Text by CLOT Magazine
Artist Leo Villareal has long been interested in deploying the simplest modes of technology to engender entrancing experiences and reconfigure how people interact with and appreciate their environments, as he told CLOT Magazine in a past interview.
Now Villareal brings his work from the physical to the digital realm, translating his art installations and site-specific LED sculptures into this new digital universe by launching Cosmic Reef, a first edition of NFTs, Leo Villareal Launches First NFT Project with Generative Platform Art Blocks. This collaboration marks a natural evolution in Villareal’s practice and is the first work the artist has created to exist in a purely digital form.
Cosmic Reef NFTs reflect our universe’s random order of beauty and symmetry. The individual works begin with a simple geometry that becomes more complex through-composed dynamic layers, each born of a combination of human control and computational chance.
Villareal explains how simple forms evolve into complex constellations, emulating the architecture of life: A particular order can be found in deepest space, in our oceans and forests, and in all living things, including ourselves – a unified code that produces variation. Gravity and cosmic winds shape star-forming nebulae into coral-like forms—Flowers self-organise with a radial symmetry produced by signals hidden from the human eye. Stars are birthed, collapse, explode, and are reborn. Invertebrates move on the tides of oceans, signalling with ever-changing patterns of bioluminescence. Light bends time as events unfold in our own lives.
Cosmic Reef consists of 1,024 digital works. Each NFT is the generative result of over 100 parameters. Randomised permutations of attributes create rarity through select combinations of geometry, colour, composition, and light.
Cosmic Reef launches on January 24, 2022, at 1:00 PM EST.
