An old god through new glass.

The only motto, I guess, in my art practice is that "the medium is the message."¹ It probably sounds obvious to most of you, but I had to learn this on my own. It took me a while to figure out why I was using digital tools. Blockchain really gave meaning to my practice. Before, image editors, code, and various stuff were just tools I was at ease with. But now they are becoming part of the way I think and craft my work.

There's been a lot of experimental stuff lately, either with my latest project, Monolith,² or with TokenWorks,³ the company I work at. I never stopped crafting stuff on my own, but got kind of frozen for the past eighteen months when it came to releasing something new, first because I set the bar very high, but also because my life changed a lot.

So I'm thirty-three now as I'm writing this, and I became a father last year. It led me to reflect on all the time I've lost, all the time spent doing random shit or pleasing people I didn't even care about or like.

And a lot of this shifted when I entered crypto for real. There was a space to work and release things where your values are at least understood, if not shared. So this led to the first bits of this collection.

Like the previous work, this collection is still trying to talk about technology. Two major turning points were discovering James Turrell⁴ and the release of Liquid Glass from Apple.⁵

His way of making people experience light and colours, the way they surround you and you become immersed in them, really changed my life.

And you know, babies just love to be outside. They love the sun, the rain, the wind, the dirt. Watching this makes you vividly realize that we are shaping our society away from maybe our most natural instincts and beliefs.

The sun is one of the most primitive forms of deity, an ancient object of worship.⁶ And that makes sense. Like, the sun is part of the reason why any life is happening.

And now, if you think about it, so much of life goes through an iPhone or a Mac or whatever computer. Liquid Glass felt like the perfect embodiment of this because it's just a UI update. It's just that your UI is more or less reflective and transparent. And it made me think, wait, we should mix this with the actual sun.

My Christian upbringing is also part of this. The arched shape comes from the churches and stained-glass windows I grew up with. So there is this connection between the sun, Christianity, and the faith we put in technology.

Lava lamps are another object I've always loved. Funny enough, I don't even own one. They seem to use a lot of electricity, and also their shape, most of the time, is ugly. Maybe I should look for new ones.

But maybe, with AI and technology, we're looking at the sun wrong. Sometimes it's mostly an annoyance, just because of the reflections on your screen. So now we design screens that are not reflective. This reflection on the role of technology is kind of a follow-up to my previous work.

And time was passing so fast. Since blockchain is somewhat immutable, at least Ethereum is,⁷ it could remember something well past my own life. I wanted to give myself a place where my memories could be associated with a piece, with a place.

The city is up to you. You make your own connection with the artwork. It's yours. We just give you a way to work with it.

To talk a bit more about the technical side, the foundation of this is a set of astronomical calculations for the positions of the sun, moon, stars, and planets, based on the place and time.⁸ Most of the work has been around making this displacement actually look good and respond to those movements, and working on colours and texture.

In this digital day and age, it's important to bring back texture in any way, shape, or form. That's where a lot of the work has been, especially with these really subtle colours moving forever, with that feeling of never seeing the same artwork.

And funny enough, at normal speed, it barely moves. To me, that's super interesting. That's clearly what I'm looking for when I work.

I'm very proud of the outcome, and I really hope that people will connect their own memories with some of these pieces and cherish them as much as I cherish the moments in my life.

This collection has a much more positive outlook on life and on my own art practice than the other things I've shared before. I'm at peace with what I'm doing, with the pace of the world and technology. You can't have a hold on everything. The only thing I can do is just enjoy life, enjoy my friends and family, be there for them, and keep creating stuff that vibrates with me.

So yeah. This is it. Thank you.