The artistic mind of Per Kristian Stoveland inhabits the liminal space between the logical and the playful. A visual artist who fell in love with coding at a young age and co-founder of the Oslo-based design studio. Empty, Stoveland has recently found a home for his love of generative art and graphic design at Web3. On January 18, 2023, she launched his latest NFT project, Harvest, on the Art Blocks generative art platform. With a current minimum price of 7 ETH and over 2,684 ETH in secondary market trading volume, Stoveland’s first major entry into the Ethereum blockchain has been well received by the NFT community.
But the artist’s recent foray into Web3 came in a bit of an unexpected way. Specifically, it was immediately after a passionate return to creating generative art that he had, for some time, left to focus on client-based work in his design studio.
Thanks to the blockchain, Stoveland has had to reevaluate the trajectory of not only his work but also his artistic identity and career path. That identity has its roots in the cities and towns of Kenya and Zimbabwe, where she spent much of her childhood. Without that experience, Stoveland would never have taken art seriously.
NORAD, Montessori schools and family
When Stoveland was just two years old, his parents moved the family to Africa. At the time, her father oversaw Norway’s foreign aid plans for water development in Kenya and Zimbabwe during NORAD. However, his parents insisted that they did not want Stoveland and his younger brother to receive the typical Norwegian expatriate education. Instead, they chose to send them to a local Montessori school.
“I’m more confident that my time at that Montessori school set a standard for me,” Stoveland explained to nft now with proof copies of The Harvest hanging in the back of his home office. “In many ways, my brain functions logically and analytically like my father’s. But being thrown into that school sent me off on a trajectory that didn’t follow in his footsteps. It’s [education] it laid a foundation that has always kept me more on the creative or fun side of things, even though my biology cries out for logic,” he said.
After moving back to Norway as a teenager, Stoveland formed a band with some friends. This coincidentally pushed him towards a career in design, as he decided to take on the task of creating the group’s album cover art. Around the same time, he stumbled upon the world of coding. Stoveland fell in love with Adobe Flash, a program that used to dominate the Web2 world, as it had an impressive set of creative tools for creating animations and interactivity on websites.
Within a year, Stoveland was making art as an active member of the international generative art community, which he says happily mirrors the generative art NFT community he sees on Twitter today.
“It’s funny, a lot of those people from the Flash heydays [now] recognize in the NFT community, like Joshua Davis and a few others,” Stoveland says of that story line.
The path to NFTs
After graduating from the Oslo School of Graphic Design in the early 2000s, Stoveland worked as a designer and programmer for several years before co-founding Void in 2015. It was in August 2021 that Void co-founder Bjorn Staal launched The Lithos of Sisyphus in Art Blocks, that NFTs really got on Stoveland’s radar.
I thought, I can do this. [kind of work]Stoveland recalled of the early days of NFT scouting. “YO did do this. Why did I stop?” Unfortunately, Stoveland’s work on Void tends to deal more with logistics and implementation and less with the conceptual or creative processes of the fantastic facilities they are known to produce.
But appropriately enough, much of what Stoveland does in Void is akin to making generative art; however, instead of appearing on a computer screen, he emerges in LED lights and project mappings and various forms of installations. Stoveland eventually turned to NFTs as a means of finding his way back to a more “pure” form of generative art for himself rather than a client. To this end, he says that the blockchain has allowed him to focus on a more selfish and happily indulgent form of creative expression.
“I could post my art on fxhash, for example, whenever I wanted to,” Stoveland explained. “There were a lot of things that were just easier. fxhash made me able to learn a lot about where I want to go [with my art] and on the technical part of the NFT”.
“fxhash made me able to learn a lot about where I want to go [with my art] and on the technical part of the NFT”.
By Kristian Stoveland
After launching a few smaller scale projects on fxhash, Stoveland decided to try his hand at Ethereum with a large and deep project. After months of experimenting with the code that would eventually become the foundation of the project, Stoveland reached out to several well-known NFT platforms to see if they would help launch the collection.
While he received a number of positive responses, he took a chance and turned them down. The reason? Art Blocks had approached him to curate his work, not the other way around.
Harvest
The project that would emerge on that generative platform was The Harvest, a sci-fi series infused with 400 NFTs of digital landscapes of different color schemes with beams of light shooting out of their topographies. Released just last month, The Harvest’s collection description details a vague but inspiring narrative of interplanetary beings (The Caretaker and his horde) preparing for a momentous occasion. It also imparts a sense of heavenly wonder to the reader.
