3rd Wave of Inspiration
Since 2003
Pixel Ptushka is a talented pixel artist and manga creator. While I cannot appreciate her manga skills as I am completely out of that zone (but you shall), her pixel art is a pure pleasure for the eyes. The cities series is my favourite and I wish to see more of her pixel art soon.
Amber Vittoria, an artist based in Los Angeles, California, is a lot more than an artist; she is a poet and author who weaves the beauty of narratives, emotions, and societal norms through her mesmerising compositions.
She paints with inks, coloured pencils, and acrylics in flowing rainbow gradients that capture the eye and imagination, reflecting the ever-shifting currents of the human experience. Her pieces are marked by simple and colourful compositions, provoking viewers to contemplate beauty, identity, and society.
Vittoria's talent has earned her numerous accolades, including Forbes 30 Under 30, One Club Young Gun, and Society of Illustrators Gold Medalist. Her work has been recognised by American Illustration, the AOI World Illustration Awards, and the ADC Annual Awards, while her clients range from Facebook to Gucci.
Beyond that, Vittoria's art resonates emotionally at the heartstrings while epitomising love, identity, and societal pressure themes. In a fragmented world, her work reminds us of our shared humanity and the power of creativity to unite us.
With the lens of Amber Vittoria’s art, one rediscovers the world with a spectrum of life experiences and gets reminded of art as that vehicle for humanity.
In the heart of Brooklyn, Hayden Clay redefines the art scene with his mesmerising take on "feel-good surrealism." Through his expertise in digital art, he masterfully blends elements of nature with the boundless realms of imagination. His pieces, often centred around water, landscapes and clouds, serve as gateways to a world where the line between dreams and reality fades.
Clay’s art offers a surreal exploration of nature, inviting introspection. Hayden’s freelance work inspires with transformative surreal visuals.
Hayden has recently unveiled his latest NFT generative art drop on Foundation, titled "Strange Clouds." This collection marks the second chapter of the Strange Clouds series, showcasing a captivating array of generative 3D artworks. Each piece in the collection presents a unique cloud formation, inviting viewers to explore the infinite variations of shapes, colours, and patterns. Inspired by clouds’ ever-changing and generative essence, this project continues Hayden's exploration of the natural world through a digital lens, offering a fresh and innovative perspective on the art of surrealism.
Alizé Jireh’s art spans photography, videography, and music. Through her lens, she captures vulnerability, resilience, and authenticity. Her work invites viewers to engage with the world intimately.
Alizé’s art illuminates the beauty of everyday life. With attention to detail and emotional sensitivity, she creates works that deeply resonate with audiences and highlight our shared humanity.
Visual artist Mia Novakova uses the ambiguity of liminal spaces to create mysterious and thought-provoking artworks, absorbing viewers to interpret and question the state of reality. Wrapping objects is not new in art, but the way Mia does it triggers the concept of form cleared of function, meaning and time.
The artwork's rhythm and pace replicate the gradual awakening of the eye and neural pathways, allowing for true discovery and challenging the viewer to question what meets the eye. By allowing the tree's non-ordinary life and image to evolve, the viewer's understanding of it expands, leading to a metamorphosis that reveals its truest definition.
To achieve this heightened awareness, the artwork incorporates respiration, high-level machine learning, psychedelia, and photographic exposure to an invisible light spectrum. The intention is to peel back layers of diffusion and blockages, invoking a guided meditation crafted through a learning machine paired with the organic invocation of the spirit of nature.
“A metamorphosis is at hand that does not distort or deform, but reveals the truest definition. This truth is only detectable in a state of heightened awareness – here achieved through respiration, high-level machine learning, psychedelia, and photographic exposure to an invisible light spectrum.
The intention is to peel back layers of diffusion and blockages, to invoke a guided meditation of sorts that is crafted through a learning machine paired with the intuitive, organic invocation of the spirit of nature.
To the machine, the tree is a conglomerate of pixels. To the human eye it is comprised of cells, even more so, to the naked eye it has leaves, branches, a trunk, bark. Both systems, the machine learning and the human viewer, are initiated into an altered state in which the tree begins to breathe and grow.”
