F(l)ight #18

Starting with traditional art materials when he was young, Tyler Hobbs later found his way into creating images with code. Eventually, he stopped creating landscapes and portraits by hand and his work with code took center stage, but he never stopped working with traditional art materials. His graphite plotter drawings and hand-painted murals created from his code are essential elements of his work. For –GRAPH, Tyler has created “F(l)ight,” a study of the aesthetic overlap and differences between the natural world, hand-made artwork, and algorithmic tendencies. It’s a return to his long-standing interests in the continuum of representational images to total abstraction. In relation to his idea that code and algorithms become increasingly important within culture and art, Tyler says, “I am interested in what parts of the analog world we can capture, what we can improve, and what is lost.”

“F(l)ight” is a software NFT, but the first collector of each edition will receive the corresponding plotter drawing shipped directly from the artist’s studio. Each software NFT includes millions of other images beyond the primary image for each edition. The software NFT and the plotter drawing aren’t linked together; the NFT can continue to be collected on a secondary market without the drawing. Click on the artwork or press the enter/return key to generate a new image with a different random seed value.

The image you see on the main artwork page on Feral File is the plotter drawing for the artist-proof (AP). Compare this image of the drawing to the corresponding software version of the AP to see how the software image and the plotted drawing are related. Because the artists are using a range of papers and inks, the software and physical drawings are delightfully different.

The “F(l)ight” drawings are 40.6 × 50.8 cm (16 × 20 inches) on cream Stonehenge paper. They are drawn with a black archival ink pen.