Restless Sky-Isle Atakekan by Daim
Restless Sky-Isle Atakekan
Bio
Daïm (DaimAlYad) is a Hungarian-Canadian Muslim algorist, apeirographer, AI artist, and archivist based in Toronto. He works primarily with custom-coded algorithms and workflows, occasionally integrating AI media generation as a component, to create both abstract and thematic works meant to evoke moments of wonder, reflection, and contemplation.
His works were among the first to be showcased in a Museum of Crypto Art solo exhibition in Somnium Space back in 2020, and have also been featured internationally at the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro, United Kingdom in 2019, as part of Senegal's Dak'Art African Contemporary Art Biennale in 2022, and in Hungary’s Digital Art Biennial in 2023. His "Ancestral Memory", a contemplative GAN audiovisual slow artwork, was an NFT Awards 2020 "Most Innovative NFT" finalist, and his high profile generative art cryptoart series include Cryptoblots, the first post-launch curated release on Art Blocks in 2020, followed by Thereidoscope and his inaugural UltraDAO curated series "Isles upon Deemed Rivers & Other Wonders" in 2022.
About the Work
The core of my practice is built on the foundations of my self-taught "outsider" approach to both programming and mathematics. I create fractals in ways unsupported by shiny user-friendly fractal generators, mathematical visualisations that reify discoveries rooted in my unorthodox and meandering mathematical field work, and thematic and abstract experiences, sometimes with AI generated elements integrated into the process, which subvert mundane expectations about artistic experience and sometimes by downright sabotaging the very tools used to produce them.
In programming, I rely primarily on the Go language; in browser-interpreted works, I relent and use JavaScript and the p5.js framework; in AI-based media generation I favour Stable Diffusion running locally on my own machine; and I often utilise a wide variety of more minor tools and utilities to wrangle data and media towards being smithed into a cohesive artwork, including but not limited to Python, ImageMagick, ffmpeg, Audacity, Photoshop, ChatGPT conjured one-off scripts, and more.
Conceptually I am mesmerised by invisible, otherworldly, infinite, eternal mathematical vistas; subtle beauty; explorations of meaning; perceptual subversions; dynamic stillness; feigned imperfections; hidden messages; and intricate transformations.
About This Piece
My "Restless Sky-Isle Atakekan" is a minimalist work in its aesthetic that embodies a complex identity.
Han's CryptoCube 111 is the skeleton upon which the Sky-Isle is built. His austere cubes I textured with a wide variety of my artworks and moved, rotated, and resized constituent cubes in a multitude of coordinated ways. Yet that is, of course, not what you see when you behold the final work, because it is, in fact, my very first dynamic pixel sorting piece, whereby each frame of the intermediary video is thoroughly transformed by the orderly reorganisation of its otherwise untouched pixels to produce something akin to an abstracted landscape reflected upon still waters.
The resulting "Restless Sky-Isle Atakekan" is a fantasised mystery, an isle floating between the heavens and the earth, ever changing and unstill, yet projecting some underlying organisation not understood but readily intuited by the human mind as being other than mere chaotic randomness. And, indeed, if we are aware of the underlying creative process, the secret lies in a bygone three dimensional identity and movement being blurred but not altogether erased in two dimensions. Such a wonder is not ours to behold with our own eyes in real life, but the artwork does its best to convey the magic.
Future
The opening lines of my cryptoart manifesto--"A Seer, a Maker, a Revealer I am; a Crypto Artist I choose to be!"--are the seed of that creedal confession and have come to be at the core of my identity as an artist.
Much of the good in my life over the past five years has come to me from and through cryptoart and the connections I made therethrough.
When my long-time employer and my country's government categorically and systematically failed me before, during, and after the pandemic, cryptoart and my friends and patrons empowered me in ways no one and nothing else ever has, before or since.
Though the scene today is not what it once was, and has not been for years, my conviction in the possibility and promise of cryptoart is as strong as ever, and remains a foundational aspect of my artistic future.
Though I have spent much of 2024 on a longer hiatus from social media, I have continued working primarily on my previously announced undertakings: a focused shift of my biomorphs into new dimensions, with dynamic forms and three dimensional shapes; as well as two books, one on biomorphs and the other on cryptoblots, showcasing my works and sharing aspects of the broader context and my community of collectors.
I am also more closely involved and aligned with the Museum of Crypto Art than ever before, and so grateful for the privilege of getting to work with such an exceptional organisation and team! And have additional projects on the horizon that have been delayed, but will come to be ripe for unveiling when their time comes.
