A friend texts you a screenshot. "look at this piece. so good."

What do you see ? A screenshot of a browser showing an iframe showing the artwork. Three layers down, and none of them belong to the artist.

You have never experienced digital art. What you saw was a browser, an iframe, a TV in a gallery, or worse... a screenshot. The artist (me) controls none of those. Middlemen do.

I couldn't fire the middlemen. So I hacked the system.

I have known about this technique for years. It sat on my list of 100 ideas (between 99 others). It is called seam carving. Published in 2007, it is a very simple algorithm, and there is no AI involved. Most important, nobody uses it for what I'm about to do.

Here is how it works.

Say your three year old made a drawing, and it is too wide for your frame. You have a pair of scissors, 60 seconds, and one rule: the kid must not cry.

You cut out the middle. Of course you do. The middle is just sky and grass. Remove it and nothing is lost, because no important information was ever there. In fact, it is the part of the drawing that carries the least amount of information.

Seam carving is that, done with code (and without the child).

Every column of pixels gets asked one question: what do you add ? The column that adds the least information is removed. Then the next one. Repeat until the picture fits the frame.

Scaling squeezes everything, and cropping ends up discarding useful information (like the woman on the left). Carving keeps both points of interest and removes the "unused" space between them.

The cut does not have to be a straight line either. Like scissors, it can go around the shapes that matter and follow the path where the two sides will meet with the least visible difference. That path is the seam.

One day I was looking at my own work on OpenSea. It lives in an iframe. A small, sandboxed, square iframe. Everything I ever make will be shown inside that tiny constrained box, at whatever size the viewer's screen allows.

That restriction can be a canvas.

Like judo. You don't fight the bigger guy's strength. You use it.

By default, the algorithm decides what matters. I took that decision away from it. I painted a mask over the picture: white for what must stay, black for what should go first, gray to leave the decision up to the algorithm.

Now I had a picture that shows or hides parts of itself depending on the shape of its container. What do you do with that?

You tell a story where the frame is part of the plot, where it influences the artwork.

A poisoned gift: you receive a gift, and later it turns into poison. I called this artwork Serpent.

In a square, a man hands a desperate child a coin. A lifeline that cannot be refused in the dire position this child is in. Open the window wider, to the shape of a TV, and nothing changes.

Keep going. Wider than any mainstream media will ever show, and you finally see the truth.

Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains

5 editions left: seamless.nahikomikasa.com