This December, digital art platform Outland will present a new generative digital art series by light artist Leo Villareal titled Cosmic Bloom. This will be Villareal’s latest fine art NFT collection that is produced using custom live code and inspired by organic and biological structures, stellar phenomena, and atomic patterns.
This collection features custom web-based coding to create a new body of work. It is part of the artist’s Cosmologies series which began with Villareal’s successful Cosmic Reef released in January 2022. Cosmic Bloom marks Villareal’s first collaboration with Outland, a leading digital art platform that spearheads innovation at the intersection of art and technology.
Leo Villareal works with sculpture, LED lights, and software to create sequenced light artworks that have been exhibited in galleries and public spaces around the world. Cosmic Bloom reflects the artist’s longstanding practice of using computer coding to generate complex, non-repeating visual sequences in his light sculptures.
Each digital artwork in this new collection is unique and features intricate geometric forms that are densely layered and multiplied, creating a myriad of captivating patterns set in constant motion. These infinitely complex compositions will be realized using javascript code hosted on the Interplanetary File System (IPFS). Departing from the Cosmic Reef collection, which was purely generative, Villareal will hand-select the final mints from the generative output to fulfill his novel vision.
Cosmic Bloom advances Villareal’s exploration of NFTs, as both a new technology and a creative medium, in order to manifest artworks that can be accessed around the world via the blockchain, similar to the reach of his notable public artworks. In 2016, Villareal was commissioned for London’s Illuminated River Project, a long-term public artwork unveiled over 2019-2021 that lights up nine Thames bridges. Villareal also created The Bay Lights, an iconic 1.8-mile installation of 25,000 LED lights on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge.
Outland previewed Cosmic Bloom during Frieze Week in London and illuminated a historic Grade II* listed chapel, dating to 1888, with the new digital artworks. The Cosmologies series continues with a third collection that will be released on Pace Verso in 2023.
©2022 Leo Villareal
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