The Purpose

When launching ART PONZI’s first piece Genesisleft, I mentioned the many advantages of using SVG. It allows storing media 100% on-chain, it allows infinite scalability, it allows infinite frames, and it allows creating forever animations that don’t have to be loops. The only disadvantage I had raised was the fact that storing things on-chain could limit creative freedom. Since SVG is essentially mathematical coordinates, its outputs are mostly geometric with its paths, circles, curves, and rectangles.

This is why if you pay attention, you’ll see that most of the glitchy effects from the previous pieces in ART PONZI are more geometrically designed. This is not a bad thing of course, it’s part of the creative choice and I think they look fantastic.

Every artist has a different style of course, but when we look at the iconic glitch art from this blockchain era (2021-2022), we see the common pattern of distorted strokes, neon glows, skulls, and other dark themes.

This is why with Glitchleft, I wanted to break the limitations of SVG and almost write a love letter to this era’s iconic glitch art. I wanted to do this while still sticking with SVG so that I can still store it immutably 100% on-chain.

The Method

SVG has some mathematical filters that are normally used for illustration, but if we can use them creatively, perhaps we can get the effects and styles we want!

For neon glow, I used blur filters to create a blurry effect of an object and then layered it with the actual object on top.

For distortion, I used turbulence filters layered with spatial displacement filters.

In some cases, I animated the intensity of these distortions to create outrageous outputs (such as the fire in the background).

I knew about and used these filters in the past (see the tree in Mergeleft), but working on this piece I had to use them much more creatively, in conjunction with each other. I also had to design the undistorted version of the pathways in advance with an estimate of how it should look with the distortion.

The mouth was the part I was most indecisive on. I was between a distorted black hole eating away the darkness, or a flowing neon-lighted mouth which displays a clearer mouth shape. So I asked my artist and collector friends and got their opinions.

Having a network of friends in web3 is amazing. Everyone gave really good feedbacks and ideas. One idea from Tokenfox stuck in my head badly: “Use #4 but add the neon gradient lines in #1!”.

And the result was incredible.

The screenshots here don’t do justice as they reduce the quality of SVG. But even in this quality-reduced version you can see the details and the depth of the mouth.

The Story

I pretty much told the story in the beginning. This was a love letter to the iconic glitch art in this blockchain era, but I also wanted to keep what made ART PONZI special so far. I wanted to store this still on-chain and be loyal to the amazing benefits of SVGs.

The piece reveals a skull with bleeding eyes, in front of a hellish fire.

The skull is screaming with his thunderous and cloudy mouth and while doing so, is eating an animated GIF file. It’s consuming and adopting the distortion elements of the GIF file; by doing so it destroys the GIF but creates something more dynamic and hauntingly beautiful.

Final Thoughts

Obviously neither GIF nor SVG formats are going away anytime soon. But hopefully with this love letter to the glitch art world; I can perhaps encourage the adoption of the usage of SVGs. This format allows artists to play around with the time element of an animation much more flexibly and in doing so enables more creative freedom. And as I’ve hopefully shown in this piece, we don’t even have to lose the distortion elements of the GIF file format.

Just as a reminder: Glitchleft qualifies its owners for the airdrop of the upcoming piece in ART PONZI, and that piece qualifies its owners for the next one. And the 10th piece in the collection will qualify its holders for a piece from a secret collection. This means; if you keep holding all drops, Glitchleft will qualify you for 7 more airdrops of unique artworks.

I hope everyone likes Glitchleft as much as I enjoyed making it. It took about nine days to complete but I’m extremely happy with the result. OpenSea does not allow auctions on editioned pieces, even though only 1 piece is for sale and the rest will be airdropped to previous holders. Feel free to make a bid to end on the 27th of September 2022 at 11pm GMT, even if you don’t see the live auction.