Art on Ledger Stax
The Art On Ledger Stax: Generative NFT Collection is an innovative project that invites five distinguished digital artists from the web3 community to create unique algorithms. These algorithms are tailored to generate original artworks specifically formatted for optimal display on the Ledger Stax device. Scheduled for release in July 2024, this collection marks the inaugural generative art drop that will be exclusively available at no cost to holders of the Art On Ledger Stax Mint Pass.
The Art on Ledger Stax Mint Pass was available through the Ledger Stax NFT bundle for users who purchased the device in December 2022. Shipping began in May of 2024. Why the delay? In this documentary, we reveal the story behind this groundbreaking product.
Art on Ledger Stax : Generative Collection
The Art On Ledger Stax drop a celebration of the newest addition to the Ledger wallet family, the Ledger Stax.
Ledger Stax is the world’s first secure touch screen wallet made with E Ink® technology allowing owners to showcase art and NFTs on their device’s lock screen.
The Art On Ledger Stax Mint Pass grants its bearers the exclusive opportunity to create a unique piece during the Art On Ledger Stax Generative NFT Drop. Possessing one of these passes entitles you to a randomly minted artwork from one of the five distinguished artists featured in the event. Each pass serves as a key to unlock a singular work of digital art, adding a touch of serendipity to your collection.
This generative art event provides each Art on Ledger Stax Mint Pass holder a one-of-a-kind artwork. With the assurance that no two pieces will be identical, participants can enjoy the exclusivity of their Ledger Stax device, which will feature a distinctive lock screen with an original piece from one of the esteemed generative artists. This ensures that every participant's device is not only a secure vault but also a personalized gallery of digital art.
Art on Ledger Stax : Artists
For this exciting project, we've handpicked five acclaimed generative artists: ertdfgcvb, Linda Dounia, Sarah Ridgley, Sasha Stiles, and Studio Yorktown. Each artist is crafting 956 unique generations, pouring months of creativity, refinement, and meticulous curation into their work to guarantee that every piece is a stunning example of high-quality art.
Collectively, these artists are set to demonstrate the incredible potential of generative art, taking the capabilities of the Ledger Stax E-Ink screens to new heights and expanding the horizons of digital display aesthetics.
ARTIST COLLECTION DESCRIPTION
5 notable generative artists were selected for this project: ertdfgcvb, Linda Dounia, Sarah Ridgley, Sasha Stiles, and Studio Yorktown. Each artist is producing 956 generations. The process of creating a generative project involves months of development, testing and curation to ensure that each output is high quality and produces something beautiful.
Together these artists showcase the best of what is possible with generative art, and will push the boundaries of what’s possible for the Ledger Stax E-Ink screens.
Andreas Gysin
Known by the pseudonym ertdfgcvb, Andreas specializes in procedural graphic design and interactive installations. Research, experimentation, analysis and discovery are the foundational principles which form the creative process for both his artistic and commercial projects.
His generative art projects use ASCII characters to create artworks in a constant state of transition.
COLLECTION DESCRIPTION
Gyricon is a series of geometric compositions using ASCII characters, including letters, numbers, and various symbols. The piece is born kinetic, resolution-independent, and ever-evolving; each single frame is captured at a specific moment in time, with a fixed size that matches the Stax’s resolution.
This frozen image will be displayed on the device. The resulting images evoke a monumental feeling: they are mostly symmetric, high-contrast, and composed of very simple elements; opposed to the motion displayed in the dynamic version.
Linda Dounia
Linda Dounia is an artist and designer who investigates the philosophical and environmental implications of technocapitalism. Her work mediates her memories and context as alternative truths and evidence of excluded ways of being and doing using generative technologies — artificial intelligence and creative coding. In 2023, Linda was recognized on the TIMEA100 list of most influential people in AI for her work on speculative archiving — building AI models that help us remember what is lost. Her work has been featured by MoMA, Chanel’s 19M gallery, Christie’s, Museum Folkwang, Bright Moments, Avant Arte, Time Magazine, It’s Nice That, and The New York Times. She has been shown at various galleries around the world as well as Art Basel, The Biennal Sur, The Dakar Biennale, Partcours, KIKK festival, ARTXLAGOS, and Digital Art Fair Asia. She has also worked with notable brands on commissions and installations. She is an advocate for more transparency and greater agency over AI, a topic she writes and speaks about.
