Sections
One square mile at a time
Sections is a body of generative work that draws one square mile of ground of the American landscape stored fully onchain in the Ethereum blockchain.
Each output depicts a “section” of 1 mile (aka 640 acres), the unit the United States surveyed itself into after 1785. For most of my career I have reimagined places from my life experiences and memories such as the Midwest, California, the Northeast, Japan, etc. In recent years, by learning about the ongoing shifts and conversations in our world, I have begun to place my emphasis on looking outward. Sections focuses on how our visual landscape changes as dictated by its needs. Each depicted square mile carries eight measured attributes: cumulative road distance, annual energy demand, annual water consumed, total construction hours, total embodied carbon, annual operating carbon, number of residents, and annual cumulative food consumption. How do these numerical variable attributes change the visual composition and vice versa?
The foundation of the code rests on a combination of my own visual language from my art practice and public documents and design instructions. Through this project it has been insightful to witness how these subjective and objective components merge. By working with LLMs I have been able to create an engine that produces each composition randomized through seed generation. While the compositions themselves are fictional, each creation comes built with sets of rules, the same public rules that built the very world we live in.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- From What I Lived To What We Share
- Subjective Approach
- Attributes
- Going Backwards
- Outlook
- Guide
INTRODUCTION
I spent the majority of my childhood living in Silicon Valley. As I watched my father go to work everyday at Intel, I became fascinated with what his occupation entailed. Little did I know his career, along with everyone working in this unique place in the world, helped shape the future of technology then and now. As I grew older I began to learn more about the history of Silicon Valley and the surrounding area. The region has found many names and has become home to numerous industries through the centuries. Once called The Valley of Heart’s Delight, it had been a staple in agriculture prior to World War 2 and cold war where it would later be defined by semiconductors, aerospace engineering, and more. Now in the 2020s, the region is finding its new footing as one of the focal points of the AI race.
Many of my personal experiences living in the area and my thoughts/feelings about this region have been exemplified in my bodies of work (both digital and physical https://www.ribbonriven.com/california & https://www.ribbonriven.com/californiaphysicals ). Years of work in this subject matter made me appreciate just how much man-power has gone into change: the hours, lives, resources spent. Sections attempts to address some of my personal feelings about what goes into geographic change. What is the cost of shifting industries and how is the world physically bent to meet our needs as a society?
Sections began in 2024 initially under the project title of Operations. The concept for Operations was to create a series of landscapes focused on different industrial operations with examples such as redundancy, extraction, circulation, creation, etc as depicted in my aesthetic approach. From there came multiple hand illustrated works, with just a few as seen below.
After months of work, the direction for the project slowly began to change as I explored seed generation options. Working with LLMs I shifted my focus from how I interpret landscape by hand to how my visual language could be randomly generated through code.
The change began with the title: from Operations to Sections. The first important consideration for creating this body of work was dimensions/positioning/point of view. I set the works to be defined in a 1:1 aspect ratio of 1 mile by 1 mile distance within each composition. This decision was made as a “section” is an area nominally one square mile (2.6 square kilometers), containing 640 acres (260 hectares) as defined by the Public Land Survey System in May 20, 1785. This unit of geographic measurement, while hundreds of years old, still remains relevant today as it continues to be the standard for legal and practical infrastructure for land ownership in much of the United States. From this project it occurred to me I have been illustrating these sections throughout my career in my landscape based digital paintings.
The point of view would begin from the zero-degree top down view point for each composition and later change as I would build out the 3-dimensional tooling for each piece.
FROM WHAT I LIVED TO WHAT WE SHARE
For the majority of my career I have illustrated from the perspective of my own experiences. For example my series Midwest focuses on my lived experiences in Wisconsin or California which explores my past and ongoing experiences of the state. By mixing together both my aesthetic approach with set rules established by public documents of construction there comes both a subjective and objective nature in the work.
For this project however I have decided to focus on how my art can be used to look outward, how I can create shared experiences. Sections is not focused on a specific region of the world, not a specific memory that I have, but more so a unique way to create new worlds that relate to us all. It is not just one person, one place that is changing overtime, the whole world continues to adapt and change. These outputs are meant to be location-agnostic; they are representation of globalization.
Subjective Approach:
Much of the background behind my visual aesthetic can be found in a prior article I had written here: https://medium.com/@grantyun2/defining-a-visual-aesthetic-5b8f50171c7b . My approach comes from a combination of my love for realism/contemporary art, video games, and my self-taught illustrative techniques.
VISUAL APPROACH
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My digital painting practice on Adobe Illustrator has always been incorporate solid colors in the form of various shapes and manually place them in multiple layers to create uniquely distinct compositions. For this project I worked closely with artificial intelligence to create a similar approach. To begin we started with mostly line based works. This is partly why you are still able to essentially see the scaffolding by pressing the “L” button on your keyboard and strip away all the color. The underlying overlapping shapes is largely how I approach manually creating my artworks.
The approach to color is also the same process. I have always been proud to have a unique palette with each work that I feel truly shines in this project as there is a significant depth to the diversity of outputs.
ATTRIBUTES
When approaching art from inward to outward I felt a need to emphasize the physical demand of our ever-changing world both visually and conceptually. This is where I decided to choose specific attributes that are measured with each work. The measured attributes are:
- Road distance
- Annual energy
- Annual water
- Construction hours
- Embodied carbon
- Operating carbon
- Resident number
- Food consumed
Each attribute tells a story about the 1 square mile. While the work is fictional, it represents realistic real-life quantifiable variables that impact human lives. One ask I have for my audience is to acknowledge how landscapes will change based on the attributes and vice versa. Conceptually do attributes dictate how the landscape is adjusted or does the landscape itself dictate the attributes? Like I had mentioned above about the decades of innovative changes in Silicon Valley, the world is continuously changing and with each change comes a footprint. I hope that viewers are able to see the variability in outputs and attributes and consider how the real world they live in also is dictated by such variables.
GOING BACKWARDS
With the project now completed I have gone back and spent countless hours looking for outputs that appear similar to my hand illustrated compositions through the years. The results have been quite shocking to find compositions that mimic what I have spent my career illustrating by hand. Below are some of the most convincing comparisons side by side:
To start here are an illustrations I had used as the initial compositions to base this project on:
The following illustrations are from my California (https://www.ribbonriven.com/california ) and Midwest (https://www.ribbonriven.com/midwest ) series:
Guide
