Nicole Vella is a computer artist and web developer residing in Toronto, Canada. She works with computers and code to create artworks and installations that invite interrogation into our relationships with technology and the world at large. Her works have been featured in public installations in Toronto, Canada and in galleries in New York, and have recently been included in exhibitions organized by Bright Moments and Feral File. Nicole studied art at OCAD University where she was also a teaching and research assistant in the fields of computer programming and wearable technology.

Jordan Kantor: Hi, Nicole. It’s been a treat getting to know you and your work better over the last year, and I am delighted that we are finally at this moment: discussing This Is Not A Rock in the context of its upcoming release as a Curated project. For those who are new to your work, do you mind telling a bit about how you first got into making art?

Nicole Vella: I’ve always been an admirer of art and for as long as I can remember, I wanted to be an "artist." But I always felt like I was lacking in talent. I could’t draw well at all, no matter how much I practiced. My high school had a darkroom and SLR cameras, and I remember having a photo assignment and really enjoying the process of developing and printing photos. I’d say that was my first real experience making art with intent. Discovering how I could manipulate the images by altering settings like film or shutter speed as well as different development techniques was fascinating to me. I really loved how small changes could produce wildly different results. Although I did exhibit some photos in a few group shows, I wasn’t serious about it, and I never considered myself an artist. I just really liked taking photos.

JK: The idea of getting a wholly different final photograph from the same motif solely by manipulating settings before the shutter snaps and/or different techniques in the darkroom after you had the negative strikes me as a kind of proto-algorithmic kind of thinking: makes perfect sense! Coming from the technical side, how did you first get into digital or generative art?

NV: I was about ten years old when we first got the internet, and I was immediately addicted to it. I taught myself to code by right-clicking and viewing the source code of the web pages I’d visit (shout out GeoCities for being my playground). Coding quickly became a hobby of mine, and I would design webpages for myself and friends all the time. All of this existed outside of my love for photography. I never connected coding and art until I discovered Processing in 2014. I was working as web designer/developer and explored code and art using Java and Processing for a few years but nothing really “clicked.” In 2018, I had a stressful year that reminded me how short life can be so I decided to do all the things I always wanted to do—the first of which was to go to art school. I had originally wanted to focus on photography, but after learning about the history of different art movements, I gravitated to digital and generative art. Inspired by pioneers in the generative art space like Sol LeWitt and John Whitney, I dove into p5.js and really began my journey into creative coding.

In 2020, I took a course on shaders and everything came together for me. I truly began to see code as a creative medium just like paint. That’s what I love so much about shaders. You use math and code which “talk” directly to the pixels on the screen via the GPU, creating a system to carefully color every point on the canvas.

JK: Sometimes the best time to go to art school can be after being in the working world for a bit. Sounds like this was definitely the case for you. How and when did you discover the blockchain as a medium for art?

NV: I had been interested in Bitcoin for a few years, so I was aware of the blockchain, but it wasn’t until the fall of 2020 that someone mentioned NFTs to me, and that I should release the sketches I was posting on social media as NFTs. I looked into it and tried to mint something but ended up messing up, and it didn’t work. So I sort of just gave up. Then I discovered Art Blocks and fx(hash), and quickly saw how powerful the technology could be. It was then that I really learned what long-form generative art was and how you could take a random seed as input and produce vastly different outputs by making small changes to the underlying code. It reminded me of old school film photography and tinkering with camera and darkroom settings and techniques. I knew this was something I needed to explore. Just like when I took the course on Shaders and code-as-art clicked, using a random hash and the blockchain for generative art just makes sense to me.

“I think being bored is an important part of the creative process, we need to allow time for our minds to clear out and reset themselves.”

JK: So from that moment of clicking, how would you say your creative process has evolved?