COLLECTION DESCRIPTION
Tongues explores asemic writing through AI, modelling symbols that look like writing but have no meaning. The reader is left with the task to deduce meaning using their senses. Tongues also challenges the prevalent contemporary bias for roman scripts in the typography practice, evident in what diffusion models understand to be writing and how they construct it.
For Tongues, the artist trained a GAN on hand-drawn ink asemic calligraphy. She created a dataset of asemic writing inspired by writing systems she was familiar with as well as scripts she learned about during her research for this project. The project honours the rich legacy of asemic writing, whose origins can be traced to the earliest forms of writing (proto-writing), by using both calligraphy tools (brush, pens) and a random assortment of materials (sponge, fabric, leaves, plastic sheet, sticks). Asemic text, much like abstract art, celebrates spontaneity and a departure from conventional calligraphic principles, tools, and systems (as well as their implied historical grounding).
Sarah Ridgley
Sarah Ridgley is a US-based generative artist and creative coder who has been exploring generative art and blockchain technology since 2019.Her work exists within the collaborative spaces between humans and technology, aiming to reflect the human-drawn through code-driven, computer-drawn mark making.
Using Processing (p5js) and JavaScript for her programmatic development, Ridgely designs her own algorithmic brushes to execute what she refers to as works of highly-ordered chaos, born out of the introduction of random parameters into hyper clean code.
COLLECTION DESCRIPTION
Florilège contemplates an intentional act of writing. Not the usual writing, with words meant to convey, convince, or express. These words don’t form sentences, they don’t form phrases, or any semblance of thought. You had no participation in the selection of these words.
Nevertheless, you carefully write them down, one by one, as they appear on the screen.
Is this a pivotal moment for you? Is it just a passing event? Do you pause and take time to consider the materials you will use? The paper, the pen, the irony of writing by hand to secure your digital identity…
Sasha Stiles
SASHA STILES is an award-winning poet, artist and AI researcher whose work probes what it means to be human in a nearly post-human era. Widely recognized as a pioneer of algorithmic authorship and blockchain poetics, she is the author of the “instant techno-classic” Technelegy, and became the first writer to bring AI-powered literature to a major auction house (Christie’s) in 2022. Stiles’ work is exhibited around the world and featured in leading art, tech and literary publications, and she is a frequent speaker at international events. A co-founder of theVERSEverse, she has served as Poetry Mentor to the android BINA48 since 2018.
COLLECTION DESCRIPTION
A collection of AI-powered aphorisms about the human desire to encrypt and preserve our most important information. In this long-form series, 10 enigmatic pronouncements – written by Stiles and her AI alter ego, Technelegy, inspired in part by Jenny Holzer’s Truisms – are generatively arranged and rearranged across the screen-as-page, creating unique moments of visual poetry in which the original aphorism is sometimes clearly legible, sometimes enciphered, and sometimes rewritten into new, uncanny lines of verse.
Each edition invites the reader to contemplate language as a code and key. CRYPTIC POEMS is part of REPETAE, Stiles’ ongoing project that explores how, in both poetry and generative art, meaning accrues through repetition.
Studio Yorktown
Kwame Bruce Busia, known as Studio Yorktown in the Web3 space, is a multidisciplinary artist from London, currently living and working from Dubai.
He is well-known for the generative works he has produced within the Tezos ecosystem, and on Ethereum.
Freely transitioning across aesthetic styles, Studio Yorktown’s work is defined by attention to detail and simplicity of concept, guided by Wabi-Sabi philosophy, the design work of Bauhaus, and the principles of repetition, material, and balance.
COLLECTION DESCRIPTION
My concept is based on generative Japanese-style vending machines. Each one will come with their own range of fully generative products with branding. It's going to play on the shape and form of the device itself. The end result makes the Stax device look like a mini vending machine (in a way, similar to how it ‘dispenses’ crypto!).
However, when you view the full NFT on the marketplace, the vending machine will be shown within a fully generative urban context. The idea is to give users a fun connection to their individual device, while offering an incentive to go and see the ‘full’ version NFT as well;