Snowfro: Chromie Squiggles

February 12 – 26, 2022

Installation Views Thumbnails Back

Installation view of "Snowfro: Chromie Squiggles," Venus Over Manhattan, New York, 2022.

Press Release

Snowfro: Chromie Squiggles
Opening: Saturday, February 12th, 6:00 - 8:00 pm
On view: February 12 – 26, 2022.

Venus Over Manhattan
120 East 65th Street
New York, NY 10065

(New York, NY) – Venus Over Manhattan is pleased to present an exhibition of recent work by Snowfro (Erick Calderon), organized in collaboration with Infinite Objects. The presentation comprises a group of more than fifty Chromie Squiggles, and marks Snowfro’s debut solo gallery exhibition. The exhibition will be on view from February 12th through 26th.

Erick Calderon, known as Snowfro, is the founder of Art Blocks, a public platform for hosting, exhibiting, and acquiring works of generative digital art. Distinct from other forms of digital art, generative art requires an artist design a process, or a set of rules, which generates an image when set into motion. To encourage and support this method of working, Snowfro launched Art Blocks in November 2020 with his own series of generative works, called Chromie Squiggles. As works of generative digital art, Chromie Squiggles rely upon Snowfro’s algorithm, which includes a set of variables and parameters that determine the visual characteristics of its output. Each time the algorithm runs, it produces a Chromie Squiggle entirely unique from any other. Snowfro’s algorithm could theoretically produce trillions of unique images, but he capped their production at 10,000, thereby creating an edition of 10,000 possible Chromie Squiggles. The Art Blocks platform facilitates the opportunity to run this algorithm and generate a Chromie Squiggle, a process known as “minting” a piece of digital art. To date, 9,270 Chromie Squiggles have been minted, and Snowfro retains the remaining 730 un-minted Chromie Squiggles.

The exhibition at Venus Over Manhattan comprises fifty one previously minted Chromie Squiggles, organized into groups. These groups illustrate different types of Chromie Squiggles and reflect their range of visual characteristics. There are six types of Chromie Squiggles—standard, slinky, fuzzy, ribbed bold, and pipe—and each type can then display a range of additional characteristics, relating to their starting color, ending color, number of segments, height, color spread, and color direction. Certain visual characteristics are significantly rarer than others; while there are nearly six thousand “standard” Chromie Squiggles, there are less than two hundred “pipe” Chromie Squiggles.

Snowfro’s Chromie Squiggles exist permanently as a string of code, but they can exist in several visual formats. For the purposes of this exhibition, Snowfro collaborated with Infinite Objects to display his Chromie Squiggles as “Video Prints.” Snowfro and Infinite Objects created a series of permanently treated displays in two different sizes, which hold a single Chromie Squiggle that plays on a loop. Organized into visually distinct groups, the Chromie Squiggles in the exhibition comprise a kind of introduction to the project’s visual vocabulary, illustrating the wide range of possible iterations that the algorithm can produce. In conjunction with the exhibition, Snowfro will make available 10 un-minted Chromie Squiggles, and will be present to mint them with their purchasers.

For further information about the exhibition and availability, please contact the gallery at info@venusovermanhattan.com

For all press related inquiries, please contact:
Susan Ainsworth, Ainsworth Associates
susan@ainsworthassociates.net
+1 (917) 861-7949