Supra-Liminal – Generative Art on Bitcoin

Supra-Liminal is a generative art project written in Processing and made up of just 250 pieces of art immutably inscribed to the Bitcoin blockchain as ordinal inscriptions between #154,006 to #167,061. Each image lives on-chain, as opposed to having the image hosted elsewhere with a third party. In other words, they’ll never disappear for as long as Bitcoin exists.

The Supra-Liminal works are connected to two movements, Minimalism, and Suprematism – the use of simple geometric shapes, squares, circles & triangles in an abstract expression. The pieces also use my usual Hexadecimal CMYK colors, with each shape being allocated one of them.

What’s in a Title

For these works, I wanted the primary shapes to exist within a void space, which can also be called a liminal space. Whole books on a variety of bizarre subjects could no doubt be written about liminal spaces, but for this article it’s sufficient to say that a liminal space is an area neither here nor there, neither outside nor inside, not up nor down, left or right. Imagine being in the middle of a crossroads, you are neither truly on one street or another, that’s a liminal space. Or, if you are standing in a doorway, you are neither truly in one room or another.

The addition of ‘Supra’ for the Supra-Liminal title comes from the Latin, which means something that exceeds or is above something else. How can anything exceed or be above a liminal space, or in this case, a void? Well, it can’t, it’s a deliberate contradiction in terms which the works also visually are – bearing in mind there is form and formlessness within the pictured void-space.

The Project

Supra-Liminal took longer than I imagined it would, chiefly due to wanting it to have a specific look instead of just ‘as is’ shapes. Not as simple to do with just three basic shapes that you start off with as I first thought it would be, assuming I wanted to keep it minimalist. I achieved a certain styling via changing the thicknesses of the lines. This difference also adds to the variety of composition.

Black lines/areas for me have always been another way to create differences in form and structure. When the forms then converge, they can create new visual constructs that otherwise wouldn’t have existed using a uniform size of lines. Black, or what I’d call void space/area, is always a call to the viewer to add their own subjective interpretation of what they are seeing. In fact you’d be surprised, not everyone sees the same thing.

You will no doubt also notice three white squares in many of the pieces, the sizes of these were altered in comparison to each other to give a sense of depth – foreground, mid-ground and background. Their randomized positioning around the pieces add a kind of visual ‘pull’, designed to draw the viewer inwards.

The elements are layered such that often they will disappear behind another element, which frequently adds to aesthetic variation in the final form of each piece. I had to change these quite a few times to finally find the specific combination of layering that worked for the majority of the time in a positive way. Many of the other possible layering combinations, surprisingly, didn’t work as well.

By the third iteration of the code, I just had the initial elements of a square, triangle and a circle as well as the three perspective squares, but after many outputs I felt it was missing a factor of variation. So after experimenting for a while, I also added two roving ‘void’ squares. These two black squares have a nice effect of often ‘cutting up’ the usual structures of the three Suprematist forms, adding further expressions.

One other styling choice I made that you may or may not have noticed, is that there is a void border that can only be seen when one of the shapes touches upon it. The line thickness of this border is set to a size whereby its affects on the aesthetics is neither too prominent nor too subtle.

Features of Rarity

To be honest, I’ve never been a big fan of adding artificial features of rarity to a generative project. For me, it’s more about the art and the final result. The randomization is the ‘brave new world’ in generative work that brings unexpected results in the form of images that have never existed before. But, I have often been asked by collectors in the past as to what they should look for in certain projects I’ve created.

As a sometimes collector myself, I can’t deny that I understand where they are coming from. So, below are some various possible ways to view features of rarity, should you be the type that wants to know…

Colors:

The majority of the pieces have the three CMY colors, therefore, pieces within the collection that only have 2 colors are more scarce

A piece with just one of the CMY colors is the most rare – color wise (In art, white is not considered to be a color, it’s a shade, as is black)

I have allowed the parameters of the triangle in the code to go as narrow as it can but only a few times did a visible ‘flat-line’ of the triangle occur and then create what would be called a line. The examples are few.

Timestamps:

Everyone in the NFT/Ordinals/Inscriptions space will know this one, the earlier the timestamp, the better. I can neither agree or disagree with this view, but at the same time, it can definitely be a factor in collecting. The oldest inscription for Supra-Liminal is the first in the series, No.1 on Bitcoin at Inscription #154,006.

Aesthetics:

The last and possibly the most difficult to judge is, aesthetics. Why? Because different people have different tastes so there is no one hard and fast rule. If you’ve ever studied art, then there are what might be some obvious choices, but if not, there are other choices that can be equally as valid.

In contradiction to the ‘choosing in view of color’ section above, some of the best looking pieces have all three colors in certain combinations that frankly, just look good, composition wise.

Below are a few pieces I particularly like, but if I’ve learned one thing in this space, it’s that what I like isn’t necessarily what other people go for.

Finally

Supra-Liminal is one of the larger and earlier of the art collections to be inscribed to Bitcoin. Limited to only 250 1 of 1 pieces, it can never disappear, and as such will always be viewable on Bitcoin for as long as Bitcoin exists…

*Supra-Liminal has sold-out, but collect them now on the secondary market at MagicEden or Gamma

(Note: Supra-Liminal originally sold-out in May 2023 on Ordswap, a site that no longer seems to be functioning and was/is(?) compromised)