Within the past five years, my art process, inherently physical, has bled into the digital domain. At first, I extended the expression of my oil paintings by painstakingly cutting them into Photoshop layers, digitally repainting, in order to convert the static imagery into animation.
Next, I began to publish some of these animations onto the blockchain, adding another dimension to the nature of the work. It is this new dimension, along with AI integrations, which I, Chimera explores.
Most of my original works begin as physical images, typically oil paint on canvas. In I, Chimera, the two works include:
“The Psychonaut”
and “Dionysus”
Physical oil paintings are converted into digital animations, and “minted” on Ethereum as ERC-721 NFT’s. Click to view “The Psychonaut” NFT animation, and “Dionysus” NFT animation.
For both artworks, I also created an “Inner Child”, which is an AI portrait using the originals’ color scheme.
These inner children are then converted into ascii artworks:
And the ascii images are used as signatures in the NFT contract source code:
Click to view the blockchain contract source codes for The Psychonaut and Dionysus.
This dynamic of the artworks being both analogue and digital, centralized and decentralized, and derived from both human and AI, is in sum what embodies the premise of I, Chimera—that, and my exposure to ancient Greek chimeras as a kid in Italy.
Finally, you can view a video which demonstrates much of the process that goes into the full scope of one of these chimera artworks, in this case The Psychonaut (at bottom):