We are excited to announce our upcoming artwork release, Natural Static by Jonathan Chomko. Natural Static is launched in tandem with “Generative Art Beyond the Algorithm,” an exhibition curated by Brian Droitcour, in order to help contextualize Jonathan’s latest series in a genre of generative practices.

Natural Static follows the conceptual path of our previous NFT drops, Figure31 and 0xMons Salt, and Burak Arikan’s Social Contracts, experimenting with and challenging the concepts present in smart contract based art.

Natural Static is centrally generative, utilizing a hash to seed distortion parameters, but the visual content is sampled from video of natural motion. The result is a work that is highly organic and deeply digital, and also happens to be mesmerizing and perfect for extended contemplation.

The project questions the desire present in much NFT work to re-create an appearance of physical materials and organic textures, while highlighting the actual texture of the screen on which it is displayed, with a resolution-responsive, pixel-shader approach which allows organic movement to flow while the pixel grain of the screen is made visible.

Producing work investigating the fundamentals of smart contract based artworks and contributing to its narrative is core to the mission of JPG and our decision to accompany this drop with an online exhibition. This effort also hearkens back to our roots of the Deep Time exhibition and SALT gift shop drop in July of 2021.

This integrated strategy - an NFT release together with an exhibition to aid in situating the work on a larger genre and narratives, follows JPG’s core mission: we build infrastructure to facilitate more cultural context within the NFT industry.

This way of releasing and appreciating art has worked quite effectively for JPG at its early days. In July 2021, we curated an exhibition doubling as a platform demo, Deep Time, curated by Sam Spike. Exploring Deep Time until the last slide brought the audience to the Gift Shop, where they found the now legendary series Salt by Figure31 and 0xmons. The model was a success, and JPG continued growing based on these first inaugural concepts.

Through Generative Art Beyond the Algorithm and Natural Static, we’re paying homage to the initial JPG that was appreciated by so many. In order to bring this project to fruition, we’ve decided to call some of the best people we know to collaborate on this project.

Generative Art Beyond the Algorithm features works that incorporate algorithmic and randomizing processes, but whose form is primarily determined by other factors, often drawn from nature or human made environments. Such works highlight the potential of generative art to produce compelling expressions of movement and change over time by bridging digital media and the world outside it. The exhibition includes works by Sky Goodman, Martin Grasser, LoVid, Amon Tobin, Random International, and others.

Credits, in case you’re wondering:

• The exhibition is curated by Brian Droitcour, Editor in Chief of Outland, in dialogue with Trent Elmore and María Paula Fernández, JPG’s co-founders.

• The 2021 format has been redesigned by JPG’s creative director Nic Hamilton, and marks the beginning of a new era of new experiments under our brand. We hope you enjoy it and that you continue to support our vision and ideas.

• Josh Hardy, CTO at Daata + web3 builder and Billy Shih, JPG alumni and avid NFT collector are behind smart contracts and website architecture and implementation, respectively.