The Making of Cathartes

A dive into the thought process of creating the Cathartes generative art algorithm

Gm Cathartists 🎨

Back in June 2022, when we just started working on Cathartes, agreeing on the concept was relatively easy.

Just as 9 months ago, we love generative art, we believe that community generation gives a special edge to an art collection, and convinced that the NFT fractionalization technology remains heavily underutilized.

So, the commitment was born — to deliver a bold experiment in collective creation and ownership of an artwork where emotions play the central role and act as both the subject and object of an art piece.

However, there was a long road ahead of us — months of labor, grit, and pure joy to transform the initial concept into a finalized design of the whole co-creation journey.

In this letter to our community, we want to provide some context into our thought process and outline some of the mechanics behind the Cathartes generative art algorithm.

Let’s get to it!

On the Choice of the Art Style

Our primary task was to choose the concept of an art style that would define and guide the whole co-creation experience.

Getting this part wrong meant putting the entire experiment at risk.

Luckily, we could always lean on the foundation — emotions are at the center of everything at Cathartes. They are the tools in the hands of co-creators and the essence of Reflections that collectively shape Cathartes.

With this in mind, we explored various concepts: from Basquiat neo-expressionism graffiti to direct suprematism practiced by Ukrainian modernists of the 1920s, from The Million Dollar Homepage to Beeple’s “Everydays: the First 5000 Days”.

It took us over a month and dozens of iterations before finally finding THE ONE 🤍

Just one look at Cathartes creation through the lenses of abstract expressionism and Jackson Pollock’s “drip technique” was enough.

It just ticked all the boxes.

The immediacy of creation, the feeling of an emotional release when dripping and pouring paint, the creative process without evident start or end — all these aspects allowed us to place emotions at the heart of Cathartes creation without compromising aesthetics.

In addition, being completely in awe of Pollock and his influence on the art world, we received that extra energy and inspiration to build what we love.

On the Choice of Color Palette

Now, having defined the art style, our next task was to select the color palette.

However, there was a challenge:

How do we balance between the diversity of colors that correspond to different emotions and not lose the goal of delivering aesthetically pleasing art?

We used the collective artwork — Cathartes — as a point of reference for choosing the color palette. Experimenting commenced:

The first attempts suggested that we needed to balance the color palette by making the colors warmer and softer.

After dozens of iterations, we found that perfect 8-color palette.

To add more depth and tie all the paint drips together, we added a certain degree of transparency that enabled the blending of colors with halftones.

Finally, after experimenting with background colors and seeing how backgrounds play together with the color of paint drips, we chose a warm and soft beige color resembling an IRL canvas.

This allows the paint drips to be the center of attention of the artwork.

At the same time, we ensure that the background, not being too bright, would not interfere with the display of emotions.

On the Reflections Generation

Now, after locking in the art style and color palette, we had to address the most interesting and the most challenging task — the logic behind the generation of Reflections.

Generative art makes unpredictable combinations that are not always aesthetic.

This, however, crystallized our goal — we needed to come up with an algorithm that will produce an aesthetic composition regardless of the number of paint drips and regardless of the strength of the emotions selected by a co-creator.

But how do we do that?

How does one engineer an eye-pleasing art piece out of an abstract mess and at the same time provide a co-creator with significant control over the end result?

We had to balance several parameters:

• a random number of paint drips (emotions) chosen by a co-creator.
• different colors of paint drips.
• the sequence of drips splashing on the canvas.

In addition to the hundreds of silhouettes of paint drips, the core of our algorithm comprises the tools like sequencing, scaling (as decided by the input of the co-creator), rotating, and positioning.

Positioning was an interesting challenge itself. Do we spread drips randomly over the canvas? Line them up? How do we find a balance between the sizes of paint drips and the canvas in general so that it looks like a composition and not just a random splash of paint?

A hundred iterations forward, we saw that the best course of action was to place the paint drips that compose a Reflection at the center of the canvas. However, it couldn’t be just the very center of it.

Instead, we experimented with the various central zones of different sizes waiting for rounded and linear paint drips to be splashed upon them.

This rule made it possible to structure emotions and always achieve a balanced aesthetic result, taking into account any number of emotions and their strength in the percentage.

Now, another challenge remained: In what turn do we splash the paint drips on the canvas? In our first interactions, we were looking at sequences guided by colors.

Yet, quite quickly we realized that this path was far from perfect. The paint drip of a larger size would overshadow the smaller layers which hurt the eye. This didn’t look good.

Then, we tried to bring the paint drips to the canvas with size priority in mind: the bigger-sized drips would be the first to splash on the canvas while the smaller ones would follow.

This logic had one nuance — dark, linear drips, as the most contrasting ones, will always act as a final touch by being placed above all the previous drips.

The results were immensely satisfying.

On the Cathartes Co-Creation

Cathartes is a collective effort of 2023 co-creators.

Surely, designing an algorithm that forms an artwork from 2023 contributions is not an easy walk in the park.

This stage brought some challenges. How do we ensure that:

• the co-creation of Cathartes is fun to observe?
• the co-creators have a more or less similar impact on the final look of the collective artwork regardless of their turn in the mint?

The key parameters we worked around were the scaling and positioning of the paint drips.

The Reflections of the first co-creators will be splashed on a shared canvas with 0.5 multipliers. This way, the early minters will have their Reflections displayed on Cathartes in the biggest size possible, thus, having a bigger influence on the look of the Cathartes.

With each subsequent mint, the size of the Reflections decreases in geometric progression and reaches a 0.1 multiplier for the last 10% of the mints. The upside for late minters is that their Reflection will most likely not be covered by any of the Reflections placed on Cathartes after them.

Having tested various combinations, we believe that the current algorithm of Cathartes allows us to create a multi-layered immersive piece of digital art that actively forms throughout the mint, creating a performance that is fun to observe in real-time.

[Not] Closing Remarks

We loved every day of experimenting, testing and iterating while working on the Cathartes art as well as the core of its generative algorithm.

Emotions, their strength, and depth act as the driving force in the collective creation of Cathartes.

Having created the framework for the co-creation journey, we take pride in the fact that everything will highly depend on the emotions & their strength as selected by co-creators while minting Reflections, so it is impossible to predict exactly what Cathartes will look like in the end.

We have no control over it.

What we are sure of, however, is that the Cathartes, inspired by the art of modernism, will cement its place in the world of crypto art and action abstractionism.

Crafted on the verge of creativity, technology, and psychology, Cathartes celebrate this early moment in the history of Ordinals by leaving an on-chain mark devoted to our minds and emotions.

A timeless snapshot that will remain on-chain forever.

We can’t wait to see you all on Tuesday, April 4, at 10 am EST, when our journey truly begins.

With love and appreciation,
Cathartes team🎨

🕊️ Twitter — https://twitter.com/CathartesNFT

🔗 Website — https://www.cathartesnft.com/

📣 Discord — https://discord.gg/cathartes

🇲 Medium — https://cathartes.medium.com/