Maxim Zhestkov

Into the Blue is an art series that explores the abstract digital depths with movement of light and colour. 

Curious and vivid, blue light becomes the viewer's guide through virtual landscapes. Closely inspecting every corner of digital depths, beams emitting from without become an expansion of our senses that helps us perceive artificial worlds. 

Still, as we strive to comprehend the digital reality that we created, it remains as unattainable as distant stars. It is a world that is separated from us by its immaterial nature. Diving into the depth of the screen with our attention, we are imagining mere projections of our reality onto the digital canvas and stay defined by our three-dimensional mind.

Into the blue

Deafbeef

https://deafbeef.com/

Seven physical grails hand forged from 24k gold, silver, bronze, copper and iron. This series explores the historic symbolism of grails as well as the recent interpretation of the term by NFT enthusiasts. In contrasting raw physical process with layers of intangibility, and playfully depicting the contexts in which we experience NFT art, one may consider what grants the status of "grail", and how that collective agreement is influenced by social cues and distribution medium.

GRAILS

Josie Bellini

Wrapped in ribbons with an introspective gaze, she is a symbol of balance, energy, life, power, and beauty in the world. 

The title "Her" is a nod to the ideal that many creatives like myself strive for: a state of flow where the world melts away and we are one with the muse. In Her, we all see different things: a reflection of ourselves or those around us, inspiring us to tap into our own potential and lead the way to balance, love, or the next challenge. When I look at Her, I see my own journey as an artist, creator, builder, and the struggles and triumphs that we face everyday.

This piece is the first time I have used artificial intelligence in my artwork. I was fortunate to be trained by an AI engineer, James, who taught me how to create training sets from scratch, run trained text to image and image to image models, and of course how to write successful prompts. It was a pleasure and honor to have this hands-on learning experience with this new technology.

I added my human touch, enhancing the work with hand-drawn layers. In a collaboration between human and machine, her spirit embodies the beauty of both worlds.

Presented by PROOF in Grails III, a work of art created by Josie Bellini titled Her.

Matt Kane

Presented by PROOF in Grails III, a work of art created by Matt Kane titled Proof of Origin - Picture of the Planets.

Crayon and code are united after four decades in a collaboration with the self. Artist Matt Kane has become well known for using time and change as artistic mediums. Additionally, Kane has referenced space and the cosmos in several series including his 2021 magnum opus, Gazers, a generative lunar phase calendar released on Art Blocks in 2021. In fact, Kane's very first NFTs in 2019 were depictions of the M87 Black Hole. The subject of 'Proof of Origin' is a red crayon drawing that the artist made when he was just 4 years old, which he titled at the time 'Picture of the Planets.' 38 years later, as a cryptoartist, Kane reminds us ""don't trust, verify. I've explained how my interest in the cosmos extends back as long as I can remember. This drawing is proof of my early passion and to my estimate, my very first visual expression of outer space. My father remembers the drawing hanging on our refrigerator for a very long time. That's probably where the stains came from. He and my mother were both very happy to see it again.

Each NFT has a unique set of stars which are deterministically generated according to an NFT's minting transaction hash. The sky is made up of one star for every month that has passed since the original drawing was made on March 1st, 1985. The work begins with 454 stars. A new star is added to shine brightly at the top of each new month.

In addition to archiving and responsively presenting the original crayon drawing, the work also serves as a 24 hour clock. Each hour is represented by a different color from the 24 pack of crayons Kane would have drawn from in 1985. "I've traded black and gray for 'Cornflower Blue' and 'Sea Green' - my favorite colors from the larger packs of crayons. I remember trading these with my kindergarten class's box of 64. I'm pretty sure I got in trouble for that." The sky fades according to the minutes that have passed, appearing darkest at the top of each hour.

Clicking on the left and right edge of the screen or pressing the spacebar changes the viewing mode of the artwork. Viewers are encouraged to reflect on their own memories of interacting with the night sky, especially at an early age.

Proof of Origin - Picture of the Planets

Seneca

Presented by PROOF in Grails III, a work of art created by Seneca titled Shermie.

Shermie

Rik Oostenbroek

Echoes

Sofia Crespo

All that we see with the naked eye is composed of that which is invisible to it: an endless realm of building blocks starting in the atomic and organised into elements, in turn comprising ever more complex structures that take on emergent, reactive properties that border on the generative aesthetically. Ascorbic acid, known to us as the essential vitamin c (which our bodies cannot produce) becomes in its microscopic state a generative element that can be interactively coaxed into forming complex, beautiful structures.

Presented by PROOF in Grails III, a work of art created by Sofia Crespo titled unsynthesized #423.

unsynthesized #423

Mpkoz

An intangible resolution becoming apparent, frustrations transform into beautiful efficiencies, nothing else matters. Realization is a 150-piece generative collection written in GLSL.

Presented by PROOF in Grails III, a work of art created by Mpkoz titled Realization.

Realization

Yatreda

The "Duressa" dance from the Dorze community of Southern Ethiopia. It represents power and courage, and is usually performed at funerals to honor a hero. The women sing "Come my Lion, come my Hero." Traditional dances are kept alive in the Dorze community by allowing kids to dance from an early age in weddings and other important ceremonies marking rights of passage.

