←
CATALOGUE
Blog

Aaron Boyarsky: correspondence Turns a Friend's Album Into Living Patterns

Aaron Boyarsky's correspondence, out now on Art Blocks Studio, pairs kaleidoscopic cellular automata with music by his collaborator Snack Master, in 400 outputs that never play the same way twice.

••

Aaron Boyarsky, who posts as ixnayokay, is a generative artist and software engineer in Falls Church, Virginia, with a computer science degree and a minor in mathematics. His work follows the emergent behavior of chaotic systems: cellular automata, fractals, models of population dynamics and evolution. On October 30 he released correspondence on Art Blocks Studio, a fixed edition of 400 on Ethereum that took him nearly 2 years to make.

The title is literal. The work grew out of many back and forth emails with his musical collaborator John Bowman, who records as Snack Master. Bowman played the music on a physical keyboard in MIDI, and Boyarsky turned those recordings into data, analyzed them for "emotionally impactful transitions" and used those moments as triggers for changes in the animation. Each edition offers "a new perspective on one of the tracks, changing its tempo, key, and voice," and the companion album, also called Correspondence, lets listeners compare the music that went in with the way the code heard it.

The visuals come in a few modes: an equalizer, shapes moving through a field of cellular automata, Voronoi diagrams, mycelial growth and overlapping ripples. Some outputs run automata rules where each cell weighs neighbors up to 7 cells away, a space where, he writes, "some of them are pretty weird"; one, to his eye, "looks like worms and checkerboards." Nothing is fixed. Every time an output plays it keeps its traits but "evolves differently," so 2 copies of the same token running side by side drift apart. A Drift mode wanders slowly through the whole parameter space, something he finds "really enjoyable to watch over minutes or hours."

The work is also meant to be handled. Web and MIDI controls let collectors dial in their own sound and look, then save it with PostParams so others can see it too. Boyarsky showed correspondence at the Artist Fair in Marfa and folded what visitors told him back into the release: simpler menus, high and low pass filters and the PostParams support. "I love giving people something to play with and experiment with," he wrote. "To me that's part of the allure of the browser as a medium."

Sources

← All storiesHome →