Leo Villareal launches new NFT project with Outland – ARTnews.com

While the crypto market bubble may have caused what some believe was an inevitable decline and fall, at least for now, there are still notable artists working in the crypto space.

Leo Villareal, Pace Gallery’s resident programming and LED lighting wizard, has partnered with digital art platform Outland to launch the next edition of his Cosmologies NFTs: Cosmic bloom. Inspired by “organic and biological structures and stellar phenomena,” the works use custom, web-based, live code to generate complex visual patterns and geometric shapes. Each NFT is unique and set in a non-repetitive and constant motion.

“I’ve been working with code for over 20 years, creating custom software that I use to create light patterns and sequences,” Villareal shared ARTNews. “When I started learning about generative art, NFTs and Web 3, I was really fascinated because it’s very close to what I was doing, except it doesn’t manifest as a light sculpture. It’s purely digital.”

Cosmologies began in January, when Villareal launched Cosmic reef with ArtBlocks, another digital art platform. Unlike its predecessor, which was purely generative, with each separate NFT randomly created from live code, each coin of Cosmic bloom will have been chosen by Villareal himself so that each reflects his vision for the series.

“There is definitely a relationship between the two projects,” said the artist. “Still, Cosmic flower has its own aesthetics. It is centered, radial. We drew from the geometry of flowers, studied fertility and cell division. It almost feels like you are witnessing a creation myth.”

Villareal is best known for two monumental public works of art. In 2013, a 1.8 mile long installation Bay Lights was attached to the San Francisco Bay Bridge. In 2019, he unveiled Illuminated river, a massive series of LED lights installed on four of the bridges along the River Thames in London that highlights the relationship between the bridge’s architecture and the river below. In 2021, we have added five bridges to the project. spanning 3.2 miles, Illuminated river said to be the world’s longest public art commission.

Advance sales for Cosmic flower began Tuesday, December 6. The public release begins tomorrow, Thursday, December 8th.