PHOTONIC HAIKUS

Photonic Haikus is a fully on-chain 1/1 artwork on Ethereum that generates a new poetic composition every day, based on the date and the sun position : a solar installation on a roof and a written haiku.

The piece can be seen live here

My trained architect eyes are always reading building elements as words in a sentence, and see their arrangement as the syntax of a discourse.
When Rich Caldwell proposed me to do a remix of one of his aerial photography work, I naturally though about this latent meaning of architecture. One of his series caught my eyes in particular: SOLAR, a large series of solar installations on roofs shot from a drone in strikingly graphical composition.
I got inspired by the repetitive patterns and started developing a writing system that would use the real technical installations as a modular calligraphical units. Instead of generating letters, I wanted to preserve the level of abstraction produced by the roof layouts.
I used the photovoltaic panel as a sign, and gathered them into glyphs, similar to how the cuneiform writing system works.
Photonic Haikus is a machine that turns sunlight into poetry, then translates the poetry back into infrastructure.

The date is the seed. From it, the engine works out the sun’s physical state for that day: its declination, the length of the day, the noon elevation, the light intensity, the season. All this data is based on the location that the device showing the work reveal through its browser activity.
On a same day, all computers will show the same poem, but its composition will present subtle variations based on their location.

The sun’s state does not write the poem directly. It chooses concepts.

Each concept has its own weights, so the current season favours different ones than others. Each concept carries a small lexicon of noun phrases, verbs, and endings. Among this reservoir, some sentence fragments are gated on specific sun state, like its elevation at noon, a month in the year, solstices, etc..

The three sentences of the Haikus are built on the conceptual structure given by the solar installation: a phenomenon, a transformation, a consequence. This mold guarantee the correct grammar, and the lexicons supply the meaning.

The same concepts that make the Haiku are drawn above the text. Each concept owns a glyph, and the whole is composing a small installation built from the photovoltaic modules

All these glyphs forms reads in the order the concept appear in the sentence, row for row, line for line. The Haiku has two faces, a visual and a textual, and they can never disagree as they come from one source.

All roof modules are coming from one picture taken by Rich Caldwell, I cut it into patches, and the piece collages the roof out of those patches live in the browser.
Other elements, like the conduits, the HVAC unit and the vents, are the ornaments of this minimalistic writing.
Under the roof sits a sun diagram, on which the sun path of the current day is highlighted with the sun showing as a yellow circle at it actually is, and updated live following the display’s local clock. This sun casts a shadow for every elements, and its light colors the area, turning the composition into a living roof.

Two contracts carry the work. PhotonicHaikus is a plain ERC721 with only one token minted during deployment. The PhotonicHaikusRenderer is where the generator lives : it assembles the page and the metadata every time its asked to do so.

The generator itself is 13 Javascript files with no dependencies, about 164KB of data. Compressed with gzip, it is stored in two bundles of around 73KB on ethereum using scripty.sol.
As everything is stored on chain, the tokenURI and tokenHTML function calls will retrieve all the data and rebuild the whole artwork instantly in any browser.

[The group drop](12daysofart.pages.dev/)
Rich has organized a group drop that features one artist a day fro twelve days. It started October 5th. You can check all the participating artists on that page.

My work will be auctioned on my own marketplace on October 14th starting with a reserve of 0.5 ETH. It will show up on top of that markeplace page, and I will share a direct link will on my socials in few days.

Where to find it:
PhotonicHaikus (ERC721 main contract)
PhotonicHaikusRenderer
Names of stored script: PhotonicHaikus_texture, PhotonicHaikus_engine, PhotonicHaikus_renderer