About

An exploration of the Chromie Squiggle in a post-AI world.

Erick Calderon, better known as Snowfro, is someone I consider one of the most important contributors to the medium of generative art. He wasn't the first to experiment with the medium, but he recognized something incredibly powerful about blockchain technology and its ability to transform how art is created, distributed, and collected. In 2020, he launched Art Blocks with the Chromie Squiggle as Project #0, demonstrating how an algorithm and a deterministic hash could generate unique, reproducible artworks at the moment of minting.

What has always fascinated me about the Chromie Squiggle is its elegance. A single line, a spectrum of color, and a relatively simple set of rules capable of producing thousands of distinct compositions. Beyond its visual simplicity, the Squiggle represents something much larger. It's an algorithm, a hash, and a permanent set of instructions that can be reproduced and experienced by anyone. The code itself is part of the artwork.

Discovering Snowfro and Art Blocks fundamentally changed how I understand art. It sent me down a rabbit hole that I have yet to get out of. With Snowfro's permission, I began experimenting with the Chromie Squiggle as a primitive, treating its recognizable form as the foundation for something new.

That experiment became Under the Influence, a collection of 10,000 unique generative GIFs produced through 100 different algorithms. Each generator recontextualizes the Squiggle through a different visual system, borrowing from games, software, popular culture, and everyday life. The Chromie Squiggle becomes both the subject of the work and the material used to create it.

At its core, this is an exploration of appropriation and the idea that existing artworks, algorithms, and on-chain data can become materials for new forms of artistic expression. Rather than creating a single algorithm with thousands of variations, I wanted to investigate what happens when one familiar primitive is interpreted through 100 distinct systems, all brought together into a single long-form generative collection.

But this project is equally an investigation into what it means to create art in a post-AI world. Snowfro developed the Chromie Squiggle through years of personal experimentation and technical exploration. Today, artists can work alongside increasingly capable coding agents to build, test, and refine ideas at a scale that would have been extraordinarily difficult just a few years ago. These agents have become integral to my creative process, writing and refining the code that ultimately produces the artwork, while I direct, select, and shape the collection as a whole.

All 100 algorithms are stored on Ethereum inside Vessel token #9898, extending the project's exploration of permanence, composability, and digital-native objects. The artwork is more than the final animation. It's the code, the underlying system, and the infrastructure that allows it to exist.

The title Under the Influence speaks to two overlapping ideas. I'm quite literally influenced by Snowfro, whose work fundamentally changed my understanding of art and technology. But I'm also under the influence of the agents, whose capabilities and decisions shape the creative process in ways that would not have been possible for me before. The collection is both a tribute to the foundations of on-chain generative art and an investigation into its future, exploring how existing artworks can be reinterpreted as the technologies used to create them continue to evolve.