New French Touch

Two 1/1 works minted on SuperRare in 2022, in the New French Touch space: Le calme après la tempête and À fleur de peau.

Most of my work is long-form. I write a generator, hand it to a platform, and it runs once for each collector, so that nobody, myself included, knows what any given edition will look like until it exists. These two pieces work the other way round. The generator still does the drawing, but then I rendered hundreds of outputs and chose one. The algorithm proposes; for once, I disposed.

That inversion is the whole interest of them for me. In a long-form series I am responsible for the range of what can happen and have to accept everything inside it, which means designing a space where even the unlucky corners are worth owning. Choosing a single output is a different discipline, closer to photography, where the frame you keep is the work and the hundreds you discard are just the cost of getting there. Both pieces carry the seed they were generated from, so the exact run that produced them stays recoverable.

Le calme après la tempête

Generated on 27 May 2022, in p5.js. It is drawn from more than 500,000 vectors and points, placed with a mix of randomness, noise and physics rules, the same family of tools as ARTERIA and FOLRADURA, pushed toward a single image rather than a range of them. A square, 4000 by 4000.

Seed: ooXaeWYmXaTyCe5NJRpUXhPPBB7Bm6rJmvV7BVhpCTrV27cq4Lg

This is the piece the space showed at its launch.

À fleur de peau

Generated on 23 September 2022, four months later, also in p5.js. The space’s themes were the machine, Dada and a darker side; I went looking for an output I had once seen, something like a trace of blood on fur. I rendered about a thousand outputs and kept this one. Portrait, 2666 by 4000.

Seed: ooxxHMCqwELJNmf7XnV3BztZZkZdYRPQNq1nife3dh6ceHfAwsZ

About the New French Touch space

New French Touch is a curated SuperRare space for French cryptoart, French in spirit rather than strictly by passport, as the organisers were careful to say. The name is a deliberate echo of the French Touch, the wave of French electronic music producers that broke internationally in the mid-1990s. The argument is that something comparable is happening with cryptoart: artists stepping around the traditional gatekeepers of the art world, and a recognisably French contribution to it. The stated ambition is to build France’s standing on that scene.

The concept comes from Benoît Couty, known as BnoiitC, an early cryptoart collector and the founder of the Museum of Crypto Art. The initiative is run by 0x4rt.

The launch exhibition ran from 14 June to 20 September 2022 and brought together seventeen artists: Abdoulaye Barry, Neil Beloufa, Booyasan, Stephan Breuer, CEGZ.project, CryptoClay, Étienne de Crécy, FelixFelixFelix, Hermine Bourdin, Kibo, LuluxXX, Nahiko, myself, Teto, Touky333, Urban Drone and Xerak. That Étienne de Crécy, one of the producers of the original French Touch, was in the same selection was a nice piece of symmetry.

The curators were BnoiitC; Albertine Meunier, artist and NFT collector, who has been working on the poetics of networks since 1998 and advises Avant Galerie Vossen on digital art; Arthemort, a graduate of the Sotheby’s Institute of Art; Lucie-Eleonore Riveron, CEO and co-founder of the auction house FauveParis; G4SP4RD, an early collector and NFT project lead at Ledger; and Jean-Michel Pailhon, a Paris gallerist and collector of street art and NFT photography.

Being chosen for the space was the first time my work had been selected by people from the traditional art world (Lucie-Eleonore Riveron had invited me), and I am proud of it. I was also very glad to be showing alongside artists of that standing.

Details

• 2 unique works (1/1), on Ethereum
• Le calme après la tempête: generated 27 May 2022, 4000 × 4000
• À fleur de peau: generated 23 September 2022, 2666 × 4000
• Written in JavaScript with p5.js
• Launch exhibition: 14 June to 20 September 2022