BRIDGE

BRIDGE is a collaborative long-form series released on fxhash, where twenty-six styles written by twenty-five artists all draw the same bridge. As far as I know it is the largest artistic collaboration the platform has seen.

The rule was simple enough to state in a sentence. I published the code that lays out the tiles of a bridge, and gave anyone who wanted to join two weeks to write their own way of drawing them. One constraint only: respect the position of each tile. Everything else, the material, the weather, the light, whether it is a bridge at all by the end, was theirs.

What I like most about the result is that no edition belongs to a single artist. Every iteration carries all twenty-six styles. One of them is drawn at mint and named in the features, and that is the one you see first, but clicking or tapping the image cycles through the rest, in the order listed below. Press s to save a screenshot of whatever you are looking at.

The project came out of impatience. I had meant to do a lot of collaborations that year with fxhash artists whose work I admired, and it kept not happening: there are only so many hours, and I liked too many artists. One morning I woke up with the obvious shortcut, which was to collaborate with all of them at once.

The fxhash contract cannot handle collaborations yet, so everything here is arranged by hand rather than by the platform.

It says something about that scene, too. There is a great deal of mutual help and generosity between generative artists on fxhash, and a bridge is not a bad figure for it. Writing a style also pushed several of the participants to develop their code outside their usual areas of interest. The whole thing stays open on GitHub.