Who is Tyler Hobbs, rising star of Generative Art

The great speculation around the world of NFTs, Crypto Art and Digital Art, beyond their future, has taught us one thing: it is easy to attract attention, much more difficult to keep it high. In this game of millionaire sales and easy enthusiasm, there is an artist who has been able to defend himself, overcoming thehype of the moment. Her name is Tyler Hobbs.

Became internationally famous for his series 999 NFT Fidenzamade up of almost a thousand works (one of these sold for about 3 million dollars), Hobbs discovered the potential of Generative Art ten years ago now, cultivating it silently like a monk, until he became one of its leading exponents.

WHO IS TYLER HOBBS

Austin-based visual artist, born 1987, Tyler Hobbs works primarily with algorithms, plotter e painting. Former computer engineer with a passion for drawing and figurative painting, around the 1910s he discovered the potential ofalgorithm-assisted art and started writing relatively simple programs that could create multiple variations of a theme. By running, modifying and repeating these programs, Hobbs developed an extremely pictorial digital aesthetic which has a lot to share with Abstract Expressionism.

His works of art focus su computational aesthetics, how it is shaped by the biases of modern computer hardware and software, and how it relates and interacts with the natural world around us. For this reason Hobbs’ works often focus on the balance between the cold structure and rigidity of the algorithms and the organic chaos representing nature and human beings. Practically a sort of visual translation of the spontaneous deviation of the atoms of the clinamen epicurean in the digital age.

999 NFT FIDENZA

An example of this approach is the series 999 NFT Fidenzabased onFidenza generative algorithm, an instrument characterized by such flexibility as to allow for a great variety of results. A flexibility sharpened by its being based on flow fields which generate unpredictable and organic curves, almost vital, which in turn serve as the basis for the subsequent ones layer of the work. In fact, the curves of the field (which neither overlap nor collide) then become the guide for inserting shapes, such as rectangles and squares, and colour.

In this most creative step, the algorithm knows where to go: while assigning colors on a probabilistic basis, the color palette is selected by hand by Hobbs. Each color is assigned one chancefor example 50% of the shapes must be blue, 25% red, 10% yellow, inserted using the technique color block or through thousands of pictorial parallel lines.

To further increase the feeling of organicity and to warm up the algorithmic structure, many of the works in the series are crossed by a certain turbulence. A kind of almost predictable case that messes up the flow field curves according to low, medium and high values.

BETWEEN PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL

In addition to using generative algorithms (still devoid of artificial intelligence), Hobbs often creates physical versions of his works. Sometimes by simply plotting and then finishing by hand, other times by installing directly on the printer a brush. An approach, the latter, which summarizes his vision of art for the decades to come: it is necessary to find a happy synthesis between human and programmed creativity; not only making the machine more organic, but also making the human hand more mechanical.

In addition to the “painting” works, created starting from 2018, which represent human figures, they reinterpret the nuances of The Scream by Edvard Munch or call theProgrammed artHobbs has also dealt with large-scale realizations as in the case of Marfa Fidenza Mural of 2021 or the works Sole, Agnes e Annetteall from 2020 and designed as interior installations.

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