Jun 2025
Notes on Aesthetic Constant
After releasing Constant, I struggled with my decision to put out a work with such an austere aesthetic expression. I joked to my partner that I would re-do the project with more regard to it’s visual appeal and release a new version in a few months.
A year later, Aesthetic Constant is ready for release. The didactic title also holds a more complex question: what visual elements hold our attention?
Aesthetic Constant does not reach the visual complexity of a Kim Asendorf piece, which the market reward for it’s complexity and dynamism, but answers this question with the complexity of natural motion.
As in Natural Static, the motion data in Aesthetic Constant was captured from the real world. Whereas Natural Static is fueled by videos of flowing water, the data set of Aesthetic Constant is much more compact. To generate it, I filmed friends in Montreal walking on a treadmill, isolated one walk cycle from that video, and ran pose detection machine learning on those frames. The resulting dataset is small enough to store on the blockchain, but preserves the unique character of each walker.
With Constant, my aim was to express that we are in relation to each other when we interact on the blockchain. Initially, Constant was going to be just two blocks, and each transfer of the work would reconfigure the blocks depending on the wallet addresses of buyer and seller. As I got close to release, I realized the changes were so small and might become lost, so I instead added one block with each transfer, the work becomes a visual record of the people it’s passed through.
Seeing how participants explored this idea was immensely satisfying. Collectors orchestrated the transfer of the token across multiple wallets, or bounced them between two owned wallets, creating relational compositions. CSA_2D7 took the work to it’s furthest imaginable extent, initiating the transfer of Constant 11, which currently sits at 148 transfers.
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The journey of Constant 11 inspired the private mint mechanic for Aesthetic Constant. Keeping the mint private meant that I could also add an invite mechanic, allowing minters to invite other minters, and collectively control the edition size.
The reward for inviting a minter is half the mint fee of 0.069 ETH. This reward is integral to the piece, as it draws a tension against the saccharine gesture of connection, and asks if we’re here for the community or for the financial reward.
The appearance of each work is generated from the wallet addresses of the inviter and invitee. The render mode is selected by combining the two addresses, and the gait of each figure is derived from the individual wallet addresses of inviter and invitee. If a token is transferred to a new wallet, or sold on the secondary market, the transfer will result in a new appearance, new wallets generating new outputs.
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The works are generated by a series of on-chain render contracts, and are animated by gait information that is also stored on-chain. Working on-chain imposes limitations. Contracts have a file size limit, and render operations have a gas limit. I find it an interesting challenge to see what work can be created within these limits, and how these limits can be stretched. For this project, I deployed three separate render contracts, a contract for combining and storing the gait data, alongside the mint contract.
Working with SVG also imposes its own limits. Certain operations are easy to produce, while others remain difficult. The aesthetics of this project are informed by the limits of both the Ethereum blockchain and the SVG standard. As Rafael Rozendaal says, ‘Art is the encounter of a person and a material. The person has intentions and wishes, and the material has intentions and wishes.’
The material of blockchain is not just a settlement layer for the exchange of images. It is a rich relational material, where the aesthetic component of a work is just one element in the communo-social dynamics of a release, and through which deeper questions of community and connection can be asked. Are you my friend, or my exit liquidity? Are we mutually exploiting each other, or are we bound together with a genuine excitement for a new artistic movement that will come to define future generations of practice?
aestheticconstant.jonathanchomko.com
After releasing Constant, I struggled with my decision to put out a work with such an austere aesthetic expression. I joked to my partner that I would re-do the project with more regard to it’s visual appeal and release a new version in a few months.
A year later, Aesthetic Constant is ready for release. The didactic title also holds a more complex question: what visual elements hold our attention?
Aesthetic Constant does not reach the visual complexity of a Kim Asendorf piece, which the market reward for it’s complexity and dynamism, but answers this question with the complexity of natural motion.
As in Natural Static, the motion data in Aesthetic Constant was captured from the real world. Whereas Natural Static is fueled by videos of flowing water, the data set of Aesthetic Constant is much more compact. To generate it, I filmed friends in Montreal walking on a treadmill, isolated one walk cycle from that video, and ran pose detection machine learning on those frames. The resulting dataset is small enough to store on the blockchain, but preserves the unique character of each walker.
With Constant, my aim was to express that we are in relation to each other when we interact on the blockchain. Initially, Constant was going to be just two blocks, and each transfer of the work would reconfigure the blocks depending on the wallet addresses of buyer and seller. As I got close to release, I realized the changes were so small and might become lost, so I instead added one block with each transfer, the work becomes a visual record of the people it’s passed through.
Seeing how participants explored this idea was immensely satisfying. Collectors orchestrated the transfer of the token across multiple wallets, or bounced them between two owned wallets, creating relational compositions. CSA_2D7 took the work to it’s furthest imaginable extent, initiating the transfer of Constant 11, which currently sits at 148 transfers.
The journey of Constant 11 inspired the private mint mechanic for Aesthetic Constant. Keeping the mint private meant that I could also add an invite mechanic, allowing minters to invite other minters, and collectively control the edition size.
The reward for inviting a minter is half the mint fee of 0.069 ETH. This reward is integral to the piece, as it draws a tension against the saccharine gesture of connection, and asks if we’re here for the community or for the financial reward.
The appearance of each work is generated from the wallet addresses of the inviter and invitee. The render mode is selected by combining the two addresses, and the gait of each figure is derived from the individual wallet addresses of inviter and invitee. If a token is transferred to a new wallet, or sold on the secondary market, the transfer will result in a new appearance, new wallets generating new outputs.
The works are generated by a series of on-chain render contracts, and are animated by gait information that is also stored on-chain. Working on-chain imposes limitations. Contracts have a file size limit, and render operations have a gas limit. I find it an interesting challenge to see what work can be created within these limits, and how these limits can be stretched. For this project, I deployed three separate render contracts, a contract for combining and storing the gait data, alongside the mint contract.
Working with SVG also imposes its own limits. Certain operations are easy to produce, while others remain difficult. The aesthetics of this project are informed by the limits of both the Ethereum blockchain and the SVG standard. As Rafael Rozendaal says, ‘Art is the encounter of a person and a material. The person has intentions and wishes, and the material has intentions and wishes.’
The material of blockchain is not just a settlement layer for the exchange of images. It is a rich relational material, where the aesthetic component of a work is just one element in the communo-social dynamics of a release, and through which deeper questions of community and connection can be asked. Are you my friend, or my exit liquidity? Are we mutually exploiting each other, or are we bound together with a genuine excitement for a new artistic movement that will come to define future generations of practice?
aestheticconstant.jonathanchomko.com