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Gorilla Recap 6

This week we released a new token on FxHash, programmed a particle system in collaboration with ChatGPT, and looked back onto 2 years of making generative art on FxHash. We also read some interesting articles about generative art!

By Ahmad Moussa



8 min read
Gorilla Recap 6

Hey everyone 👋 and hello to all new subscribers that joined since last week! Thanks for signing up and joining along for the ride! This is the weekly newsletter, in which I recap everything noteworthy from the past week. Hope you have a good stay!

This week I released a new token on FxHash - 2D or not 2D!

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2D or not 2D #17 collected by Alessandro Fiore

Big thanks to everyone that collected an iteration so far! 🙌 I was hesitant about releasing the token initially but then I decided that I will not let the pile of unfinished projects get any bigger and pulled the trigger! And I'm super happy that I did!

In this Newsletter you're getting a mini making-of. The initial idea for the project came up while prototyping my EditArt piece Blöck, where I had a simple idea for partitioning a rectangular region into slanted slices:

I decided on a different grid-based strategy for Blöck however. A little bit down the line I returned to the partitioning idea, and explored some visual ideas. For instance I doubled up the slice quadrilaterals, achieving a sort of 2.5D effect:

After refactoring the entire code, I thought it would be interesting to have the slices move up and down inside their respective partition containers - which looked pretty cool:

I love making stuff that looks like 3D when it's just 2D tricks. Soon after that though, I dropped the project for almost a month, and got busy with other things. Earlier this month I got around to working on it again:

Until I finally felt that it was complete enough to be published:

Tom coming up with a banger name for the sketch 😂

In other news Yazid shared a post yesterday that really resonated with my own feelings:

Making art is an emotional challenge. I'll often have too many ideas for my own good, and in the attempt to pursue multiple threads I'll start to lose myself and not get anything done. For this reason, I find that it's a massive effort to work on the same thing again when it's just so easy to start a new project instead. Makes feel a little bit better about myself when I read such words coming from someone whose art I really admire.

Gorilla Articles

Programming a Particle System with ChatGPT

This week I played a lot with ChatGPT and tried to use it as my personal sketching assistant; turns out that it's actually pretty good at making P5 sketches. The practical example that I decided to pursue was an interactive particle system, and after trying different approaches I ended up with the following:

Later I compiled a little post summarizing my explorations, showcasing the prompts that I used to put together the final sketch. If you want to try this experiment for yourself and steer ChatGPT to create an interesting p5 sketch:

Programming a Particle System with ChatGPT
You’ve probably heard about ChatGPT, and you’ve probably heard that it can write code. In this post we’re taking it for a spin and explore a practical example - we’ll make it code a full-fledged particle system from scratch! Let’s see what the best prompts are for this purpose!
Gorilla SunAhmad Moussa

A brief FxHash Retrospective

After releasing my latest token, I looked back on all of the projects that I have released on FxHash so far, and it made a little bit nostalgic:

16 FxHash projects

I rarely take the time to reflect on my previous works and all the experiences that I've made along the way, hence I wrote a little retrospective to commemorate this 16th FxHash release:

Making Generative Blockchain Art on FxHash: A brief Retrospective
This post is a brief retrospective in which I look back onto the past two years of making code based blockchain art. I tackle some lessons that I’ve learned, some of the emotional struggles that I’ve experienced and conclude with some tips to grapple with this fast paced environment.
Gorilla SunAhmad Moussa

In the post I tackle a couple of topics, like grappling with the emotional challenges that come alongside making generative art, as well as some things that I believe I could have done better.

I believe that I've grown a lot as a coder and as an artist since these early FxHash days - at the very least I feel much more comfortable now putting work out into the world than I did before.

Gorilla Sketches

Another week of heavy sketching - not just for the newly released token but also for a couple of upcoming projects. One of them for Proof of X, which I'm already really excited about:

All the simple things - WIP Sketch in preparation for Proof of X

Same artwork at a larger scale.

The second project is for a new upcoming platform - I'm not certain if I can reveal too much about it at this point - but it's got something to do with the Poisson disk sampling I shared recently:

More about this one in the coming days! Can you guess what it's going to be?

Interesting reads of the week

This week we treat ourselves to a couple of articles on generative Art!

Draw this Seed!

Alejandro Campos released a really innovative FxParams token that allows you to draw onto the canvas and then mint whatever you created. In his article he explains how he made it possible: essentially the canvas needs to be encoded as a string and then passed in a parameter, such that the minted piece re-generates what has been drawn.

fxhash - Draw that seed!
Pensado a mano explores the intersection of Generative Art and Hand Drawing. The collector, by drawing a predefined number of shapes on canvas, creates a unique hand-crafted seed that generates the final artwork. That is the only customisable param, thought by hand, which interacts with various rand…
fx logo

The technicalities behind Pensado a Mano

Juhani Halkomaki - Feature Article in Stir World

It is always a joy to see Juhani's art grace my timeline - here's a well deserved feature article on his art in the Stir world Magazine in which he talks about his background, process and inspirations:

Juhani Halkomäki: Exploring a digital arts practice that builds on creative coding
The artist Juhani Halkomäki shares anecdotes from his digital art practice, and explains how he came to focus on his art while working in technology.
STIRworld.comManu Sharma

A closer look at Juhani's practice - a must read!

The Algorithm behind Buizen

Not from this week, but still very worth reading - Misha Heesakkers gives us a peak into the inner workings of the algorithm and maths behind his generative token Buizen:

fxhash - Behind the algorithm: Buizen - Generating tubes with arc tangent math
Welcome to my article series ‘Behind the algorithm’ where I try to write about the work that gets into the artwork. I started this series for my generative prints but recently I dipped my toes into generative art NFTs on fxhash where I launched two generative tokens, “Kralen” and “Buizen”. In this a…
fx logo

Tip of the Week

Not a programming tip this time around, but nonetheless something quite interesting to me. It's about varying the length of you sentences to create a perceived rhythm in your writing.

You might've noticed but I've been writing quite a bit these days, and sometimes I'm utterly stuck on certain paragraphs and sentences. Often it's because I can't find the correct wording/phrasing to express a certain idea, other times the paragraph just doesn't flow well. Now I'm starting to wonder if it has to do with the rhythm of my writing.

Amelia Wattenberger made a tool for exactly this purpose 👇

Music for Coding

Really enjoyed this playlist this week - gave me a lot of good vibes, perfect tunes for starting your summer and clearing up that morning brain-fog:

And that's it from this week! See you next week, and until then cheers, and happy coding ~ Gorilla Sun 🌸