[ Generative ]
1337
Ix Shells
1337 on the cover of Fortune, 2023
For the cover of Fortune Magazine’s April/May 2023 issue, Crypto Climbs Back From The Worst Year Ever, Ix Shells created a custom art piece, titled 1337. In collaboration with ARTXCODE, the magazine cover was made available as limited edition NFTs during a 24-hour sale on the Foundation platform.
While Fortune’s first NFT cover by pplpleasr in August 2021 celebrated the the crypto boom, Yard’s reflects themes of building and resilience. Using a 3D displacement algorithm in TouchDesigner, Yard coded the pixels in the artwork to expand into intricate geometric shapes that shift up and down. The depth and dynamicism of the piece serves as a symbol of hope, and a celebration of those who kept on building during the crypto industry’s worst year ever.
“The algorithm I used to make the artwork is something that expands pixels and can convert a small black square into a more extensive geometric shape. For me it looks like when I'm walking in the middle of a city and I look up and see all the buildings.”
– Ix Shells
About The Artist
Itzel Yard, known by her artistic pseudonym Ix Shells, is a Panamanian-based new media artist specializing in sound, generative art and the creative space between the two. The artistic capabilities of computational systems sparked her interest at an early age through her passion for music and video games. As she began exploring art through code, Yard discovered TouchDesigner, a visual node-based programming language that allows for real-time creation of multimedia compositions. Through this program, she interrogates the evanescent interactions between wavelength, velocity and visual expression, shaping a creative process driven by intuition and emotion. Architecture, namely the geometric structures of Brutalism, is key to her practice. Supplemented by her studies in architectural technology, she creates works with exquisite detail and spatial depth, often pulling patterns present in her daily life, before abstracting them together through elements of digital aesthetics like glitch, gradients and pixelation. The resultant compositions are methodically layered tapestries pulsating with energy and rhythm. Yard has become widely recognised for this style in the contemporary digital art space, which she refers to as 'Caribbean glitch'.
In May 2021, Yard became the highest-selling female generative artist when her piece Dreaming at Dusk was purchased for a record-breaking 500 ETH (over $2 million at the time). That same year, she was featured in Fortune’s NFTy50 list, alongside names such as Beeple, Cryptopunks and Mark Cuban. In 2023, her work Bend was acquired for the permanent collection of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and she became one of the first 15 artists to take part in MoMA’s blockchain-based postcard project. Yard’s works continue to be some of the most sought-after by major museums, galleries and auction houses around the world. In August 2024, having completed a residency at the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark), she will feature as the only digital artist in the museum's exhibition, Against All Odds. Spanning an immersive, interactive installation and a number of smaller integrated pieces, the exhibition marks a historic moment for Yard, solidifying her position as one of the foremost generative artists of our time.