From a joke to our most serious art project.
Hunks began as an offhanded joke between two friends, but when we started to mix hand-drawing with computer aggregation, it became a full-time obsession.
The project escalated into a four month creative outburst where we combined classical art with programmatically generated art. The result is 10.000 unique and iconic Hunks.
Available as 10.000 on-chain Cardano NFTs
Suggestive creatures came out of the machine.
Who are the 10.000 Hunks?Hunks emerge through ping-pong between the artist and a computer program. Through generating and inspecting sample Hunks for several months we gradually identified suggestive personalities that helped us define who the Hunks are. Here is a taste:
Making a fine art machine.
Trained in classical art, we sought to adapt the virtuoso qualities of the tradition, such as form, lightning, and warm and cool colors, to the trait-by-trait assembling logic of a "profile-picture" (PFP) generator to produce image files small enough to store on a blockchain.
Chipping away every unnecessary pixel while careful not to break the logic of the classical qualities, we arrived at a 26 by 26 pixel base and canvas. On the programming side we built our own little machine, The Hunk Generator, which consistently output opinionated quality Hunks.
“..when I started making music, what interested me really, [...] was making musical machines of some kind […] where for quite a small input, there would be alot of music coming out.”
- Brian Eno (source)
The creators.
The genesis moment of Hunks occurred on the 24th of November 2021, when one friend said to another: "Say hello to hunks, the new punks."
A satiric remark that lead to a serious creative partnership; pretty much full-time for four months, during odd hours of the day, executed over a dinner table on two Macs and an iPad.
We had unlimited time, made no compromises and got to experiment with a new creative process. We are proud to release signed art prints and NFTs of Hunks.
The Hunk pipeline.
Hunks emerge through an iterative partnership between human intention and computer aggregation. Hand-drawn traits are combined into Hunks and visualised by a program. After repeating this process for over hundred traits, personality types, variety range, optimal color combinations and shapes are understood and honed in on. Hunks represent a finely tuned selection.
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Trait Design.
Traits are hand-drawn and then aggregated by the computer program. Does the trait add variety while remaining coherent with the whole? Does it suggest personality without pandering? Many traits are tried and tested. Most of them get eliminated, but they all contributed along the way.
Collection Design.
Making a few good Hunks is simple, but having a consistent floor of exceptional Hunks would be an overwhelming challenge for two people. However, due to the processing power of computers, custom analytics tools, and having visually inspected the 10.000 Hunks, we can conclude that every single Hunk meets our standards.
Analytics.
Analytics is essential in order to tweak the output of the entire collection. Some traits are more compatible than others, and knowing when to boost or reduce the probability of a trait occurring in the collection is necessary for striking a balance between variety and unity. At a collection-level, analytics are our eyes.