Code as canvas: how Olta and Transient Labs are ushering in a new genre of coding as art
Strauss and Peyfuss came up with their first super high-level concept in May, 2021, while working at an aerospace engineering company. After tossing around some ideas, they settled on the 24 Series.
The concept: “Taking Ben’s landscape photography and having it evolve throughout the day,” Peyfuss explained. “It lives with you throughout the day, night, sunrise, sunset.” Instead of a fixed landscape print for your wall, the artwork changes over time by tracking your day-to-night 24-hour cycle
Here’s where the coder as the artist comes in: “It’s based on user location. You’re polling the city that the viewers are viewing the piece in, by looking at the IP,” Strauss said. “And from that you can calculate sunset, sunrise times, lunar phases, et cetera…”
Users can mess with the VPN of a location to manipulate the artwork – such as having the VPN set to Tokyo while in NYC – and seeing the piece based on that time zone.
The 24 Series separates the artwork from a standard digital art .jpeg or .mp4 video, which the team refers to as ‘“passive metadata,”’ i.e. metadata that doesn’t do anything but be itself regardless of external input or external forces.
The 24 Series was also the genesis for the idea of new experiences with art based in coding.
“The whole concept is an artwork that lives with you, so it’s actually now a window, instead of just an art piece,” says Strauss. “The idea was taking a step back in photography.”
Since photography is all about freezing a moment in time, Transient Labs’ idea was to unfreeze time, to give the viewer a taste of the core experience of the photographer.
Reposted from: superrare.com