NV: I take a lot of walks and find inspiration and motivation in nature and my environment. I tend to work in creative bursts that might last anywhere from a few days to a few months, and in these bursts I will have several projects on the go. Rarely do I finish one project before starting a new one. And in the time between these bursts, I will literally create nothing. I’ll spend that time reading or just being bored. I think being bored is an important part of the creative process, we need to allow time for our minds to clear out and reset themselves. All that said, I am actively trying to change my process from being so dependent on inspiration and motivation and shift it to a dependency on discipline. Ideally, I carve out time every day to be creative and focus on consistency as opposed to only working when I am feeling inspired. Both motivation and inspiration are fleeting; discipline is a constant. And I find that inspiration and motivation can ultimately become traps if we depend only on them to create.

JK: Whatever you are doing seems to be working. Can you tell us a bit about This Is Not A Rock?

NV: This Is Not A Rock started out as most of my projects; explorations in trying to create realistic looking materials. I was walking through the park one day, and I kicked a rock by accident, and that got me thinking about rocks, which I find fascinating. They have such diversity in color, size, shape, and texture. They also symbolize the passage of time. I have a rock at home (the one I mention in the project description) that I will often sit with, holding it in my lap, and contemplate everything that the rock must have gone through until that morning I found it in a lake. I wonder how many other creatures have come across my rock, what has it seen, what has it experienced. I started to wonder if I could create a system which generates rocks using the shader techniques I’ve learned. When I got home I started to explore rocky textures using a technique called “fractional brownian motion” or fBm. And I found that by using some wobbly noise techniques (thanks Piter Pasma) and some fBm, I was able to generate realistic rocky looking textures. I then used some ray marching techniques to map the texture to a 3D rocky shape. I was pretty happy with the results and thought “I can generate rocks.” Success, right? That’s what I thought. And then I took a sip of coffee and read what’s on my mug “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (I have a mug with René Magritte’s 1929 painting The Treachery Of Images on it, which includes that text) and I immediately thought to myself that what I created is not a rock, it’s not even an image of a rock, it’s code.

I went down a deep rabbit hole of reading about representation and truth and how the objects we interact with everyday might be something more than what we see at the surface level. I started to contemplate what “things” really are; a combination of intricate parts and materials which comprise something more. I really hope that when people are looking at the outputs of this project they consider their own reality in a different way, and not take things at face value. To look past the surface level of things and people and see the underlying components. We often say that “a thing is more than the sum of its parts,” but that I think ignores or lessens “the parts.” The code behind a program, the quirks in a personality, the cells within an orange slice, the leaves within a forest canopy … all these underlying things have beauty and I hope I can help people realize and admire that.

JK: A wonderful invitation to stop and think. On a less philosophical note perhaps, what should collectors look for in the series as it is revealed?

NV: I spent a lot of time on the colorization methods and how the hues within a palette blob and swirl around one another. I’d love for people to spend some time with that. There is also an immense amount of detail in the rock. Pressing H on your keyboard in live-view will download a high resolution image, zoom in to see that detail. Keep an eye out for small rocks too, there should be a couple of those.

JK: Is there anything else you’d like to share that would help viewers approach and appreciate your work?

NV: My work focuses on color and texture (and sometimes motion) and people often ask me what my art means or represents. Although my art has specific meanings to me, I don’t really like to share what those are. I try to come up with a title that maybe sort of guides the viewer in the direction of my own thinking about the project, but I hope they come to their own conclusions.

JK: Are there any recent accomplishments you’d like to share?

NV: Honestly, this release is maybe the biggest accomplishment of my art career. I’ve loved Art Blocks since I discovered it in 2021 and now to have the chance to release a project on the platform is like a dream come true. I’m also really proud of Text Me When You Get Home, which was a part of N=12, a group show on Feral File in July of this year. And also I was the Artist in Residence for Bright Moments during the month of August. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone I worked with in all of those platforms, you are all absolutely wonderful and I am truly grateful for these opportunities.

JK: Thank you so much to you for bringing This Is Not A Rock to Art Blocks and for taking the time to speak here. What is the best way for people to follow your work?

NV: I will eventually update my website nicolevella.com but the best way to follow my latest sketches and artworks would be Instagram and Twitter. You can find me on most socials as @nicolevellaart.