A long form generative art collection of eyes - uncannily real, yet supernatural. It is said that eyes are the window to the soul. What does the digital soul look like? Each piece is animated in 3D and is resolution-independent, meaning it will scale to any size of digital display without any loss in quality or resolution. Animations are non-repeating and continue forever.

Window to the Soul was one of the most popular exhibitions at Miami Art Basel 2021, recognized by Miami Herald as a 'must see' project.

Features and Traits

Each eye is generated with unique traits selected by the algorithm, including:

• Color palette
• Base texture
• Inner ring
• Fibers
• Animation
• Symmetry
• Reflectivity
• And some surprise hidden features

ARTIST'S CHOICE

In addition to the eyes generated at time of purchase, an exclusive set of 10 pieces have been hand selected by the artist to showcase some favorite outputs from the algorithm. These are marked with a special 'Artist's Choice' property and may be kept or resold by the artist.

AUGMENTED REALITY

As a special bonus the eyes can be displayed in augmented reality on supported devices. This works natively in Android Chrome, and on iOS by installing the WebXR Viewer. Simply tap the 'AR' button that appears in the bottom right when viewing an eye on a compatible device.

The journey began in 2018 when we (Alina and Ryan) met at Burning Man. Alina emerged from a dust storm wearing a hood and mask, and all Ryan could see were her eyes. He knew in that moment that she was special. We began our relationship and married at Burning Man the following year.

Eyes became a recurring theme in our relationship. We had some high resolution photographs of our eyes taken on a trip to Melbourne, Australia. The magnificent, intricate, beautiful complexity of nature fascinated us. It's clear that eyes are a unique window into a person's soul.

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We wondered whether we could write a computer algorithm to recreate some of this beauty and complexity - to peek into the soul of the machine. We wanted to do this using nothing but math and code. No imported textures, no imported models. Alina sketched her ideas, breaking down the components of a human eye (the colors, the textures, the rings and fibers) and Ryan began coding. Using a combination of GLSL shaders running on the GPU, and three.js (a Javascript 3D framework), a prototype was born.

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First mathematical noise is generated (inspired by The Book of Shaders which is an excellent resource on using math to create graphics). Then some trigonometry (specifically the arctangent function) is used to map the noise from a regular coordinate system to a polar coordinate system, and a little bit more math to show only pixels that sit in between two concentric circles. Finally, the texture is mapped onto a sphere in a 3D scene with a camera and lighting.

With this initial proof of concept we continued forward. We added animations (blinking, looking around, pupil dilation) and tried to measure the timing of our own eye movements to make these as realistic as possible.

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Ryan built a set of parameter sliders so Alina could apply her creative touch to the noise algorithms and color palettes. The eyes started to take on a surreal quality - reminiscent of human eyes but becoming something new, something digital.

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We continued pushing the boundaries, exploring new noise algorithms, new color palettes. We were ready for the most important step - to peek into the soul of the machine. Ryan wrote some code that probabilistically varied the parameters  every time a new eye was generated. This code would ultimately be informed by a unique hash generated by the Ethereum smart contract, based on the wallet address of the minter and timestamp of the mint. Once the algorithm took over and started generating eyes our jaws dropped. This was fun!

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Of course not all of the outputs looked good, so we began a long process of tuning, tweaking and pruning the algorithm, preparing it for deployment. We are proud of the final result and hope all the buyers love their eyes as much as we do!

Electralina is a wife and husband collaboration between Alina Karo and Ryan Junee.

Alina started her professional career as a fashion photographer in 2004 and by 2006 she was working with top modeling agencies in Paris, London, New York and Moscow, with her photographs featured in Vogue, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Interview, L’Officiel, Interview, Numero, Tatler, Elle, Marie-Claire and many others. In 2014 she turned her attention from the commercial fashion industry towards artistic independent work and created collections like “Seven Deadly Sins'' and “Vollipsis” that were exhibited at galleries in Paris, New York, Miami and Los Angeles. Combining the elegant poses of high fashion with the grotesque, the anti-sexual and with stunning disregard for what is expected, she told the story of society’s increasing consumerism, environmental destruction, false idols and the irony of modern trendy spirituality. Continuing her artistic journey, the rise of NFTs and digital generative art caught her eye and became her newest medium for exploration in collaboration with her husband.

Ryan has a background in programming and technology, originally studying engineering at Stanford University. He always believed coding was an art form - an elegantly written algorithm inspires the same feelings of beauty as a painting or a sculpture. He is particularly attracted to abstract art, perhaps due to its similarity to code. Collaborating with Alina on Identity has been the perfect marriage of art and code (pun intended).