Both machine learning and human viewers experience an altered state in which the tree begins to breathe and grow. The journey of microcellular breathing causes the audience's vision to be repeated, patterned, alive, dismantled, and reformed, revealing the beauty of the artwork. Machine learning is given its own equivalent of a psychedelic dose in the form of prompts and embeddings, leading to the subdivision of the pixels and the tree's genetic and photographic makeup, resulting in a digital organism.
The intent and techniques used in the artwork are deliberate, but the outcome is mostly unknown. Transformation, mutation, and change, on a digital micro cellular plane, and a soulful one, must be allowed to surprise and expand. The artwork's First Breath becomes the trigger to unveil what lies beyond and challenges the biological status quo, resulting in a euphoric, transcendent, and elemental experience.
The festival will be held on March 23, 24 and 25 at Disseny Hub Barcelona, a few weeks earlier than usual, since in April the digital art exhibition "Digital Impact" will be held at the same venue for the first time.
The festival presents a powerful lineup in its 22nd edition, bringing together a total of 65 speakers linked to the field of creativity, design, visual art and digital culture from countries such as the UK, USA, Canada, Germany, Mexico, Netherlands and Spain. Among the special invited artists are Alex Trochut, Brian Collins, Eddie Opara, Found, Framestore, Timothy Goodman, Gemma O'Brien, the iconic David Carson, Joshua Davis, James Victore and State, among many others.
OFFF, the festival renowned for constant change and diversity, is proud to announce its latest creative representation for 2023: “Cube.” “Cube” embodies the amazement and surprise artists evoke from the audience and begins with a set of rooms symbolising the diversity of the festival's speakers and artists' creative practices.
The OFFF's “Cube” campaign was brought to life by a team specially assembled for this purpose, consisting of Vasava, Barcelona (concept and creative execution), Found, London (CGI and motion), and Combustion, São Paulo (sound design and music). With its visually stunning and thought-provoking concept, OFFF 2023 promises to be a truly inspiring event that celebrates diversity, constant change, and the power of creativity.
Metaverse Greenhouse, Mat Collishaw and Danil Krivoruchko, Heterosis, 2023 © Snark.art
Heterosis - the increase in such characteristics as size, growth rate and yield of a hybrid organism over those of its parents.
Snark.art, the innovation laboratory supporting artists creating at the cutting edge of art and technology, announces Heterosis, a new series of digital artworks and an immersive metaverse experience by Mat Collishaw. Created in collaboration with digital artist Danil Krivoruchko and metaverse architect EL-GABAL, Heterosis is a project produced for the OG.Art platform which combines blockchain technology and art to create a unique experience for collectors.
Heterosis will see participants cultivating and breeding virtual flowers that grow in a hyperrealistic metaverse ‘greenhouse’ – a digital recreation of a grandly decorated wing of London’s National Gallery, abandoned and reclaimed by nature. Each flower will be a one-of-a-kind, unduplicable digital artwork, but the works, both individually and collectively, become meaningful via the community that is created. Based on innovative technology, Heterosis invites collectors to participate in an art ‘game’ where their interaction determines the outcome of the works. The participatory nature of Heterosis means the artwork could not exist in any context other than on the blockchain.
Mat Collishaw and Danil Krivoruchko, Heterosis, 2023 © Snark.art
Upon minting, each collector receives a Heterosis flower with unique DNA code and the combination of a few basic traits. Through hybridisation, collectors can discover advanced characteristics or mutations, and unlock new species, colours, patterns and forms. Their actions and engagement with one another will determine how the creation of new species and increasingly exotic and elaborate blooms unfolds. They become the agents of digital evolution and digital art collaborators.
Mat Collishaw and Danil Krivoruchko, Heterosis, 2023 © Snark.art
The digital flowers have been developed using SideFX’s Houdini – a powerful 3D animation and visual effects tool used in blockbuster films, commercials and video games – and are rendered on Redshift. Uniquely, the hyperrealistic flowers are created via a process of hybridization that is not predetermined, requiring advanced technology to generate the dynamic content. The metaverse ‘greenhouse’ was developed using Unreal Engine, the state-of-the-art gaming technology to allow collectors to interact with one another and freely explore the environment no matter where they are in the world. The technology means they can have an interactive, collective experience on any device with exceptionally high-quality visualisation.
