We are excited to welcome the artist Manolo Gamboa Naon known as Manolo (@Manoloide on SuperRare) as a new artist to our platform!

Manolo Gamboa Naon is an Argentinean visual artist and creative coder whose interest focuses mainly on exploring generative visual aesthetics based on plastic experimentation with code. His works explore the potential of programming as an expressive language in the framework of generativity and process art. Combining images and video, he explores the possible relationships between chaos and order, organic and artificial, randomness and control.

In the 2018 article “Generative Art Finds Its Prodigy” Jason Bailey interviews artist Manolo with the help of art historian and Spanish to English interpreter Kaesha Freyaldenhoven. Together they published the first interview in English with this internationally respected and admired generative artist.  The interview has been read over 50 thousand times and Bailey has offered to share an excerpt from their conversation below to help acquaint SuperRare collectors who may be new to the artist and his work:

Jason Bailey (JB): A lot of generative artists either start as artists first or programmers first and then build the other skillset. Can you tell us a little about your background? How did you first end up making generative art?

Manolo Gamboa Naon (M): I was young. I was thirteen. But, well, I think in that moment, I started making images but I didn’t know what I was doing. I did not realize that there were other artists out there doing the same things I was doing. Only after many years and finding other artists, did I say, ‘Wow! There are people doing things with Flash that I now appreciate in this moment.’ I later switched to Processing.

JB: How long have you been using Processing?

M: Seven years.

JB: How did you learn it?

M: I had an orange book – Schiffman – during this time. But I also started studying design as a career. They encouraged us to learn Processing for a year. We had to learn how to program in the course. But during this time, I was more interested in creating interactive things rather than design.

JB: I am often surprised how people misunderstand generative art. I had a professor who told me generative art would always be limited, as there is no such thing as an accident with a program. He believed accidents are where discovery happens. I disagreed. When I was making generative art, there were often surprises when I would run the code, and I would build and adjust the work based on those surprises. I am curious about your thoughts on the creative process in coding art. Is it a discovery process with trial and error and accidents and discovery like traditional art making? Or do you have the complete outcome in mind before you start? Or maybe neither?

M: Generally, one has an idea, makes a first draft of this idea, and then begins correcting. All of the time, when I come and create, the most beautiful parts of the work are born from the errors. After a certain point, I believe that the maturity of my style was formed by making small errors because I was discovering as I went along. From these errors, I take an idea and it stays. I learn how to manipulate from these errors. The error is central to the work of generative artists apart from, obviously, the rules, and the rules become text that converts into an image. It is impossible to have what you imagine become what you see. The beginning is errors, errors, errors, errors. They are beautiful errors.

JB: For me, your sense of color and pattern are what stands out the most. I feel like your choice of color palettes is very smart, and you evoke strong feelings through this alone. For example, you have some recent works that makes me nostalgic for the ’80s, with shapes and colors that were very popular in that decade. Where do you get the inspiration for your color palette?

M: Color is a problem in my life. Realistically, when I began making generative artwork, I realized that programmers – I mean, I don’t want to generalize – but they do not give color a lot of importance. They do not have an intention. But in the past five or six years, I have been attempting to feel more comfortable using colors. Because it matters – a lot. And now, sometimes I spend more time forming a color palette than programming. My inspiration comes from looking around all the time. I look at a lot of things from design. Instagram, Twitter, all the time searching for references. A movie, an old newspaper. Inspiration comes from many places. In my work, I intend to evoke something – from a time or of a certain quality.

JB: What are the biggest changes you have seen in the last decade in Processing and generative art?

Read the answer to this question and the full interview as well as Jason’s complete analysis of Manolo’s work in the article “Generative Art Finds it’s Prodigy” on Artnome.

By k0ch

ALGORITHMIC ARTIST LOST IN A RECURSIVE LOOP. His work combines the beauty of nature with the artificial decay of big cities, represented by organic algorithms that grow like neon lights in the middle of concrete. He is inspired by internet culture, dystopian/sci-fi films, old video games, punk, mathematics and generative art.

IMPORTANT: There’s a puzzle with prize at the end of the article.

Insomnia is an artwork series that are compose of eleven pieces (a beautiful prime number). The first piece come to my mind in a sleeplessness night during Coronavirus quarantine, but is not the product of lockdown. The lockdown allowed me to think about myself, and what happen when all the world is stopped and you’re only connected through internet.

I’m working with generative art since 2015. I started to work with interative technologies with Corvus Project, a project that uses kinect to generate real-time images with dance/performance pieces. I learned that the graphics that we generate doesn’t have any sense without the beauty of dance, without this element the computer pieces in Corvus has no sense, but in the other side, the dance without the graphics still express poetry and feeling. Dance is a form of art really well developed, with centuries of history.

