After Even Night takes the viewer on a kind of journey: An endlessly changing view, as if through the window of a train, through a kind of abstract landscape that mixes digital and real life. Stop any time to take a picture.
Scrolling past in unexpected yet familiar ways, After Even Night illustrates our strange relationship with time and space; how memory makes that relationship less linear and defined, melding one place with the next, merging past and present.
I started thinking about these ideas on a train ride with my young daughter. The passing of time felt particularly tangible. I liked the nuances: of loss and expectation – of leaving one place and time for another – and the introspective journey in between.
After Even Night is mostly in constant motion, but it does pause at times (as if reaching a station) and then restarts, with elements that loop at varying speeds. An ellipsis (the symbol of working or thinking in various apps like discord) perpetually animates on the lower right to indicate that even when slowed to a stop, the journey isn’t over.
Collectors can click on the animation at any time to stop, and then double click to download a large image (travel pics!) – but the journey continues, layering and evolving, indefinitely.
You can check out a live generator here.
Elements
I like making art in a way that’s impossible IRL. After Even Night lets me drag lots of things across the canvas, as I would a paint brush: a transmission tower, Tetris-like shapes, trees, and bright red hearts (“like” emojis).
Data, like historical cypto prices, dictates the shape along the horizon and length of rays extending from the sky. Data’s just one of the many elements of this multi-layered journey, but not always front and center.
Many elements in this piece also bridge the gap between IRL and digital: ring lights, display screens, and QR codes.
Textures
Besides varying the thickness and evenness of lines, the texture in this piece – in trees and geometric objects – comes from QR code patterns.
Illusion of Motion
I paint each element onto digital buffers and then layer those buffers at varying speeds. For instance, the most distant slow moving layer displays a horizon whose shape is dictated by historical ETH or BTC prices.
Colors
The palette for each leg of the journey is dictated by a particular saturated shade of “like” (heart) emojis.
Monochromatic palette:
Dichromatic palette:
All the various colors of like hearts on a monochromatic background:
Saturation and brightness of trees and landscape correspond to the local time on the machine running the piece, with peak saturation and brightness at noon, and lowest saturation and brightness at midnight.
Windows and Surfaces
Amongst the multiple windows in this piece – a window onto a landscape, various window frames within the landscape – I’ve added a layer, somewhat like a surface of a glass, that separates us from the world passing by. That surface is clear at the start but gets obscured by a flow field of scratches over the course of the journey.
These are the two types of scratch pattern:
Every hour, with each new leg, the window is replaced by a new clear surface.
Interactivity: Screen Capture
Although the piece is in constant motion, collectors can create still images from it. You can stop the journey at any time by clicking the screen. Double click to download a large printable image. And then click again to continue the journey. (Pics or it didn’t happen.)
The Name: After Even Night
I encountered the words “After Even Night” while researching the impact railways had on time standardization. The words appear here, on a timetable from 1844, before Greenwich Mean Time was instigated, with instructions for converting local time to railway time.
Safe travels — and I hope you enjoy this journey After Even Night.