INTRICADA

INTRICADA means ‘interlaced’ in Old Occitan, a Romance language spoken in the south of France. This project explores the balance between emergence and control.
INTRICADA is an open-edition, long-form generative series released on Bright Moments in March 2023.

Bright Moments named me its Artist of the Month for March 2023: INTRICADA could only be collected in person, at its galleries. Its founder, Seth, had been collecting my work since the summer of 2022.

Emergence

INTRICADA is created with autonomous agents, like ARTERIA, drawing very small dots and following simple rules, positioned according to geometrical patterns.
I’ve designed INTRICADA like a simulation, setting the initial conditions and seeing what comes out of it.
Each piece is the result of thousands of unpredictable consequences.

Variation

This collection includes a very large number of possible variations. Some properties belong to the agents and set their rules, colors, number of children, angle… Many parameters influence the initial position and direction of the agents, palettes (more than 30)…
Each combination creates a unique output.

From far and near

From a distance, an INTRICADA piece may look like intersecting circles, geometric patterns, confetti, a perspective design…
When you get closer, you can see that these shapes are composed of multitudes of agent trajectories.
Finally, if we get even closer, we can see that these trajectories are composed of points (several hundreds of thousands per output).

Building animation

INTRICADA is based on a main concept: autonomous agents. When you watch the rendering of an INTRICADA piece, you can enjoy the very satisfying building animation. It also helps to understand how each piece is made.
First, you see the main agents being born, then see them move according to the rule they have been assigned, have children from time to time or stop if they meet the path of another agent.
A piece takes about twenty seconds to build itself: long enough, in the gallery, for some suspense before discovering your edition.

Features

Here is an explanation of the different features of INTRICADA:

• Palette: Unsurprisingly, this is the color palette. By the way, you’ll recognize some palettes of previous projects: Classic (used on my fxhash projects), some Rainbow (used on FOLRADURA)…
• Palette Subset: This defines the subset of colors that will be used.
• Rule: This defines how the agents move (Sine, Rotation, Spiral or None)
• Colors Mode: This defines how colors are assigned to agents.
• Agent Count: Main agents always appear in groups. This defines how many agents there are per group.
• Symmetric Agents: If true, each agent has a symmetric twin going the opposite way.
• Recursion Level: This defines which level of agents can have children.
• Circle Mode: Main agents are always born in groups distributed around a point. These groups can themselves be distributed around a point (Circle) or on a grid (Grid).
• Circle Count: If the Circle Mode is Circle, this is the number of repetitions around the centre.

The photos of the release events, in London, Mexico City, Los Angeles and New York, are further down this page. In New York, thanks to Lume Studios (venue), Subjective and @djsicoli (photographer).

Details

• Open edition: 270 editions created
• Collected in person only, at a Bright Moments gallery
• Released in March 2023
• Built on Art Blocks Engine
• Due to the technique used, small differences may occur depending on the browser. The project was mainly tested on the latest versions of Chrome/Brave.