Mercalli

23 February 2023

This generative art project explores the destructive power of earthquakes and seeks to capture the raw emotions of those who have experienced earthquakes and the transformation of their world into a memory.

100% of the primary split went to @tezquakeaid, Tezos community initiative providing aid to the victims of the catastrophic earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria on February 6, 2023. Once again the Tezos art community proved to be special. 💚

The project was hand coded in a few days after midnight and released on fx(hash), on the Tezos blockchain where a total of 66 unique outputs were generated by collectors.

How it was made

For this project I envisioned a temporal rendering engine that stacks frames in transparency, leaving behind a fading trail that gradually disappears with the passage of time. To replicate an earthquake, I employed Matter.js, a physics library.

The buildings are constructed using basic stacked cubes, while the ground is represented as a plane that receives a rapid sequence of impulses, simulating the Earth's shaking and causing the buildings to crumble.

As the buildings disintegrate, their colors slowly transition to shades of grey, resulting in a collection of monochromatic ruins.

Two photos are taken during the generation process, one prior to the event and the other after it has occurred. These photos are then composed together with the sky and the trails in order to form the final image.

After releasing the project I published an article on fx(hash) to illustarte the technical process.