The “cathedral” atmosphere and varied landscapes that define the images in the collection are inspired by science fiction artist Michael Whelan and architect and illustrator Hugh Ferris, reinforcing the idea of humanity’s insignificance on the grand scale of the cosmos. .
And while Stoveland has intentionally kept the story behind The Harvest ambiguous, in order to potentially expand it in the future with more projects, he invites viewers to use their imaginations to play with what they think the story might be about them.
“I’ve always been very interested in science fiction,” Stoveland said of the origin of the project. “I always thought that when I retire, I’m going to write a science fiction book. What I realized when I was thinking about doing these science fiction books was that maybe I can tell the story, but not through the books. Maybe I can make it through [visual] instead, art. Maybe a next project could be based on some antagonist’s reaction to this Guardian.”
The collection contains 19 different color palettes, each referencing a well-known sci-fi lore or universe: Arrakis, Serenity, Thoth, Nostromo, Moya and more among them. Stoveland named the palettes after creating them, taking a few nights to consider what science fiction lore they made him think of when he saw them.
sharp eyes NFT collectors have noticed that some of these palettes are actually more unique than others (almost unexpectedly), and they tend to constantly change hands at double the collection’s bottom price. The Nostromo and Sulaco palettes are two of those rare types that, coincidentally, were the palettes that Stoveland considered the “baseline” for the entire project.
Blockchain and generative art: a match made in heaven
Stoveland finds the intersection of blockchain technology and generative art particularly harmonious. The large files of images and videos that non-generative visual artists tend to create do not fit well with the storage capabilities of the blockchain, hence the existence of a system like IPFS.
But generative art, according to Stoveland, is “a level above that,” because the file sizes involved are typically quite small, allowing artists to store their work directly on-chain. “Basically, there is no limit to the size of a collection without increasing the size in any significant sense,” says Stoveland, with the average size of an NFT from his latest collection taking up only around 25 kilobytes of space.
The Blessing and Burdens of Success in Web3
The success of The Harvest has made Stoveland rethink how he approaches art-making and what his future projects might look like. In fact, she says the project has been a major “turning point” in her life.
“Before the project, [the goal] it was just to complete The Harvest, and ‘I’ll think about whatever after that,’” Stoveland says. However, the popularity of the project brought with it certain privileges and responsibilities that he never had to consider in the past. “I’m at a point in my life now where I have to see the future maybe a year in advance. My stress level has been much higher than [normal]. I thought he would go down after the knockdown, but he actually went up,” she said.
However, Stoveland clarifies that this stress is not something that outsiders have imposed on him. Rather, it stems from his own personality and the duty he feels towards his followers. “I feel very responsible when I do something. I almost want people to calm down because what if something goes wrong? I feel responsible if someone loses money or, say, floor tanks. And I feel that I, personally, am responsible for that collapse. But it is still a responsibility for something that I am very lucky to have, ”he explained.
The way generative art code creates a collector’s NFT can also lead to an interesting new dynamic, one that artists need to be aware of.
When someone tries to mint a generative art NFT, their web browser pulls the code from that token. The token is then placed in the code and the final result is displayed. Consequently, an artist must guarantee that her code will produce the same visual result every time a token is generated (if that variation isn’t something she’s looking for). In fact, part of the Art Blocks process involves a person taking a particular token from a generative artist’s upcoming collection and displaying it across different browsers and computers to ensure the NFT is consistent across the board. And so Stoveland faces new technical and community hurdles.
By his own admission, Stoveland is not a “social media guy,” and the NFT community’s heavy reliance on Twitter and online engagement is something he’s still getting used to.
“It all feels unreal and crazy, to be honest,” Stoveland said. “I am very happy with the project. I think it looks beautiful. But the people who place that value on it only feed a kind of impostor syndrome. Again, I am aware that this is an extremely lucky position. It’s a very interesting mix of stress and gratitude.”
That gratitude is evident in the serious way Stoveland considers the future of his work and what it means to have a relationship with collectors and fans at Web3, a consideration often absent in the space. Additionally, in an effort to reward their new collector base, Stoveland is making signed physical prints Available to everyone who owns a The Harvest Collection NFT.
But it’s your future job that’s probably the best gift of all. And while impostor syndrome has a hard time answering to reason, it’s undeniable that Stoveland has breathed new life into the generative art scene on Web3. He now he lets the man take a break from Twitter. He has earned it.
