Mass is a shared 3D interactive space that lives on the blockchain. Everyone shares the same space, but it appears differently to each viewer and changes in unexpected ways over time.
Mass is a surveillance machine, recording every action its owners take on-chain and communicating them back to the group through changes in the dynamic 3D compositions. But there are bugs deliberately introduced into the code, making the communication of events unreliable. The visual environment and its digital objects are also fragmented.
The artwork brings together a community, but also distances them from each other. It’s a reimagining of our shared online environment, stripped of its agency to direct behaviour. An ever-changing structure that overturns the problematic nature of the network it exists within.
More about Mass
Mass is a surveillance machine, recording every action its owners take on-chain and communicating them back to the group through changes in the dynamic 3D compositions. But there are bugs deliberately introduced into the code, making the communication of events unreliable. The visual environment and its digital objects are also fragmented.
The artwork brings together a community, but also distances them from each other. It’s a reimagining of our shared online environment, stripped of its agency to direct behaviour. An ever-changing structure that overturns the problematic nature of the network it exists within.
More about Mass
‘Without their market, most NFTs would simply be digital art, like back when people still talked about computer art,
net art and new media art without the blockchain and everyone knew what was meant.
Without the blockchain and its market, MASS by James Bloom could not live.’
Anika Meier
Imagine NFTs Are Alive
net art and new media art without the blockchain and everyone knew what was meant.
Without the blockchain and its market, MASS by James Bloom could not live.’
Anika Meier
Imagine NFTs Are Alive
Loss Surface visualises the statistical output of a deep neural network as it analyses a dataset of images for visual recognition. The artwork makes visible the process of optimisation the model employs as it goes about the task of image classification, a process which is normally invisible.
The loss surface is a 3D graph of a Resnet 56 model’s performance. Where the model is unsuccessful the loss function is high, producing a mountain. Where it is successful a valley appears, representing low loss. This landscape is a frozen moment-in-process in the task of visual interpretation, realised as a monolithic carved physical relief.
A problem with the encroachment of AI into the classification of the world is that it generates a landscape in which people are alienated. As John Tagg put it, these systems “instantiate a machine regime indifferent to the human ego, eye and body”. The Loss Surface investigates the act of seeing and the impulse to classify and interpret.
The loss surface is a 3D graph of a Resnet 56 model’s performance. Where the model is unsuccessful the loss function is high, producing a mountain. Where it is successful a valley appears, representing low loss. This landscape is a frozen moment-in-process in the task of visual interpretation, realised as a monolithic carved physical relief.
A problem with the encroachment of AI into the classification of the world is that it generates a landscape in which people are alienated. As John Tagg put it, these systems “instantiate a machine regime indifferent to the human ego, eye and body”. The Loss Surface investigates the act of seeing and the impulse to classify and interpret.
The disappearance of the current moment is a common experience. Its replacement with a moment yet-to-arrive is now anticipated. People fetishise digital images and networked markets, which in turn are designed to keep us hooked.
BURNER dynamically reacts to people’s activity on the blockchain. It harnesses network processes to create a neverending stream of dopamine-triggering visual stimulation. It demonstrates disappearing states, the burning away of moments in time.
All 256 pieces are interconnected and all are dependent on the live state of Ethereum. As network usage increases, increasing gas prices as a result, a more forceful artwork develops. As such, BURNER strives to picture a kind of sum total of the inscrutable processes happening on the chain.
Ethereum gas prices are made from the competing desires, intentions and beliefs of millions of entities. Digital transactions create overwhelming amounts of this information in block time, cyclically revealing fresh states. Likewise BURNER is never finished, there's always a new variant.
Taking found imagery of real gas and digitally processing it to the point where the original forms break down, BURNER pictures an unending network process we participate in but which escapes our comprehension.
More about BURNER
‘The Stack is an accidental megastructure, one that we are building both deliberately and unwittingly is in turn building us in its own image. This planetary-scale computing infrastructure… is powerful and dangerous, both remedy and poison, a utopian and dystopian machine at once.’
Benjamin H Bratton
The Stack, MIT Press
Benjamin H Bratton
The Stack, MIT Press
‘Every block is an update of information. A database forever expanding and reacting in coordination to things happening inside and outside of [the Ethereum Virtual Machine]. The more we ask it things, the more it amasses information on us. Does it understand us? Can it speak back?
We look at it, but does it look back at us? Does it shape us as we shape it?’
Loucas Braconnier
Essay on BURNER
We look at it, but does it look back at us? Does it shape us as we shape it?’
Loucas Braconnier
Essay on BURNER
‘Physicals’ is a series of reliefs carved with a 3-axis CNC router into polyurethane model board. The artworks are based on CAM 3D models constructed on screen.
All the objects appearing in the works are taken from popular online 3D object libraries. These commercially-available internet objects include user interface elements, digitally-constructed painters brushstrokes and 3D primitives.
These separate objects are subjected to multiple processes before being placed together in dimensional compositions and carved into monolithic physical artworks. Each piece is a single presence from a design of many parts.
The artworks follow complex and opaque production processes commonly used for the manufacturing of new and desirable aesthetic objects through appropriation and strategic refinement.