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Certificate of Authenticity
Golan Levin
Cytographia #0
NFT
Description

Each unique pen-plot drawing, signed by the artist, is paired with an ERC-721 token certified by Verisart.

Cytographia is an elegy for species we will never know, or will never know again, expressed through generative illustrations from an imaginary book about imaginary organisms. The artwork depicts speculative cell structures whose appearances and movements arise emergently and in response to real-time user interactions. Cytographia was created using p5.js (an open-source programming toolkit for the arts) and may run best in the Chrome browser on OSX.

An algorithmic “neoincunabulum of xenocytology”, Cytographia presents an interactive diagram of a one-celled microorganism, styled to evoke a hand-drawn engraving. Every aspect of this illustration is generated through custom code, including the simulated behavior of the depicted creature, the poiesis of its anatomy, the calligraphic quality of its lines, the asemic letterforms of its labels, and the virtual “paper” on which it is rendered. Cytographia’s drawings may be exported as high-resolution PNG images, or in an SVG vector format suitable for pen-plotting on A4 paper.

The Cytographia project draws inspiration from several historically significant books that visually and methodically documented encounters with the unknown. These include Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), a landmark of scientific observation in which living cells were described for the first time; Edmund Fry’s Pantographia (1799), an attempt to compile exemplars of all the world’s writing systems; Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (1899), a rich exploration of symmetry and structural hierarchy in natural forms; and Luigi Serafini’s hallucinatory Codex Seraphinianus (1981), a visual encyclopedia of an artist’s imagined world. The generative letterforms in Cytographia are loosely based on 16th-century typefaces by Ludovico degli Arrighi.

Cytographia represents a culmination of several enduring threads in Golan Levin’s thirty-year oeuvre of interactive software art, including research into responsive blobs (e.g. Polygona Nervosa, 1997); artificial life (e.g. Obzok, 2001); the use of physics simulations in computational drawing (e.g. Floccus, 1999) and the algorithmic generation of asemic writing systems (e.g. Alphabet Synthesis Machine, 2002).

Exhibition history
Awaken, Metamagical Hands, Gazelli Art House, London, UK (2024)

Details
Production year
2024
Object type
Drawing
Dimensions
20.3 × 26.7 cm
Medium
HP7475 pen-plot in black 0.25mm Pilot Hi-Tec-C Gel Ink on cream-colored, acid-free Canson Colorline 300gsm card accompanied by generative, real-time graphic ERC-721 token
Asset type
PNG
Location
United Kingdom
Contract address
Token ID
487000000
Certificate of Authenticity
Our patented certificates are designed to evolve over time, unlike paper certificates. All changes to the certificate are registered on the blockchain, proving a clear and trusted timeline of the certificate’s evolution.
Verified issuer
Creator authorized
Physical link
Created by
Golan Levin, 1972
Signed by
Certificate Signature
Issued by
Gazelli Art House
Owned by
Private
History
Transferred
Jul 26 2024 13:00:38 UTC
Transferred
Jul 26 2024 09:37:14 UTC
Authorized edit
Jul 18 2024 11:59:46 UTC
Created
Jul 18 2024 11:36:41 UTC

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