Corvus Project video:

I want to do the same with the programs that I write, express beauty in the same way, but generative art is something relatively new compared to other art expressions. I found that several generative artworks are more compromissed with the technology and the innovation itself, that with the fellings that we can express through art. And, surprisingly, I found in cryptoart world the missing piece to start to build this poetry. Following the cryptocurrencies philosophy, the value is not in something that you keep jealously in a vault, is the entire network that put the real value. Without this, you don’t have any precious thing, you only have a number. Insomnia is about myself, but without the network, is nothing. I’m the product of the network, i’m a son of internet, and I’m the product of thousands of nights sleeplessness searching things in the network and connecting between us. Insomnia is a network state. This is why I consider Insomnia a cryptoart artwork, and not only an artwork that is sold through ethereum network.

Why GIF? The GIF format allow me to work with perfectly looped animations and working with the concept of infinity. All the Insomnia pieces are created without start and end, you can see the GIF for a long time without noticing any break. If you want, until death. The fractal draws that you see are created using Lindenmayer Systems. I created a program that you can found here (https://www.k0ch.art/ceres/) that creates random l-systems. All the pieces contains a fractal created by CERES (with some hand modifications to fit in the piece correctly).

PUZZLE!
I will put a puzzle here that involves all the Insomnia pieces, and the first one that can resolve it, will receive an artwork for free. You only will be able to solve this with the eleven pieces. At this moment, I only uploaded nine to Superrare, so for now you cannot start. Insomnia is composed by two types of pieces. If you found the two groups of pieces and tell me which piece is in each group and the justification behind, I’ll create a new piece only for you. If you have the answer, you can mention me in a tweet with the explanation.

Only a clue: There’s a mathematical relation between the groups.

ALGORITHMIC ARTIST LOST IN A RECURSIVE LOOP. koch’s work combines the beauty of nature with the artificial decay of big cities, represented by organic algorithms that grow like neon lights in the middle of concrete. He is inspired by internet culture, dystopian/sci-fi films, old videogames, punk, mathematics and generative art.

This week I had the pleasure of sitting down with k0ch to hear more about the thoughts behind his dystopian, cyberpunk GIF art. We chatted about the relationships between art and code, the inspiration behind his glowing ideographs, the unique qualities inherent in the GIF as a format, and more.

They have always been closely intertwined. In fact my first serious programming project was a game that combined my work with digital art. I worked in the video games industry as a programmer for 3 years. With time I discovered that I’m more interested in the algorithmic aspects of programming than in software architecture, and creative coding provide me the opportunity to work in an intense way with algorithms and mathematics doing the thing that I most love: art. 

Another important thing is that my developer work provides me experience with different tools and languages that you need to use for every software project, and generative/algorithmic art, like code repositories, syntax, compiling and specific language flows.

I can describe my creative process like an iterative process between me and the computer. 

Normally, I start programming an autonomous system to explore some field, and I decide if this is providing me good outputs or not. After that, I select the outputs that represent the feelings that I want to express for a certain piece. For the pieces that I have tokenized right now (GIF animations), I’m working entirely with Processing–P5JS to be exact. It allows me to work easily with only a text editor and a browser. I capture all the frames in the animation in PNG format, and after that I create the GIF using ImageMagick commands.

I also prefer to work with open source tools. It’s amazing when you have the possibility to dig deeper inside the code without limits. Free software opens up the possibility of democratizing technology and art.

I wrote this manifesto because I found that GIF is more than a format for short animations, it is a technology with magical characteristics. First of all, colors are limited, so if you watch closely, all of the complex GIFs have some level of dithering. You can get mad with this limitation, or you can use it to your own benefit. This is why one of the rules is “Dithering is part of the artwork”. The other two rules are more about the concept of the loop and infinity. One is to “avoid ping-ponging (when a GIF plays forward, and then plays in reverse)” and the other is that “Perfect Loops are the goal. The GIF must have no visible beginning and end.” The perfectly looped animations allow me to explore the concept of infinity. The ping-pong technique isn’t bad in itself, but if you use it for all of your animations, you lose some important techniques that allow you to step outside of ping-ponging. I don’t want the GIF to feel trapped in a scene. 

Of course, if GIF is only a format for you, these rules make no sense. This is only valid if you want to do GIF art!

I grew up in an ex-industrial neighborhood in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, playing hide and seek between abandoned buildings and old railroads. One of the most magical things in an old building is when the plants grow between concrete cracks. Nature never gives up, and this fact provides a lot of metaphors about our life and our landscapes. The cities in Latin America are really big, with unplanned and chaotic growth. This is why I use broken neon lights and ideographs (like old billboards) in my pieces. For me it’s a good way to express the feelings of an urban person from this side of the world. I usually use Chinese or Japanese in my pieces because you can express a complex idea with a few characters. I think that all the ideographs are a really powerful tool for art. If someone wants to go deeper into the artwork’s meaning, these characters are probably a good start. 

I will continue with my GIF works. Right now I’m obsessed with the ways to create 3D effects using only 2D techniques. I think this is a good way to understand deeply how we perceive the dimensions. Also, I’m working again on Corvus Project, a project that I have with @nadart12 that explores the connection between algorithmic art and dance/movement. We will tokenize some videos in the near future.