On the occasion of the first anniversary of the release of Leo Villareal’s Cosmic Reef, we are reprinting Charlotte Kent’s essay that originally appeared in the catalog accompanying the artist’s solo exhibition in the Art Blocks Gallery in Marfa, Texas from May to October 2022. —Eds.

Jack Burnham, an influential writer on art and technology, once claimed that “in an industrial society the role of artistic abstraction is nothing less than the psychic preparation for the entire re-creation of society.”¹ Burnham was writing about the ways in which science and technology influenced sculpture, noting how art, like those other endeavors, aims to shape the material world, “motivated by the same pangs of discovery and a desire for the consummation of ideas into beautiful totalities.”² Leo Villareal’s work exemplifies this relationship between art and science. He has described his installations of light as driven by technology and the chance encounter that comes from experimentation.³ His works emphatically avoid representation, knowing that viewers won’t be able to resist pareidolia—the mind’s tendency to create intelligible patterns of what it sees, no matter how abstract the sculptural form. 

His resistance to prescribed meanings provides audiences with space to speculate. Amid the insistent, flashing demands in our mundane use of computers, Villareal’s works offer an alternate terrain in which to consider how and what our relationship with technology can be.

Abstraction draws away those characteristics that obscure the essence. In the early twentieth century, art shifted away from narrative and figuration, dissolving such references in favor of a discordant set that includes both the classical austerity of the highly intellectualized line and the romantic exaltation of the spontaneous, irrational, and biomorphic.⁴ Surveying Villareal’s work, we see both approaches: the terseness of Line (2012), a permanent installation of white LED lights along the top edge of MoMA PS’s exterior; and the effusive color and emergent behaviors of his Chasing Rainbows/New Haven (2004) for the New Haven Green and Yale Repertory Theater’s Plaza.

If abstraction in art focuses attention on the substance of the artist’s materials, abstraction in technology manages complexity by condensing information to increase the software’s efficiency in producing a desired outcome. It categorizes and generalizes in order to enable particular features and procedures. It hides data as a means of extracting behavior that aligns with the intended usage of that programming layer. Villareal works with a team to design a custom software for each project. By altering parameters, he can generate patterns of all sorts, turning variables on and off from one layer to the next as he experiments to find what he hopes to achieve. It is a balance of chaos and control. Though the visual abstractions common within generative art serve their own aesthetic purpose, they are also indexical of underlying technological abstractions.

One of Villareal’s earliest light sculptures, Red Life (1999), is an easel-sized panel of incandescent light bulbs that brighten at random behind an opaque sheet of plexiglass that mutes the effect. It was his first use of color and important early adoption of generative systems. Generative art is a form of computer art that automates certain elements of the work by establishing rules that a self-governing system (like a computer) can then follow. The method focuses on designing processes rather than outcomes; the behavior may be programmed but it typically retains numerous, sometimes countless, executable pathways at each step. The generative approach is largely associated with abstractions of line, shape, color, and pattern, but it can produce figurations. Red Life can be seen as a portrait of the underlying code. 

While it may be obvious to most viewers that the flashing lights in Villareal’s most iconic works—like The Bay Lights (2013), an installation of 25,000 LEDs that form abstract patterns on the bridge connecting San Francisco to Oakland, or Multiverse (2008), a sparkling underground concourse linking the buildings of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.—are somehow controlled by computation, it’s less apparent that these are generative works.

Villareal’s light installations express algorithms that he modulates through intensive site-specific experimentation that creates a final effect integrated into its environment. 

Technology is a part of our environment. Cables wrap around the globe and satellites circle, all attending to our needs. Culture is not distinct from nature but made up of it and through it. In situating technological sculptures in public places, Villareal heeds art historical precedents, painters like Turner and Whistler who achieved a mastery of color and light by immersing themselves in the landscapes they painted. Whistler spent forty years engaged with the Thames and depicted the variety of ships and personages encountered along it in etchings and paintings. The French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire wrote that Whistler’s works were a “...a marvelous tangle of rigging, yardarms and rope; a chaos of fog, furnaces and gushing smoke; the profound and complicated poetry of a vast capital.”⁵ When designing Illuminated River (2019/2021), an installation of undulating light beneath every bridge crossing the Thames, Villareal would walk along the bank, speaking to locals to gain a sense of the river’s physical and social flow. He adopted soft hues for his installation and put the lights under the bridges to limit light pollution. A network of concerns becomes apparent in every Villareal work.