Mat Collishaw and Danil Krivoruchko, Heterosis, 2023 © Snark.art
To hybridize, collectors must pay the flower’s owner a breeding fee. Collectors themselves set the prices for hybridization which can reflect if significant resources have been spent to create a new rare and exciting combination of genes. These dynamics create two separate markets – one for the purchase digital flowers and another for selling the opportunity to hybridize your flower.
Mat Collishaw and Danil Krivoruchko, Heterosis, 2023 © Snark.art
Heterosis builds on Collishaw’s practice and cross-disciplinary approach which sees him engage with developments in technology and unafraid to venture into unfamiliar terrain. He says of the collaboration:
“I wanted to create an artwork that could not exist in any context other than the metaverse. The digital network that forms the basis of Heterosis allows all the participants and components to come together, bringing the artwork to fruition. The fact that the work can evolve through time, depending on what the owner will or won’t do, was something very interesting for us. Danil managed to encode all the different traits into DNA and designed an evolution process. These mechanics, are essential to the Heterosis project and are especially valuable to us as something that’s possible only in a decentralized space”
Mat Collishaw and Danil Krivoruchko, Heterosis, 2023 © Snark.art
“This is the most complicated digital art collection I have ever worked on. Mat wanted Heterosis NFTs to be real flower species. A real life reference, which is super complex on the one hand and so familiar to everyone on the other, meant that even the goal of achieving a photorealistic visual was technologically very complex”
“Art is the interweaving of events and a person experiencing them. And through these relationships, through the search for an answer to the question of who this Other is, life, connection, and beauty manifest. The most important thing is the space between me and the Other. Meeting with another is always an event, an opportunity to experience it together as equals.”
Russian digital artist Elena Arkhipova creates artworks inspired by internet surrealism and minor everyday situations . “Surrealism helps me convey my deepest emotions and feelings through an image,” - says artist
Hetaera Psappha is a video artist born in Moscow in the waning years of the Soviet era. Working all around the world, Lisa Minaeva (the artist’s real name) creates her wordless portraits in various places. Having started her project in London in 2012, she gathered over 100 portraits of artists, poets, musicians, and other people of different professions and backgrounds. After ten years of filming portraits, she feels more interested in it than ever.
A French actress sitting topless in a bathtub in Moscow; a young Indonesian woman looking at the camera with eyes full of tears in a hot Belgrade apartment; a celebrated Russian rapper squinting in the sun on a famous Saint Petersburg rooftop after an acoustic gig; a British painter, frozen in his chair, looking as if he’s about to attack – the Blossom of Silence project counts endless faces and hours of quiet contemplation. Being able to stop and look into another person’s eyes is a rare gift in a time of rapid news and information, and the lo-fi image created with a MiniDV camera helps the artist clear it of the filters we got used to so easily thanks to fashion magazines and Instagram. At times, the picture shakes and interrupts, and zooms in and out: leaving the footage “rough” is the artist’s committed position.
Initial idea was to “create a collection of the most beautiful people’s portraits”, and, therefore, remake a famous Andy Warhol work. However, the goal changed fast as Hetaera Psappha realized “beautiful” does not always mean “interesting to silently communicate with”, and vice versa. According to the artist, the key to “interest” stays unclear after all these years: while some portraits are more loved by the audience than others, she never knows beforehand if a portrait is going to work out well or turn out to be boring and “soulless”. It depends on many factors, where the openness of the model often stays the most important one.
Among many famous and unknown faces, one stands out – Alina happens to be the only person Hetaera Psappha filmed more than once. From the very first shooting, she became the artist’s muse, whom she decided to film every year. The colourful and unexpected evolution of a teenage girl through the troubles and transformations of her adolescence years is a curious experience, “a project within a project”. And it is not the only one – in 2016 Lisa created a special collection Silent Poets, especially for Poetronica festival of contemporary poetry, sound art and video art.
