Scry Visuals — Journal

Favorite GLSL Resources

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 04:43:55 -0700

My Favorite Resources for Learning GLSL

I figured it might be a good idea to put together some of the resources that helped me most to get the shader skills I now have.

Shaders have been of interest to me ever since I first found shadertoy.com. I’m not sure when exactly I found it, but I know around 2017 I started experimenting with editing existing shaders and soon after created my own account to store my experiments. After a while, I wanted to actually gain more precise control, to create something more like the great art I’d see there every day, so I started following tutorials and eventually made it to the abilities I have today. There’s still a lot to learn; by no means can I say that I’m done or that I have mastered GLSL, not even anywhere close. But the bandwidth of the pipeline from my brain to the screen has considerably widened, and that has been one of the best experiences of my life.

Time Anxiety

Sat, 10 Sep 2022 23:21:26 -0700

A representation of how I’ve felt the last year or in general overthinking things, each quadrant is a sort of state of mind.

Q1 present moment feeling of rising/falling, maybe imagined in past/future (but really happening now because you can only imagine the past or future not go there)

Q2 is like a third person overview, seeing yourself along the path of a bigger picture, which ends up being an opposite good/bad judgement from the moment..

Atomic Discovery Collection

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 09:33:34 -0700

Today I’m releasing a 1 hour video and Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.com called “Atomic Discovery”

The use of small dots on the screen with a myriad of symmetries and visual feedback create a visually accurate replication of the two-dimensional surface nature of psychedelic hallucinations.

The collection on objkt has 30 invididual 1 of 1 NFT’s at a resolution of 5000x5000 and 5tz each.

General Stuff

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 18:36:00 -0700

Just a sort of overview of some key things going on right now:

Self-training on GLSL/Art/NFTs
Plan to make a case for functionalism and prove Andres/QRI wrong

Self-Training on GLSL/Art/NFTs:

Currently I’m in the process of still teaching myself skills to accomplish my goals with GLSL. This is mostly focused on math in the context of shaders, but also includes artistic perspective as well. I have no formal college art training, but I began self-teaching some relevant concepts in high-school as well as taking elective photography and pottery classes. The photography classes were clear in my mind as an influence, but I actually didn’t realize how relevant pottery likely has been until writing this just now. When working on a shader and finalizing what I’ll render and share with the world, I try to get into a photography mindset and explore how I can frame things to get the best result. Specific objects can be placed arbitrarily, but when creating fractals or even just moderately complex functions, the resulting space isn’t predictable and requires exploration to understand like any other natural environment. After the last several months of focus, I’m already experiencing a huge shift in what I can do, and I’m beginning to work towards replicating exact physical objects and scenes. If I’m aiming to replicate bizarre phenomenology only temporarily present in occasional conscious states, then I better hope to be able to replicate the phenomenology of typical conscious states. Luckily cameras already capture the visual part of this just fine, which is all I’m aiming for with GLSL anyways. If I can make photorealistic scenes, than I’ll be much closer to making psychedelic-realistic scenes.

Self Discovery

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 16:52:03 -0700

In Februrary 2022, I quit my job as a software engineer. I was the lead of a small team, myself and two other coders. It was in a lot of ways a decent job, and since Covid had the ability to work from home. For the last year before I quit, I had hope that my art practice would be something I would slowly nurture and eventually as it became a source of income would overtake my existing job. Instead I found that as the potential of my art became more apparent, so too the necessity of giving it my full attention. Each day became more and more difficult, until at some point working my job felt like trying to maintain a made up story that didn’t actually matter. When originally leading the creation of novel software that solved problems for people, it was fulfilling, but as the software matured and the focus became more detail and design oriented the feeling of making a difference dissipated.

Scry Visuals

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 17:31:27 -0700

Hello, I’m Scry. I’ve been wanting to start this blog for awhile but never got around to it for various reasons, so now here I’m finally doing it. Given that I’m an artist trying to show something to the world, I probably ought to talk about what that is and why I feel it matters. This will be a platform where I can freely share my thoughts in long form. This first post is just to announce whats to come. Now that I have the basic blog setup (powered by hugo) working, I’m excited to start sharing a bit more!.