Escher in the Algorithm

Maurits Cornelis Escher, the famous surrealist known for his mathematically inspired art featuring impossible shapes and tricks of the eye, was born 125 years ago last June. To commemorate this great artist, Escherly Seeds, a collection of generative NFTs by Martijn Cohen currently being sold on Artblocks.io, pays tribute to this milestone, honoring the artist, his work, and the impact he made on art as a whole. 

The collection is a series of generative pieces, made using a publicly available algorithm, features colorful tree structures, exhibiting the impossible perspectives and geometries that Escher loved to feature. The interconnected strings of cubes that form the branches loop back on themself at odd angles, and the “fruit” of the tree are impossible shapes, including the Penrose triangle, an optical illusion of a three dimensional triangle that loops back on itself in disregard for the rules of space, and Escher’s Solid, a shape popularized by Escher featuring an overlapping of three octahedra such that its profile, when rotated, looks like a square has changed size and grown spikes. Each tree grows out of a sheet of paper, beginning as a hand drawing before fading to be its own shape. Cohen cites Escher’s Drawing Hands as an inspiration for this, though it lacks the cyclic unendingness that I think gave Escher's work meaning. 

The works are also, for a reasons I don’t entirely understand, interactive. I think Cohen might have just gotten bored and wanted to add an additional feature. The blocks, which are by default always rotating in sync, experience a change in period as your pointer (or more likely finger, as the collection is optimized for mobile) gets closer, resetting to their default position as you move your cursor over them. The result is a disjointed and sporadic wavering effect, brushed over the piece as you swipe across it, that ultimately feels more like a temporary deconstruction than any kind of active participation in the work. While it's satisfying to begin with, it quickly becomes stale, leaving the feature largely redundant. It doesn’t hurt the visual experience with its presence, so I can’t exactly fault its inclusion, but I also can't help but wonder if the feature could have been reworked to be more satisfying to play around with. Maybe the effect touching the blocks could have been randomized, or cyclic in a way that meaningfully changed the piece as you played with it. Again, there’s nothing actively bad about the feature as it currently stands, but it's a shame to see potential go to waste.

There’s clearly a lot of passion behind Martijn Cohen’s debut on Artblocks, Escherly Seeds. In addition to his thoughtful description on Artblocks, whose explanations of metaphor would fit right in on a high school English paper, he wrote an entire explainer article on his website, going over what the work was, how he accomplished it, and what each piece of the process involved. This was honestly my favorite part of the experience. I don’t have the background in graphical programming I would need to properly understand what he was saying much of the time (although his writing captured the ideas simply enough that I could at the very least follow along), but it's always pleasant to read someone write about something that they are very clearly both deeply passionate about and intimately familiar with. I may not be able to understand the scale when he gripes that “Functions which [he] had assumed to be rather rudimentary could sometimes add milliseconds per frame!” during his section of optimizing for mobile, but I’m willing to believe that’s both shocking and somewhat relatable to the programmers in his audience. 

On his Artblocks profile, Cohen describes himself as obsessed with creating “a musical instrument that emits color instead of sound.” This is not that. All the same, Escherly Seeds is worth checking out. Its bright colors, fun shapes, and tendency to change just by looking at it to hard make perusing its contents (currently limited to 21, as they are only generated upon being purchased for the first time) a good use of some free time. While this may not be a masterwork, I’m genuinely excited to see what Cohen might do next.