Presented by PROOF in Grails III, a work of art created by Yatreda titled Dorze Duressa.

Dorze Duressa

Ryan Koopmans

Systems is an 8 piece series of modern megacity skyscrapers cast in colour tones that contrast with the textures of the manufactured landscape.

Systems

Killer Acid

Presented by PROOF in Grails III, a work of art created by Killer Acid titled Man Machine.

Man Machine

Presented by PROOF in Grails III, a work of art created by Tjo titled Cigarette and heartbreaks.

Cigarette and heartbreaks

Harvey Rayner

Reticulum is part of my continued exploration of developing deep color and texture using 100% generative approaches. For this project I created an entirely new generative color model and for the first time rendered the entire artworks using SVG making it possible to scale the outputs to any size in live mode.

I wanted this series to look like rudimentary and mutating networks. Crude interconnecting webs of primordial elements. I love the idea of a network coming online in terms of self awareness. Networks seem to pervade all of life from the vast Mycelium webs in forests through to the circulatory, nervous and neurological systems in our own bodies. More inspiring for me however is thinking about the first pulses of life that evolved in microbial networks in ancient epochs and also the possibility of self awareness evolving quietly and wildly within the interconnected machinery of the internet. This series of artworks I hope are a playful expression of my fascination with this subject. 

A recurrent theme in all my work is an attempt to create a simultaneous sense of both macro and micro vistas. In building the primitives for this project I was inspired by images of both microorganisms and vast skeletal gas clouds in interstellar nurseries revealed by the James Webb telescope. I often have the sense when looking out into the cosmos that this might be what it's like for a cell or even an atom looking around at its neighbors and unfathomably distant cousins. In this way I am filled with a sense that we ourselves might be nodes in a much larger self aware network. 

When I’m at my desk developing a work I don’t tend to think about much else other than the code and what is directly in front of me. Mostly I’m thinking visually or just involved with technical problem solving. It is exciting and sometimes even surprising for me to see how the subjects I have been contemplating and reading about recently reveal themselves in my work. When I write about my work it may seem contrived, but I would say the subjects I write about are genuinely inspiring a series, it's just that the means by which they get translated into visual forms is often a mystery even to me.  

As a way to make this a true Long Form Project in the sense that it is not just a curated collection of generative outputs I used a list of Seed Phrases to generate each output. These are included as a feature so collectors can see them and potentially use them as a name for each piece. I started out by forming a list of words that describe the project plus a few other words related to Long Form Generative art and the Web3 space. 'Proof' is in there! Each seed phrase is then passed to an algorithm that turns it into a hash of the same variety that is generated on the Ethereum network. This hash is then passed to the algorithm and the artwork is created in the same way an standard Art Blocks project is built.

Presented by PROOF in Grails III, a work of art created by Harvey Rayner titled Reticulum.

Reticulum

Seerlight

Presented by PROOF in Grails III, a work of art created by Seerlight titled Shores.

Shores

Reuben Wu

Expired Polaroid Time Zero photograph of my guide standing on the frozen ice of Tempelfjorden, Svalbard Archipelago, 2011.

Part of my first photo series of Svalbard, a trip that motivated me to dedicate my artistic practice to photography, as my time as a full-time musician drew to a close.

Presented by PROOF in Grails III, a work of art created by Reuben Wu titled Tempelfjord.

Tempelfjord

Mika Tajima

Bathybius Haeckelii is the genesis NFT by Mika Tajima, presented by Pace Verso, the web3 hub of Pace Gallery. The artwork is a visualization of New Humans (2019), in which emergent gatherings of synthetic humans rise from the surface of a black ferrofluid pool. Appearing to morph like a supernatural life form, these dynamic clusters of magnetic liquid produced by machine learning processes are images of communities of synthetic people — hybrid profiles modeled from actual DNA, fitness, and dating profile data sets sourced from public and leaked caches. The work questions the very nature of identity as something liquid, ever-evolving, and emerging, much like Bathybius Haeckelii, a substance that British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley discovered and initially believed to be a form of primordial matter, a source of all organic life.

Presented by PROOF in Grails III, a work of art created by Mika Tajima titled Bathybius Haeckelii.

Bathybius Haeckelii

Alpha Centauri Kid

Presented by PROOF in Grails III, a work of art created by Alpha Centauri Kid titled there goes that kid.

there goes that kid

Zach Lieberman

A map, but of what?  A landscape, but where?  

Don't worry too much about it.  Listen to the colors talk.  When you need it, they will tell you where you are and where to go. 

How things fit together

Jon Gray

Presented by PROOF in Grails III, a work of art created by Jon Gray titled Mud Slide.

Mud Slide

Iskra Velitchkova

Substance is a generative study of color, matter, body and mass. PNG, 5000x7000px. 2022.

Substance

Adorned with fresh mechanics and a few new surprises, PROOF is proud to present Grails: Season III. We’re bringing 20 artists into this season, which features both limited edition and curated series of artworks. As always, artist identities are kept hidden until the post-mint live reveal event.

Type	Series
Mint date	Jan 17, 2023
Number of artworks	11

Details