Generative Art & Permanence

Generative artworks are hard to capture in a still moment. They're moving and evolving systems with vast numbers of possible outcomes (1.7976931348623157E+308 to be exact.)

These systems offer artists a unique opportunity to build continuously surprising outcomes within one set of instructions that is littered with randomness. They arouse complex questions, like whether the algorithm or its output is the artwork. For the artist, choices emerge - should the possible outcomes be robust or deliberate? How much should the program favor chaotic randomness vs. procedure?

Working with randomness as an artist

Creating art with randomness has benefits and drawbacks. The ability to generate a new rendition of an artwork on demand is highly intriguing because I can make an entire body of work with one program. I may choose to exert control or defer to chaos for each of my system's hundreds of parameters.

Creating Permanence

The primary way in which I archive my artwork is by transcribing its geometric form to paper via a pen plotter. My program creates instructions for this drawing machine, and I carefully select the best pens, inks, and papers for it to use. With archival-quality materials, these drawings will last many decades.

Challenges in digital art

In the twenty years I've been practicing it, I've witnessed numerous communities grow and shudder, services shut down, databases corrupted, and businesses pivot to new models. When these things happen, user-submitted content often ceases to exist online. The collective contributions of the community are unrecoverable, lost into the ether.

The insecurity of digital platforms (on the time scale of decades) requires artists to preserve their digital portfolio of artwork, which is often fraught with its own challenges.

There's a way to bottle up a generative program and create a high level of durability. It even allows artists to monetize their algorithms and distribute them to collectors without needing a print studio. This system stores the seed of the PRNG in a decentralized permissionless database, which is highly likely to last for many decades. These "seeds" are innately tied to the program's code, which is also stored in the database, thus giving you the complete assembly of tools to replicate the creation of the artwork.

What database am I referring to? The Ethereum blockchain.

NFTs have a negative connotation for many legitimate reasons. Insider trading, money laundering, and low-quality "art" have all tarnished the public's perception of this technology. In 2025, most of this negativity has moved on to Memecoins, with everyone from the head of Digital Art at Sotheby's to the United States President utilizing them to extract value from gullible speculators.

What remains is a technology that is extremely good at archiving code art. Although most NFTs are just fragile pointers to web URLs, on-chain art is entirely stored on the chain, giving it the same resilience as the Ethereum network. Given their innovation in the generative art movement, I opted to work with Artblocks.io to tokenize my artwork into NFTs.

There's one major issue with this strategy, and it comes down to file size. Storing data in smart contracts on the blockchain can get extremely expensive. During the euphoria of 2021, artists could expect to pay tens of thousands of dollars to upload 30-50kb of code. This situation has improved with changes to the Ethereum network, less traffic, and optimizations by Artblocks on their smart contracts. However, it is still relevant.

Some may point out that I could store my artwork in a robust backup solution with a budget of >$1000. This is true, and in fact, I have a few layers of redundancy for my code base. It may also imply that an expensive upload to the Ethereum network isn't worthwhile. However, the value of the blockchain comes not only from its decentralized ledger but also from its ecosystem of Web3 apps that can extract and present artwork on the blockchain.

An example of this durability through decentralization can be seen in 2021, when the Avant-Garde digital art marketplace Hic Et Nunc abruptly shut down. Because the marketplace utilized the blockchain instead of a private database, it only took a few days for mirror websites to come online with a complete record of all artworks and sales. While the sudden shutdown caused insurmountable brand damage, the data persisted. This was an aha moment for me after all the times art-related websites had fallen offline, never to return in the past, and solidified my belief that art on the blockchain provides real value and isn't simply a gimmick.