DEUS EX MACHINA

My initial idea for this Deus Ex Machina was to create a functional machine constructed from gears and use it to produce art. When envisioning machines with beautiful aesthetics, my first association was undoubtedly the steampunk genre. This led me to embrace the somewhat brutalist aesthetics of the mechanisms themselves. I spent a considerable amount of time analyzing real engine schematics to find inspiration. I even went to the extent of learning how to build a functional Stirling engine. This research influenced the very brutalist aesthetic of the elements composing the artwork.

Gears, cylinders, or pipes are often perceived as something ugly, but I still wanted to find a way to extract beauty from them. On the other hand, complex machines are built from small parts that work together. Gears connect with each other in synchronous harmony, which is a beautiful and impressive aspect of industrialization. One small gear is not impressive, but if we connect it to dozens of others and look at it as a whole, we can find some beauty in it! The working, moving and complex mechanisms are almost hypnotizing! Watching rotating connected gears even for a longer while can be a really pleasurable experience.

In my art, I tried to show this duality: brutalist parts that are not pretty when looked at separately, but when connected together, they should create something truly beautiful. My work was still missing some mystery and a fantasy vibe, which I truly love in the steampunk genre. To address this, I decided to add some smoke and mist around the machines. As I contemplated how to achieve this in an appealing way, I looked at some Beksinski posters hanging in my room. That was the missing element. I realized that combining brutalist industrial gears with a touch of dystopian surrealism would create the mood I wanted to achieve. I even decided to build some of the color palettes based on Beksinski's paintings.

In summary, the primary inspiration and goal of my work was to create a fully functional machine as a form of art with a touch of dystopian mystery surrounding it. I wanted to show that we can create beauty from brutalist, ugly parts that will make something great if we only connect them together.

In Deus Ex Machina, I employ two recursive techniques previously unused in generative art to provide collectors with a truly interactive experience:

Timestamp of Last BTC Block: By reading the timestamp of the last BTC block, I gain information about how long ago it was mined. In the case of DEM, this information controls the speed of the machine animation and the strategic release of fog.

Current Block Height: Reading the current block height allows me to predict when the BTC halving will occur.

Both pieces of information are powerful and, when infused with artistic vision, can be utilized to craft something genuinely unique and entertaining.

Deus Ex Machina is fully embracing bitcoin blockchain as a medium being artistic visualization of its pulse. It is first generative art collection reacting to blockchain events in real time reflecting it with piece animations.

Digital Artifacts are a very important paradigm for bitcoin ordinals. One of the rules they need to follow as according to ordinals handbook: "Digital artifacts are complete. An NFT that points to off-chain content on IPFS or Arweave is incomplete, and thus not a digital artifact."

The only Exception to this rule is Recursion Pattern.

Deus Ex Machina, to preserve Digital Artifact status, is NOT connected to any external dependencies. To gather bitcoin data of current blockchain state it utilizes ordinal recursion endpoints which are gathering onchain data without any off-chain connections.

Thanks to this specific method, Deus Ex Machina can be a dynamic visualization of Bitcoin blockchain without violating Digital Artifact status.