Art on Ledger Stax

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.

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).

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…

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.

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;