired by Piterpasma, who is considered a master in the field.
Eventually, my piece uses 9 548 bytes of Vanilla Javascript code, with no dependency, and features a 3D engine with vector and matrix maths, a triangle rasterization algorithm, a generative alphabet with text renderer, a line occlusion algorithm, various noise background patterns and color themes, real-time animation and even a fully functional SVG export making every animation frame plottable. ( press [s] on the animation to download the SVG ) .
This piece might be seen as a display of coding technique. It was above anything else a lot of fun and excitement, making something different than the type of craft I was known for, and reviving the spirit of my time on the demoscene, as a teenager in the 90's.
More specifically, it draws inspiration from an actual piece of Javascript code than I had written in 2002 which was animating in real time some basic 3D objects ( cube, pyramid ) in both wireframe and flat shading + lighting, back when the canvas element didn't exist ! I was actually moving around a number of divs + changing their background color to simulate the control of individual pixels, or lines of pixels using a custom triangle rasterization algorithm, which behavior I replicated for the Finale piece after finding my original code that had survived 20 years.
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For anyone interested, this is the javascript code that creates the artwork on this page (100% handwritten, no minimizer tool ) :
zancan_venice.js
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The work is meant to be viewed in fullscreen on a 4K monitor in portrait orientation.