Pale, male and best-selling. It’s a catchphrase applicable to the kings of today’s generative art scene: Tyler Hobbs, Dmitri Cherniak, Larval laboratories, jack butcher. Unfortunately, the main creators of perhaps the most original and lucrative NFT genres largely mirror the homogeneity of their analog ancestors. Brigitte Riley.
New York generative artist Emily Xie is keenly aware of this imbalance. In fact, it’s the one she extends to the world of software engineering she worked in until just over a year ago, when the success of her textured and teasing generative NFTs allowed her to code and to create full time.
In Xie’s latest series, “Interwoven,” the Harvard-trained artist redoubles his efforts to disrupt what has until now been a male game. She created 100 generative quilt-inspired NFTs, which abandoned on June 7.
“Interlaced” is the last installment from the joint blockchain initiative of Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Cactoid Labs, Remembrance of future things, which encourages digital creatives to riff on works from its collection. Xie was immediately drawn to LACMA old textiles, but refined on a quilt from the end of the 19th century which has been hidden in the archives: “Bullseye” by Martha Lou Jones a kaleidoscope of tawny-colored swirls that appear from afar lined with rope and rusty leather.
Martha Lou Jones, Bull’s eye quilt (1896). Courtesy of LACMA.
“Visually, it embodies generative art as it captures a strong tension between the human and the computational,” Xie told Artnet News. “Quilting and generative art involve algorithmic processes and I wanted to explore those parallels.”
Jones’ quilt was not computer programmed, but its precise scheme of squares and circles certainly seems suggestive. Lean (or zoom) a little closer, however, and imperfections and variations become apparent, an effect that captured Xie’s imagination and fueled his design process.
Indeed, there is a sweet historical interaction between textiles and computers. Textile design is a forerunner of the first computers thanks to the invention of jacquard loom, which used punched cards to produce weaving patterns and would inspire English polymath Ada Lovelace to write an algorithm for a mechanical computing system called the Analytical Engine. Loom inspires computer and vice versa.
Sample of Emily Xie’s “Interwoven” NFT series. Courtesy of the artist and Cactoid Labs.
Xie is also keen to emphasize the social component. In North America, and even far beyond, quilting was one of the few artistic avenues available to women, often passed down from generation to generation and used to tell stories. Xie plays with this historical marginalization by handicrafts in their image by using tools (mainly JavaScript and p5.js) that have largely been the domain of men.
“Quilting and computing have deeply gendered histories. The women have contributed significantly, but still face an unsettling sense of invisibility or erasure,” Xie said. “I was hoping to spark some thought on this by weaving the two areas together.”
Xie’s quilts don’t appear as generative NFTs – at least not as we know them from CryptoPunks’ brutal pixelation, hard Sol LeWittismes autoglyphsor the rolling rectangular fields of Hobbs Fidenzas. Of course, there’s a pattern (read: algorithm) at work: a warm background color layered with a large irregular shape and a constellation of bead-like circles.
But they appear singular as a person’s darling blanket, each strewn with a figurative animal (a skinny elephant, a prancing horse, a duck wearing a tie), and small marks, coffee and mud stains not yet removed. They don’t quite smell like an old blanket, but almost.
Sample of Emily Xie’s “Interwoven” NFT series. Courtesy of the artist and Cactoid Labs.
Here, Xie’s ability to bring generative art to life, to break up its often rigid formalism, predates “Interwoven”, but may have something to do with the research that preceded coding. Xie watched video tutorials on common patterns, visited local textile stores, and read many articles about its history and development.
“We were thrilled to see Emily gravitate around quilts in the museum’s collection,” Lady Cactoid of Cactoid Labs told Artnet News. “I am struck by the textures, the organic shapes and the sense of movement that she is able to convey thanks to her algorithms.”
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