Now Villareal has produced Cosmic Reef for Art Blocks, an NFT platform dedicated to generative art. The increased interest in generative art brought about by the NFT market offers Villareal an opportunity to foreground this aspect of his practice. The patterns in Cosmic Reef evoke nebulous molecular structures as much as the radial symmetry of crystals. Some are reminiscent of chrysanthemums and disco balls, sparkling water and star systems, but only briefly before they transition into other forms. Unlike the looping of many other generative projects, Cosmic Reef consists of live simulations without end. This is a recurring trait in Villareal’s work because he aims to resist the insistent repetition of a media culture driven by advertisements.⁶ It’s a conscious effort in Cosmic Reef to provide a different kind of experience from our typical encounter with a light-emitting screen. Sitting with the shifting nebulae induces meditations on complex webs of associations—the similarities of computer algorithms and biological patterning, the utopian possibilities enabled by electric machinery, and the environmental damage wrought by their energy consumption. To see Cosmic Reef as a set of pretty animations would be like looking at the work of Turner and Whistler as charming impressionistic paintings rather than scenes that capture the effects of industrial pollution, social storms, and political uncertainty. 

Prior to the release of Cosmic Reef, I spoke to Villareal about the process of developing the work. The custom code for Cosmic Reef includes multiple layers, each of which have their own color palettes. The proliferating layers created visual chaos, especially when randomized. To ensure a sense of unity, Villareal worked with his team of engineers and coders to develop a method of producing gradients. It coheres the palette for the 1,024 visual outputs minted through the Art Blocks system. The artist’s use of color has a painterly care that is matched by his attention to the underlying software.

Shadows and negative space ensure a sense of volume across the iterations of Cosmic Reef. Villareal used Three.js, a JavaScript library that renders 2D and 3D images in a browser. Three dimensionality is evident in Villareal’s sculptural approach to light, so it makes sense that he sought out a software that could reproduce the dynamics of his physical works for a web-based experience. Villareal describes sifting through the hundreds of presets while making Cosmic Reef, many of which contained 100 variables each, in order to find what worked when layered together. To a simple shape like a sphere or torus he would add variations—changing resolutions, moving elements, introducing noise or feedback in layer upon layer—in order to discover exciting moments within the networks of possibility. The final visual abstraction is paralleled by technological abstraction we do not see.

Villareal introduced movement to the parameters guiding the core shape by coding a telescopic effect for each layer. The feeling of zooming in and out from foreground to background and back again is almost cinematic. The change in focal length in a camera lens mimics what the eye can do and contributes to the physicality that is so important to viewing Villareal’s sculptures. To present Cosmic Reef as a sculptural object, he made it possible to press the letter Z on a keyboard as a means of activating a journey, allowing audiences to navigate in and out of the space of the artwork. 

Known for his public artworks, Villareal approaches blockchain as another kind of commons. Its decentralized and distributed architecture produces a kind of community, not only through the Discord chats or associative tagging that digital art encourages, but also as an infrastructure produced by all the computer and human participants. He had been following the developments and creative exploration of this emergent technology for several years but remained uncertain about working under the limitations inherent to a flat screen. Finding the software tools that matched his sculpture practice helped him decide to produce a blockchain-based project, and when he met the Art Blocks team he found the right niche for his work. 

Cosmic Reef was released as a part of Art Blocks’ curated collection, which features projects that introduce technological and aesthetic innovations. Villareal comes from the contemporary art mainstream, and on Art Blocks his project stands alongside those of artists better known to the creative coding community. It represents a merging of worlds, communities united through a common practice rather than a shared ideology. Nevertheless, Villareal’s longstanding environmental concerns are reflected in Art Blocks’ decision to make carbon offsets beyond the emissions associated with the minting of the NFTs. On Art Blocks, Cosmic Reef truly highlights the material ties between the virtual and the tangible, between the concrete and the abstract.

