art

charm.farm
Part of the We Are Tech and Tech Are Us exhibit at Agitator Gallery, Chicago

Art Machines or… A Hypothetical Blueprint for the Emergence of New Media.

At the crossroads of art(ifice) and artificial intelligence, the charm.farm project emerges as a speculative prototype for future digital art practices. This proof-of-concept not only invites reconsideration of creation, ownership, authorship, and archival processes of digital art but also highlights the role of neural networks in crafting cultural objects. “Neural Artworks” if you will.

The cornerstone of charm.farm is the ‘charm’ – a digital piece of art housed in a portable and durable hypertext file. These charms are generated within specific constraints: a 256×256 bitmap <figure> with a 60 token <figcaption>, all contained in an <article>. That is the artistic payload of a charm.

Incorporating a lightweight layer of cryptography, charm.farm embeds the record of ownership of each charm directly into its container document metadata. The document’s <meta> elements will hold a chain of JSON Web Token blocks, providing a type of provenance to each copy of the charm. This onboard pseudo-blockchain is obviously not a distributed ledger; the charms grow in provenance and value by users sharing and building the record of transfer. Each JWT’s claim will also contain a SHA-256 hash of the <article>, making the charm immutable. Of course, anyone is allowed to remove the web tokens and destroy the chain-of-ownership — but then it loses it’s charm, doesn’t it?

At the heart of charm.farm’s ethos lies a process of discovery, a studio practice that enhances traditional notions of digital art creation. Rather than direct authorship, the project embraces the users’ encounters with the sublime. It is a method that fosters a unique yet predictive form of artistic expression, elegantly bridging the divide between human intuition and machine precision.

The question of “who makes the artistic mark?” is a great philosophical conversation. While the initial prompt comes from a human, the generative process is driven by large language and vision models. Generative Art is nothing new, but the promise of quality-at-scale has finally been realized.  charm.farm points in a possible direction towards a much more relaxing NFT production/consumption cycle.

charm.farm stands as a thought-provoking platform for potentiating future art practice. It points to a novel path in the digital arts landscape where the end-to-end artistic lifecycle intersects with machine learning and digital preservation techniques, often challenging and expanding our conventional perceptions of Art.

mbutler