Isles upon Deemed Rivers & Other Wonders
The extraordinary often lies just beneath the façade of the mundane. Images seen as serendipitously arranged arrays of pixels can be reorganized in thoughtful ways to reveal curious, mystical identities ripe for pareidolic conception.
About the collection
Isles upon Deemed Rivers & Other Wonders (IDROW) is a 500 piece artist-curated algorithmic collection that subverts visual identity and intent by reorganizing the pixels of its source images to produce tranquil and mystical abstracts imbued with new semantic context arising from their natural appeal to the human predilection for pareidolia.
In order to produce the series, Daïm applied his unconventional pixel-sorting algorithm to a collection of source images generated via Stable Diffusion, an AI image synthesis system, thereby radically transforming them into peaceful, often naturalistic images that disavow their origins and instead present as islands, monuments, and apparitions of a world that is at once alien and yet comfortingly familiar.
Being the genesis art collection from UltraDAO, one of the world's longest-running and most well-established DAOs, it is fitting that this unique series by long-time member and early Art Blocks Curated artist Daïm employs a popular algorithmic technique to unconventional but masterly effect.
Daïm Aggott-Hönsch
As an algorist, apeirographer, and AI artist, Daïm has built an aesthetically and methodologically diverse practice rooted in the childhood foundations of his studies under the late Jenő Zaszlavik.
An exhibiting artist since 2015 and a cryptoartist since 2019, his achievements include being an NFT Awards 2020 Finalist, the first post-launch Art Blocks Curated Artist, a Museum of Crypto Art Genesis Artist, and a curator and participant of the Dakar Biennale 2022 "Forging the Future" exhibition.
Daïm is also a collector and a thinker, having most recently authored his cryptoart manifesto attempting to contour the amorphous boundaries and values of the evolving movement.