Cosmic Reef’s emergent formations dispense with illustrations of technology and representations of physical reality. His works make a kind of meditative sense that becomes mundane when narrated in terms of computational biology, the metaphysical, or personal experience. Despite the months of creative effort that went into Cosmic Reef, Villareal was never concerned that he wouldn’t know exactly how each NFT would appear once minted. “Right now, it’s important to emphasize that inherent unpredictability is a feature of both real world and game world realities,” he told me.⁷ A NFT is at heart a smart contract, which can automate certain outcomes based on determined inputs. But Cosmic Reef features the unpredictable through its generative design. Generative art deals in the infinite possibilities of computer programming that some have described as a computational sublime.⁸ 

The Enlightenment-era philosopher Immanuel Kant presented the sublime as an encounter with infinite greatness, that which can’t be measured, parsed, or imitated. The mathematically sublime can be contrived symbolically but not through the senses, while the dynamically sublime is a confrontation with the incomprehensible capacity of nature. Conceptually and tangibly, the sublime awes because it cannot be defined or identified, contained or controlled. It is not representative and in that sense it is connected to abstraction. The experience of the sublime is indexical in that it points at something we can neither hold nor truly fathom. The inability to manage the sublime produces both pleasure and fear. Recognition that there are things more vast and powerful than we can comprehend is ecstatic and also terrifying. Generative systems’ ability to produce an astronomical variety of exemplars is astounding. They deliver an encounter with that which is otherwise impossible to imagine. 

The tension between the programmatic and the unexpected revealed by these systems may at first seem alien but becomes quickly familiar.

“I think somehow, these very mechanical means are able to create things that we’re very connected to as humans, things that we respond to in nature: this sense of wonder or sublime,” Villareal said.⁹ There is great pleasure in standing before something we can’t quite sum up. This is why art often eludes description and yet pulls at us to find the words. Art and technology are abstract and abstracted spaces through which to meditate on our assorted changing relations with the world around us.

Cosmic Reef invokes natural systems in the title and the works may look like far-flung nebulae, but the series also provides a means to reflect on the role of abstraction in the contemporary. It offers a way to think through the abstraction of our digital environment, which is crucial to understanding the structures rising around us. Of course, it is possible to admire generative art like Cosmic Reef without thinking about what the abstractions of digital capitalism have generated—social stratification and space exploration, species collapse and information wars. Generative art is a visualization of code so a society coalescing around the possibilities of coded permutations ought to appreciate that particular practice. Villareal’s title urges us to reflect deeply on the material ties between the virtual and the tangible, for those are not abstract concerns. The future depends on recognizing them as interrelated, the rules and parameters of one layer influencing the possibilities of the next.

‍

Charlotte Kent, PhD is an assistant professor of visual culture at Montclair State University and an editor-at-large at the Brooklyn Rail.

Notes

Portions of this essay are adapted from the author’s review “Layers of Light,” Outland, Jan. 24, 2022. outland.art 

1. Jack Burnham. Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century. New York: George Brazille, Inc, 1969, 3–4.
2. Ibid., 5.
3. Interview with the artist, Jan. 17, 2022, and Varick Shute, “Sequence of Light: A Conversation with Leo Villareal,” Urban Omnibus, Oct. 24, 2012. urbanomnibus.net 
4. Alfred H. Barr. Cubism and Abstract Art: Painting, Sculpture, Constructions, Photography, Architecture, Industrial Art, Theatre, Films, Posters, Typography. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986, 19.
5. Charles Baudelaire. Art in Paris, 1845–1862, Salons and other Exhibitions. Ed. and trans. By Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1965.
6. Shute. 
7. Email from the artist, Jan. 13, 2022. 
8. Jon McCormack et al. “Ten Questions Concerning Generative Computer Art.” Leonardo 47, no. 2 (2014): 135–41, 137.
9. “Superblue Presents Artist Leo Villareal.” superblue.com