Noctilucent Mementi is a generative chronicle that encapsulates 5 years of MLO's work with clouds in cryptoart. Each image is generated from the artist's photographic archive of clouds, spanning 4 continents and 11 countries. For MLO, clouds serve as a medium for speaking about the way that we transform and preserve intangible presences, both through personal memory and through digital wallets.
Over the last 5 years, MLO has come to be known as "the cloud artist." He began making cryptoart in July 2018 as a way to understand and educate others about what he saw as a transformative technology. His early works use geometric minimalism and artistic data visualization to investigate the potential meanings of blockchains and tokens. With the piece "Cloud Seed Phrase Visualization" (September 2018), he arrived at a mode of translating data into metaphor that has since become the spine of his practice. In his words, "I find the analogy to clouds particularly intriguing, as we store only the rights to assets in our digital wallets while the actual digital assets remain permanently on the blockchain; the digital assets therefore remain intangible much like clouds in the sky."
Clouds also resonate with MLO on a personal level as someone whose life has been defined by movement and transition. MLO was born in Poland, raised in Germany, and emigrated to Canada, living in more than 30 different places through the years and traveling professionally with extreme frequency. Clouds for him are both an emblem of transience and a constant companion. In his art, the distributed nodes that constitute a blockchain become a symbol of hope, a living network maintained by shared belief, reflecting the continuity of an individual identity through the fragile impermanence of physical locations.
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Noctilucent Mementi is a generative chronicle that encapsulates 5 years of MLO's work with clouds in cryptoart. Each image is generated from the artist's photographic archive of clouds, spanning 4 continents and 11 countries. For MLO, clouds serve as a medium for speaking about the way that we transform and preserve intangible presences, both through personal memory and through digital wallets.
Over the last 5 years, MLO has come to be known as "the cloud artist." He began making cryptoart in July 2018 as a way to understand and educate others about what he saw as a transformative technology. His early works use geometric minimalism and artistic data visualization to investigate the potential meanings of blockchains and tokens. With the piece "Cloud Seed Phrase Visualization" (September 2018), he arrived at a mode of translating data into metaphor that has since become the spine of his practice. In his words, "I find the analogy to clouds particularly intriguing, as we store only the rights to assets in our digital wallets while the actual digital assets remain permanently on the blockchain; the digital assets therefore remain intangible much like clouds in the sky."
Clouds also resonate with MLO on a personal level as someone whose life has been defined by movement and transition. MLO was born in Poland, raised in Germany, and emigrated to Canada, living in more than 30 different places through the years and traveling professionally with extreme frequency. Clouds for him are both an emblem of transience and a constant companion. In his art, the distributed nodes that constitute a blockchain become a symbol of hope, a living network maintained by shared belief, reflecting the continuity of an individual identity through the fragile impermanence of physical locations.
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