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Silvergrass

Dutchtide

Silvergrass

Generative art
Nature
Meditative

Petrichor is the pleasant, earthy, and musky smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather.

Midnight Breeze

Midnight Breeze unfolds around a single place: the Lonely Road, a world walked by figures who each carry their own quiet story. The frogs and toads that wander into these scenes represent curiosity, newcomers experiencing the road, its trams and its convenience stores, for the first time, much like the viewer does. The spirits drifting through are those who have passed on but cannot yet let go; left unresolved, they risk becoming hungry ghosts, restless and manic, a Buddhist image of suffering born from attachment. Figures like the postman, forever delivering letters on his moped, exist in a kind of in-between state, neither fully spirit nor fully present.

Beneath its serene surface, Midnight Breeze is a meditation on life, death, and the necessity of letting go, built one animated fragment at a time through a generative system in which every element, down to the rarity of a passing tram, was designed by the artist himself. A Python script determines the spawn rate of each trait in a scene, and these traits are built to interact with one another rather than sit side by side. That same logic extends to sound: each character carries its own musical motif, so narrative, animation, and music are all generated from the same underlying system.

format

landscape

technique

generative art

duration

01:20

year

n/a

Transport

Dutchtide

Netherlands

Dutchtide is a Dutch artist working across digital painting, 3D, animation, and concept art, best known for his ongoing generative world Midnight Breeze. His practice is built around the Japanese concept of ma, most literally translated as negative space, but understood here in its more poetic sense: an absence that is felt rather than explained, the reflective, non-negative loneliness of a convenience store lit up at 2am with no one inside, or a car left running with no one behind the wheel. The project traces back to a 2016 trip to Japan that Dutchtide describes as both a culture shock and strangely familiar, a feeling he attributes to belonging to a generation unconsciously raised on Japanese media. Each piece in Midnight Breeze exists as a fragment of a larger whole he calls the Lonely Road: different scenes exploring the same core feeling, in the spirit of a Buddhist teaching told a thousand different ways so that it might resonate with a thousand different people.

Since 2019, Dutchtide has led his own indie studio, livestreaming his creative process for his community on Discord. Midnight Breeze, his magnum opus and longest-running project, began in December 2021 as one of the first generative art projects to shift focus away from characters and toward atmosphere and landscape; its second chapter, Fragments of the Lonely Road, expanded the world into a fully animated collection of 8,000 pieces built from roughly 170,000 individually animated frames. The original 6,969-piece collection sold out in 40 minutes, and the project has since surpassed nearly 5,000 ETH in total volume, expanding beyond the digital realm through hand-printed physical editions.

Silvergrass

technique

generative art

format

landscape

duration

01:20

year

n/a

Transport

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Generative art

Generative art refers to a way of creating artworks using an autonomous system. In digital art, these are usually generated from code and algorithms created by the artist, often with certain predefined parameters or systems. Although these parameters guide the final outcome of the work, generative art is generally a surprising way to create artworks, as the results are often unexpected and the number of possible outcomes can be infinite.

AI art is a branch of generative art that uses artificial intelligence. Unlike other generative artworks, AI artworks use specific complex algorithms and models derived from machine learning. The most common methods for creating AI art today are GANs (generative adversarial networks) or proprietary prompting platforms such as ChatGPT, Sora, Midjourney, or Dall-e.

3D art uses 3D software such as Blender, Cinema4D, Houdini, or video game software such as Unity to create works of art. In 3D works, artists can either arrange assets (the 'objects' in a 3D artwork or world) that they have created themselves or purchased from other creators to create elaborate environments and scenes (an approach to 3D art called 'set dressing'), or specialize in sculpting, which involves creating their own objects and assets.

Photogrammetry

Photogrammetry is a specialized 3D technique that allows 3D objects to be created from numerous photographs taken of an object or scene from multiple angles. These photos are then compiled to determine the specific positioning, shape, and dimensions of the object in space, and then converted into a 3D model. Initially developed for engineering and urban planning, photogrammetry has become a way for artists to produce extremely accurate 3D models from real-life images.

Collage

An extension of the traditional, plastic approach to collage, digital collage involves searching for and cutting out multiple images, extracting them from their original context, and recomposing them in a new arrangement to create a work of art. Artists can use their own photographs or find images on the internet.

Illustration

Digital illustrations are created using software such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, or Procreate. As with drawing on paper, the artist uses a stylus to sketch a figure or object, usually on a tablet, to construct a scene or artistic universe. Unlike traditional drawing methods, digital illustration is much more forgiving, as mistakes can be easily corrected and drawn elements and objects can be easily moved around within a scene.

Video

Video artworks primarily use a recording camera, but may sometimes include additional post-processing or editing to distort, modify or add additional elements to the image. Some artists use state-of-the-art recording equipment to create macro zoom-ins or time lapses, privileging fidelity to the subject matter. Others use additional softwares to significantly modify or warp the video, creating an alternative perspective on the world that surrounds us.