CØSMØSTONΞS
Something new. With visual sophistication.
what is cosmostones?
Cøsmøstones is a generative art project. Derived of multiple algorithms, simulations and techniques which are together computationally strenuous, alongside artist involvement, constructed on a high resolution canvas with excessive fidelity.
The cosmic is explained visually.
And since they are to be collected, they resemble stones.
How do you recreate the organic formations of which nature has been constructing since eternity?
The results are something that you have to see yourself in the full resolution. Even if you have an 8K (7,680×4,320) display, you’d still need to downscale a cosmostones piece to view it in frame.
All pieces are by default made in 11520×11520 pixels (1x1 square). They show their beauty in very large prints or on large displays.
Resolution isn’t everything, however. So all those pixels are put to good use. As you zoom in, you will see extraordinary amount of detail on all of the surfaces. That’s the expensive-to-make part.
It is recommended to open and (ironically enough), “right-click” to view the preview images in full-screen to get an idea for the scope of detail present all throughout. And then multiply it by at least 2, because the full 11K res images are currently reserved as unlockable content.
The JPEGs are so large that OpenSea has a hard time digesting them. Most image hosting sites outright reject them. And the ones with color naturally are over 3 times larger in filesize and that’s just the data gathered from the first 7 creations so far.
..also forget about PNGs and other file types. The website completely breaks when trying to upload the transparent 11K or even 4K PNGs; however token holders can contact the official Twitter to get their own transparent PNG or other file types.
the why
To put it simply, many artists like to over-complicate and overpopulate their work with excessive concrete detail.
I do it myself too all the time when I did paintings; and have learned better.
There’s also the other side of that same coin, where some artists are so obsessed with being minimal that they do it for the sake of being minimal.
Understanding both sides and without going extreme in either direction, I wanted to have them both. To have my cake and eat it too.
Cosmostones might be the ideal middle ground.
How do you distill in essence what a human would see as beautiful or attractive? And make it distinct too?
cosmostones pieces tend to be simple in shapes, but are complex with abstract-detail for you to get lost in.
They come in black and white, usually. But colored pieces are rarer because they are more difficult and require more fine-tuning to make.
Another thing that I need to touch on is the copying and replicating. We’ve seen 3D artists, punks, apes and other whatever animals and avatar projects get popular and from them tend to be many spin-off or better said: rip-offs.
Made by opportunistic and the less creative among us. Which, more power to them, however, it’s not me. With these and my experience I’ve attempted to make something visually tough to replicate or reproduce.
When it comes to replication, an extra factor to take into account is the fact that it costs quite a bit of computational resource to create these.
In other words, a beefy PC plus a render farm alongside lots of high speed storage to cache the dozens of gigabytes of pre-calculated intermediate data have been used to make these.
essentially PoW in a human-readable artform.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading through this. For further info checkout this Twitter thread where I explain the natural inspirations for the project.
There will be other articles written for the other aspects of the project. Soon.
— Matin Poursadeghi (@matinprsd)
As a side note: this project is in no way affiliated or done in collaboration with the Cosmos Network ($ATOM) and any other project for that matter.
