Sterling Crispin

Sterling Crispin creates smart contracts, generative art, machine intelligence, and techno-sculpture. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide, including ZKM Karlsruhe, The Mexican National Center for the Arts, The Seoul Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, The Deutsches Hygiene Museum Dresden, and the Venice Biennale. The diversity of Crispin’s body of work reflects his unique background in machine learning, neurotechnology research, and multimedia engineering.

Artworks

Flourish

Flourish draws inspiration from historical architectural ornamentation to craft generative talismans and artifacts. Crispin sees the collection as the ‘notebook of an algorithmic architect’, intentionally invoking aged archival drawings, woodblock prints, freshly inked illustrations, blueprints, and photocopies. The outputs feature intricate manipulation of the arrangement of primary shapes to create complex patterns, a hallmark of both generative design and traditional architectural design.

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Infocalypse

This open edition collection is a collaboration between artist Tony Sheeder, author Neal Stephenson, and artist and software developer Sterling Crispin, marking the 30th anniversary of the publication of Snow Crash. The animated work is composed of images referencing the graphic novel project that preceded Snow Crash, evoking the data-saturated dystopian setting and the titular image of the novel.

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Spectacle

Spectacle is a reinterpretation of Guy Debord’s critical theory text 'The Society of the Spectacle' (1967). The artwork uses the AI to simplify the first ten theses of the book into ‘tweet-sized’ plain english, and to then convert these aphorisms into images. The imagery presents an excavation of the latent space of the neural network and the society it was trained on; a semi-random, semi-autonomously produced, and chaotic interpretation of the original philosophical text.

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Neophyte MMXXII

Animated, evolving, responsive; Neophyte MMXXII are generative plants that grow, bloom, fade away, and regrow. Each NFT generates a unique species of simulated plant life and emergent qualities of its genetic code, so new varieties arise over time. The work is an inquiry and expression of cycles, stability, and unpredictability.

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Message

Message is a conceptual experiment in communication. The onchain generative system uses text, generative drawing marks, and ‘vibes’ (visual style) to create and modify the message / artwork. Public Messages can be changed onchain, creating a new social dynamic between artist, the first buyer as a secondary creator, and the ultimate collector who has the choice to preserve or alter the work.

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Ideas of Mountains

Ideas of Mountains are generative 3D landscapes with accompanying AI generated phrases. The landscapes draw inspiration from early 3D rendering software from the 90’s and early 00’s, and from the artist Ed Ruscha’s iconic painted landscapes. Generatively composed mountains, sky, cities, and plant life are both sublime and mundane, natural and artificial. The phrases use OpenAI at a time when it was a-state-of-the-art rather than ubiquitous language model technology.

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