Inspired by the use of light and color by American artists James Turrell and Dan Flavin, as well as the elegant designs of minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, Snowfro creates generative art with a strong sensory impact. Works in his pioneering Chromie Squiggle series combine a sense of formal simplicity with notions of chance, resulting in playful traces of the artist’s hand as interpreted through computer code.

Chromie Squiggle #9950 consists of a fully saturated spectrum of colors in a ribbed format with an animated feature, allowing its colors to change over time according to an internal algorithm. Its unique visual output is codified in a blockchain-based hash string which provides entropy unique to this edition of the series. Minted specifically for Rice University in 2023, this original work of digital art is one of a series of 10,000 unique iterations of the Chromie Squiggle. It is currently displayed on a high-resolution monitor located in the O’Connor Building for Engineering and Science.

About the Artist
Snowfro a.k.a. Erick Calderon (b. 1981, Mexico City) is a Houston-based artist as well as the founder and CEO of Art Blocks, the first online platform dedicated to blockchain-documented generative art. Combining his interests in diverse media, ranging from ceramics to digital art, with his affinity for coding, Calderon began to generate artworks on the blockchain in 2018 and launched Art Blocks in 2020, minting the first Chromie Squiggle in November of that year. Prior to founding Art Blocks, Calderon founded and operated a ceramic tile business. Calderon’s alias Snowfro references a snow cone refreshment stand he ran as an undergraduate student at the University of Texas, Austin.