Squaring the Circle by Alexis Andre
Squaring the Circle
Bio
Alexis André (aka MacTuitui) is a French artist, researcher and designer based in Paris working towards a future where you could enjoy unique experiences that were tailored to your taste, where the power of generative systems is leveraged to offer individually custom-created pieces. His generative art pieces have been showcased all around the world and in auction at major auction houses.
About the Work
My artistic medium of choice is generative systems: I program through code systems that follow a set of rules and variants, combined with a source of randomness to select how to apply those rules. The rules themselves range from simple choices to more complex algorithms yet the power of such systems is that taken altogether, they exhibit emergent behavior that is almost impossible to predict. Everything can be explained a posteriori (answering “why the algorithm did this”) but nothing can be known in advance. The best part of designing such pieces is that even I, the creator of the piece, am expecting to be surprised by the results.
About This Piece
My CryptoCubes piece is of course taking CryptoCube #42, the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”. Most of my work at the time was using only circles (and lots of them) so my approach was to take the Cubes (definitely not circles) and find a way to relate to circles. I went to this hybrid 3D/2D approach where the Cubes are taking a path around their original position in the CryptoCube arrangement but leave a coloured trail along the way, circling the Cube, or as the piece is called “Squaring the Circle”. The palette is also a classic of mine, “Time for Blood” that has been present in all my generative collections to date.
Future
NFTs and Web3 provided two things that changed my life forever. The first thing was to provide a way for generative art to make sense as digital art pieces (the minting process, the randomness, creating scarcity hence value). The second thing has been to connect with an audience of art collectors that might have been more tech savvy than the regular art audience, thus more keen to take interest in this specific medium. As far as the future is concerned, I can see a path where NFTs are literally everywhere, from concert tickets to attendance records to meetings, and the idea of digital artefact is oblivious. I can also see the complete opposite, and a rejection to have a token for everything. Either way, the art is where the value is, and the medium should support that.