As Hetaera Psappha says, filming portraits with no words doesn’t just help her rest after working with texts and words, which is the other big part of her life as a poet and scriptwriter. It helps her feel, build and share with her audience connections, which cannot be broken by borders, political systems, religions, classes and backgrounds. In such a way, when watching her portraits, everyone is free to build an imaginary connection with any of her models and try to read the mystery hidden in their eyes. After all, the eyes are the mirror of the soul, as long as one suggests it exists. And if it does, observing them is a useful and enriching practice.
Prominent artist Krista Kim is bringing Continuum art installation to cities worldwide to spread the movement of wellness, healing and humanity in the age of the Metaverse. Together with Times Square Alliance and YMU Arts they reinvented famous billboards to run Continuum through February each night starting 11:57PM.
“Krista Kim’s Continuum is a soothing visual meditation presented on a monumental scale. Synchronized across 90 electronic billboards, a slowly shifting gradient of color washes over Times Square, creating a moment of calm amidst one of the most visually kinetic places in the world.”
International contemporary artist specialising in figurative painting with concentration on portraiture.
“Peterson came to painting in 2012, when he put paint to canvas professionally for the first time after receiving life-altering medical news. Eight months later, he exhibited his work in New York and has since become one of the country’s most celebrated new artists, exhibiting in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami. Peterson paints raw, honest, and empowering portraits with the express goal of uplifting people of color. Reconsidering and challenging the ways they have often been perceived, Peterson strives to establish “a dialogue between his works and the people viewing them… about how beautiful, resilient, powerful, and worthy we are and have always been."“
Meticulously designed isometric panorama of Istanbul is a debut NFT project of artist Tarık Tolunay. With a great attention to details and in a playful manner he creates colourful homages to the beautiful cross point of two continents. He interprets the historical and cultural richness of Istanbul and transfers it to the visual world. The asymmetrical structure of the city turns into extremely complex and entertaining compositions.
Biochemistry researcher, freestyle dancer (candidate to Olympics US 2024, yuk!) and artist - Vitruvian man - Grant Riven Yun is a vocal supporter of NFT Art movement. As a digital artists Grant specialises in realistic, yet minimal landscapes, evoking the 20th century American Regionalism movement with a 21st century spin.
“Intentionally Wes Anderson” if you want to summarise Vaughn Meadows body of work. Or maybe you will hear Salinger’s lines while watching his mellow-coloured, pastoral photography. And if I was you I’d defo visit artist’s links and even purchase few works as NFTs
For the 2020 launch of the Mars Rover, NASA asked House of van Schneider to design a symbol capturing the energy and legacy of space travel, while celebrating the engineers who worked tirelessly on this mission.
At once an abstract representation of the iconic rover and blocks reaching up to the sky, the logomark works as beautifully on the rover as it does on a 191-foot tall rocket ship.
Do you know any other designer around whose work travelled to Mars? We know only Tobias! Proud to meet him during OFFF Festivals in Barcelona.
Voxel artist (3D pixel) Mari Mad Maraca shares her magic worlds available for collecting as Prints or Digital Tokens
Artist and director of Barcelona Academy of Art Jordi Diaz Alamá has a vast relationships with academic and abstract ways of painting.
“Alamà offers through this series of saturated, vivid and imposing reds, a privileged peek inside the universe of the painter’s studio, the practice of working with life models and the vast plurality in sensuality. Red Studio synthesises the many layers of technical research the artist has acquired over the last decade. Academicism and abstraction coexist again on the canvas: a new aesthetic chapter carried out by an overwhelming expressive force in the form of a dance between the measured and the vigorous brushstroke.”
“Red Studio has been developed in parallel with another of Alamàs’s ambitious series of paintings illustrating scenes of Hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Both series have grown in the same space – the artist’s studio – a place that can too often become hell in itself. The fire of the Dantesque Hell seems to crawl into these classical anatomical studies and envelop the figures with an abrasive red enamel, the main unifying thread of the series. Similarly, the works from the #ClásicosDesollados series also make an appearance, engulfed in flames and hung at the bottom of the Red Studio‘s works.” - words by Albert Navales
Time to refresh our #tattoos collection with a new masterpieces from Moscow-based ink artist Ilia Zharkov
