Meshy #4

Meshy (1998, minted 2024) is an interactive gestural abstraction in which a participant's strokes are used to scaffold a gauzy mesh of animated elements. The mesh continually bridges the user's two most recent marks; by drawing, users can tease the mesh in real-time. In addition to its interactive mode, each token is initialized with a uniquely generated mesh composition.

Meshy was originally developed in 1998, while Levin was a researcher in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory. This official NFT release was produced in July 2024 for the exhibition "Awaken, Metamagical Hands", curated by John Maeda and Robert Norton for Gazelli Art House, London. The code has been ported from C++ and Java to JavaScript, and is rendered with the HTML5 Canvas API.

To get started with Meshy, draw two gestural strokes using your mouse, touchpad, or multitouch tablet surface. After thirty seconds without interaction, Meshy will enter a self-playing generative mode. Each Meshy token is initialized with a uniquely generated composition that can be recalled using the "r" key, and whose space of possibilities can be explored using the "n" key.