Tyler Hobbs is a visual artist from Austin, Texas, who works primarily with algorithms, plotters, and paint – but not in the way you would expect.
Photoshop wasn’t even opened once inside his Holly neighbourhood studio. Tyler Hobbs, a computer scientist-turned-generative artist, created his now-viral art collection entirely from raw lines of code. “Take your stereotypical hacker scene in a movie where they’re typing words into a black console,” he tells Austin Monthly. “That’s basically what I’m looking at and working with.”
Last year generative artist Tyler Hobbs, like many of his peers, is still trying to adjust to his newfound fame. His signature project, Fidenza, debuted on the non-fungible token (NFT) platform Art Blocks in June 2021. Generated at random by an algorithm of Hobbs’s design and rich with colourful curves and blocks, 999 pieces were minted at 0.17 ether each (around $400 at the time). They now trade on the secondary market OpenSea for as much as 1,000 ether (roughly $3.5 million) each.
Tyler Hobbs is a generative NFT Artist from Austin, Texas. His biggest influences are painters. He enjoys various styles, but he also thinks abstract expressionism has probably had the most significant influence on him. Fidenza has caused a storm among NFTs. It’s since made more than $177 million in secondary sales, turning Hobbs into a crypto multi-millionaire.
Hobbs’s confidence stems partly from his belief that NFTs have already reached a “critical mass of social acceptance,” he said. “As long as everybody agrees that owning an NFT carries some significance, it does.”
When it comes to his actual work, Hobbs ran his Fidenza algorithm 999 times—creating 999 different outputs—each using a random number: the purchaser’s randomised transaction number or hash. Randomness, Hobbs says, is a critical factor in his work, including his newest project, Incomplete Control. “Sometimes even better things will happen than what you could have intentionally designed.”
For the future, he has a few potential mural designs underway. He hopes to continue mixing mural work with his regular studio work over the next few years. To his point, some of the most stunning outputs in the Fidenza collection are the results of accidents – well, Dahm, let’s hope a few artistic accidents happen my way. I would love to be a millionaire with a click of a button.
