The OMEGA Code goes live at 8am PT / 11am ET / 5pm CET on Highlight on December 8.
Over a prolific 30-year career pioneering code-based artwork, Joshua Davis has evangelized creative coding as his North Star since glimpsing its potential in 1994.
Known by his alias Praystation, Davis preached generative art’s promise at 2005’s TED Conference and then witnessed his fringe prophecy inch towards mainstream adoption.
Now, amidst the digital art renaissance, Davis revisits a seminal project that has haunted him since original technological limitations stifled his vision over a decade ago.
In 2008, Davis created a rapturous album cover for Brazilian metal band The Omega Code, a swirling planetary generative work born of vector lines, strange attractors, and chromatic gradients. Hardware constraints of the time capped Davis’ ambitions, however.
“It was work that everyone really liked. And it was visionarily compelling. But the technology was at a place where I couldn't properly render it, let alone animate it. I could only generate so much,” Davis explains.
Resurrecting the concept from his mental code vault, Davis re-architected the artwork as a dynamic, blockchain-enabled generative collection.
In The OMEGA Code, Davis offers a swirling planetary generative work born of vector lines, strange attractors and chromatic gradients. Multiple factors over the mint window of December 8 to 15, 2023, introduce rich variability and endless uniqueness across generated pieces.
For example, each day of the week of the mint will reveal a new set of 21 color palettes starting at 12am ET. Day 1's color palette is black, pictured below.
For collectors that batch mint 22 tokens at a time, they will receive all of the 21 color palettes available on that day plus a hidden Vector View wireframe mode that unveils the underlying visual architecture. There are also several extremely elusive traits, which Davis won’t share prior to the mint going live.
As a blockchain-enabled generative collection, it taps into Davis’s concept of the infinite iterative potential between human and algorithm.
“I have all the instructions to make the thing that you see. But that thing that you see has enough vibration and variation that I'll do an infinite number of them, you know, forever,” Davis says of his work.
An influence for generations of digital artists and designers, Davis has a lasting legacy. A prominent icon in generative art, Joshua’s work has been exhibited at the Ars Electronica (Austria), le Centre Pompidou (France), the Tate Modern (London), the Design Museum (London), the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), the ICA (London), PS.1 MoMA (New York), the Whitney (New York), the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (New York), the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Spain) and more.
The OMEGA Code goes live at 8am PT / 11am ET / 5pm CET on Highlight on December 8.