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Andrew Mitchell

Flowers of Alfiren

September 6th - September 21st

mint-art

Andrew Mitchell

Flowers of Alfiren, 2023

Unique Series of 86

Algorithmic Design

0.19Ξ per artwork

September 6th at 6PM EST

About Andrew

artist bio

Andrew Mitchell (b. 1996, Virgina) is a generative artist holding a BS in Computer Science from the University of Virginia. His journey into the realm of generative art began in 2014, inspired by a school project and further nurtured by a childhood surrounded by art—thanks to his mother, a volunteer at the National Gallery of Art in D.C. Mitchell's initial project, an application for drawing non-periodic tessellations, served as a stepping stone into the world of generative art, leading to a transformative experience with his blockchain-backed art piece "Primera," created in collaboration with Grant Yun. He is a strong advocate for the growing field of generative art, seeing coding as an extension of his artistic hand and looking forward to its inclusion in top art school curricula.

Project Description

Immerse yourself in a visual narrative that transcends the boundaries of traditional art. "Flowers of Alfiren," the latest generative art collection by Andrew Mitchell, encapsulates the raw beauty of nature and the universe in code-driven visuals. Inspired by the lush landscapes of Virginia and the boundary-pushing work of Takashi Murakami, Mitchell conjures the world as seen through the eyes of a newborn bird—chaotic, beautiful, and infinitely complex.


Mitchell's artistic journey has been a fascinating evolution. His earlier works, such as "Sky Meadow," taught him to draw flowers, "Touch Grass" involved organizing these elements, and "April Showers" pushed these techniques to their limits, while "Memory Loss" enabled him to master lush textures and backgrounds. Each of these projects contributed to the development of the unique formula used in "Flowers of Alfiren."


Technologically driven yet emotionally resonant, "Flowers of Alfiren" deploys intricate algorithms designed to invoke visually captivating thoughts. The creative process is a multi-step marvel: from the initial design of each organism in a digital 'black box,' to its placement on a digital canvas via a fine-tuned formula, all the way to the layered final product that includes background, color, and skeletal structure. The collection's code is permanently stored on the Ethereum blockchain, making each artwork an immutable part of the digital ledger. For those interested in the mechanics, the smart contract can be viewed here. Furthermore, it's immortalized as a serverless webpage on Arweave.

Process

backgroundBackground
colorColor
skeletonSkeleton
final artworkFinal Artwork

These works are all curated outputs from a generative algorithm written entirely in Javascript using the p5js library. This algorithm is a living entity, which I have been using and building off of for the past year now.


The process has a few steps:


1. Draw each organism in a black box. This process can be infinite. The organisms I use here took a whole year to create. The flowers themselves are comprised of hundreds of individual curves, drawn in a series of loops, which move from ~ 0 to ~2*PI. The geometric functions of cosine, sine, and tangent are used to draw curves rotationally around the center of the flower.


2. Drawing these organisms as well as any other textures to the canvas. When I say canvas, I am talking about a digital canvas on an HTML page. In HTML: <canvas> </canvas>.


3. Trial and error, constantly changing the formula. The formula for flower placement uses a custom scaled noise field. I found success with ignoring gravity and increasing the density of flowers towards the center of each piece.


4. Once I have a formula for placing all my digital paint strokes, I focus on creating layers. There are three main layers: background, color, and skeleton. Each of these three are also aggregates of other layers.


Past Projects

past-project

Primera

Series of 400

past-project

Sky Meadow, 2022

Series of 555

past-project

Kaleidoscope, 2022

1/1

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Email stephen@vertufineart.com

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