PZS

Artist

PZS · pzs.me/posts/summoning-ritual ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/pzs ↗

Practice

Generative software, particle systems, geometric drawing, pen plotting, and experimental fabrication

In the set

Summoning Ritual ↗ · 110 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

PZS describes generative art as the construction of complex, emergent content from simple rules. The artist's early experiments included particles moving through fields, Penrose tilings, fractal curves, laser-cut woodblocks, and custom-built pen plotters.¹ This combination of programming and fabrication establishes a practice concerned less with a fixed visual signature than with the behavior of systems. Code sets the conditions, while repetition, accumulation, mechanical execution, and computational variation produce the image.

Summoning Ritual concentrates that approach into a browser-based work whose visual density emerges incrementally. Released through the Art Blocks Factory program, the project comprises 110 editions.² Its outputs resemble luminous masks, bilateral organisms, spectral diagrams, or devotional icons, yet these associations are not representational instructions embedded in the work. They arise through the viewer's tendency to extract figures from patterned fields.

Accumulation as image

The project runs as a compact JavaScript program using p5.js. Tens of thousands of particles traverse force fields derived from the token hash, and each particle deposits a faint trail. The final composition is therefore not drawn as a bounded figure. It is accumulated from many small movements whose traces become legible only through density.³ This procedure joins the instantaneous logic of deterministic generation to an extended viewing experience: the hash specifies the conditions, but the image must still appear through time.

The gradual reveal began as a response to technical limits and became an explicit artistic decision. PZS associated the emerging symmetries with alien or eldritch faces and named pareidolia as central to their perception.³ The title converts this delayed recognition into theatrical structure. To watch the image resolve is to wait for an entity that is never literally present. The ritual is computational, while the summoning occurs in perception.

Resolution and hardware materially affect that encounter. The work requires WebGL, and larger canvases generate more rays and finer detail while placing greater demands on the viewer's graphics processor.³ Such dependence does not undermine the work's deterministic basis. Instead, it makes execution visible as an event situated between stored code, token data, browser, display, and machine.

Live on Art Blocks: summoning-ritual-by-pzs ↗

From screen to instrument

PZS's broader practice clarifies why Summoning Ritual should be understood as an engineered process rather than a collection of static motifs. In an account of building a large-format plotter, the artist moves between Rust programming, tiling systems, laser cutting, woodblock printing, stepper motors, driver electronics, and plotted drawings.¹ The apparatus is not merely a neutral output device. Its vibration, scale, speed, and mechanical limitations participate in the development of the work.

A later project, Azulejos, extended this interest through vector drawings intended for physical plotting. PZS connected its tiled structures to Portuguese ceramics and described outputs containing substantial lengths of plotted line, requiring hours of mechanical execution.⁴ Art Blocks identifies Azulejos within its Plottables marketplace, placing it in a platform context dedicated to generative works with physical plotting dimensions.⁵

Across these projects, accumulation serves as both method and subject. A particle trail gains force through repetition; a plot becomes an object through the prolonged passage of a pen; a symmetric field becomes a face because vision organizes ambiguity. Summoning Ritual is especially effective because these processes remain inseparable. It is simultaneously a deterministic edition, a time-based computation, a test of hardware, and a perceptual invitation. The work's occult vocabulary does not conceal its mechanism. It gives a name to the moment when transparent rules produce an image that feels stranger than their explanation.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the PZS links page ↗.