Selection
In 1983, Bill Atkinson was working on MacPaint, a graphics application for the Apple Lisa. While drinking a beer at a local bar, he noticed an animated waterfall in a beer sign on the wall. The effect was created by rotating an image under a mask. Back home he applied the animation using simple diagonal lines producing a moving dashed line. The ‘marching ants’, or animated selection marquee that became ubiquitous in interface culture, were born.
I have always been spellbound by the selection marquee. The elegance and sensitivity of this element of GUI is unlike anything else. Extending the idea of circling a word with a pencil it is a physical manifestation of our mental capacity to select, bringing in all the unique material beauty that only the computer can offer. Paraphrasing Bruce Nauman, on the one hand it’s just a daily used functional element, but on the other when seen for what it is, it is a profound experience. Like something between a beer and a waterfall. – Jan Robert Leegte
The idea behind the work was to have a selection are genererated by code. The so common used tool in especially PhotoShop then looses its image reference and becomes the protagonist.
Selection is a fully on-chain long form generative collection on the Ethereum blockchain. The work is a responsive webpage. The thumbnail image data is generated from the contract as the token number in ‘marching ants’ with the assigned background color.
Selection launched in partnership with Folia . This collection features 150 NFTs, each priced at 0.11 ETH.
Paying tribute to interface culture, Selection is a responsive work designed to not scale. When resized, the piece is rendered anew: viewing it at a smaller size causes details to fade, while the composition remains recognizable – much like stepping back to observe a piece of art from a distance.
Each Selection NFT comes with a customizable background, which can be a solid color, a color gradient, or a gray gradient. Holders of the token have the unique ability to change the background layer through the smart contract. Options include the original assigned color, white, black, or transparent. This change is permanent, updates across marketplaces, and can be made as often as the holder wishes.
Jan Robert Leegte
SELECTION, 2024
on chain, generative
Edition 150
ABOUT Jan Robert Leegte
Jan Robert Leegte (born 1973, The Netherlands) is one of the first Dutch artists to work on and for the Internet since the 1990s. In 2002, he shifted his main focus to implementing digital materials in the context of the physical gallery space, aiming to bridge the online art world with the gallery art world, making prints, sculpture, installations, drawings, and projections, connecting to historical movements like land art, minimalism, performance art,
and conceptualism.
As an artist Leegte explores the position of the new materials put forward by the (networked) computer. Photoshop selection marquees, scrollbars, Google Maps, code, and software are dissected to understand their ontological nature. The networked computer is the central muse in my work, exploring all its wonders and peculiarities. “I don't use software to make art, I make art about software”.
His work has been exhibited internationally (Whitechapel Gallery, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, van Gogh Museum, ZKM Karlsruhe, Centre Pompidou, Museum Ludwig Budapest).
Additional works
JPEG 2022-Ongoing
JPEG is a collection of generative images in the JPEG file format. The work tries to break with the idea of the fixed file format, therefor creating the JPEG entirely from code using no image material whatsoever. The individual JPEGs are generated responsively at the moment of viewing based on the token hash as a random seed. You can literally drag the JPEG out from the browser window.
The mid grey chiseled computer interfaces of 1997 have always reminded me of sculptures created in bas-relief, a technique going back to the stone carved petroglyphs that is as ancient as humankind's first steps in making art. The combination of illusion and tactility found in these interfaces shows our longing to have the computer experience be part of the material world. Therefor it comes as no surprise that the programming language of Ethereum is named 'Solidity'. The blockchain is software, yet it behaves and feels like hardware.
It seems we are witnessing a progressing performance of permanence.
„The interface is a fiction, a form that pretends that data can be held steady, a quality that is crucial for humans to be able to interact with it“ – Vito Campanelli
Mountains are grand natural statements of sculptural expression. They are birthplaces of sublime monumentality and romanticism. Their crumbs are the raw materials that provided us with a long tradition of sculpture.
In another realm there is the ambiguous materiality of the digital, the human-made bits and bytes, in constant flow through systems, from which a new order of materials emerge at the surface of the interface. Among them is the user interface phenomenon of the drop shadow. A material bereft of all our notions of materiality, it being nothing but the absence of light cast upon a surface due to an obstructing object. In the work the shadow has been severed from a non existent casting object making it less then nothing. But also the drop shadow being a digital simulacrum adds another step deeper into ethereality, making it almost a shadow of shadows. This places it in direct opposition to the most earthly rooted of them all, the mountain.
Mountains and Drop Shadows is a continuation of a line of work going back to 2013, with the net art piece www.mountainsanddropshadows.com in which a live script would continuously fetch images tagged ‘mountains’ from online databases. Because of this, the landscapes would become anonymised and delocalised, merely beco- ming an image, often ending as a humble desktop image.
For this most recent iteration of the work, querying databases felt like a thing of the past, as all those images have been added to the datasets of various image generating AI services. Mountains and Drop Shadows, 2023 uses AI ge- nerated mountain images, a mashup of all images of existing mountains, fully erasing the subjectivity of the photo- grapher and a-localising the image.
The work is a sculptural desktop standoff between a mountain dreamt up by the internet and a drop shadow. Embodiment vertigo on the summits of the interface.
You can find more information about Jan Robert Leegte here.