Superblob

Artist

Superblob · instagram.com/superblob ↗

Practice

Computational art, interaction design, generative systems, and audiovisual software

In the set

Tangled ↗ · 384 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Superblob is the name of a creative studio whose projects connect code, images, sound, and interaction. Its documented practice ranges from an image-based music sequencer to artificial landscapes, browser sound experiments, and an interactive installation using face tracking.¹²³ Across these works, computation is treated less as an invisible production aid than as material with perceptible rules. Inputs are translated, constrained, and made available for inspection through movement, sound, or patterned form.

Tangled is Superblob’s contribution to the AB[500], a collection of 384 editions released on Art Blocks on September 17, 2021.⁴ The project emerged from an extended investigation of how an Ethereum transaction hash could determine a composition while remaining legible within it. Superblob’s development account describes an initial prototype that mapped the first 25 bytes of a hash onto a 5 by 5 monochrome grid, with brightness values also assigned to musical notes.⁵ This early audiovisual system was eventually reduced and redirected toward curves, color, and animation.

From hash to knot

The finished work organizes flowing bands around a geometry derived from their own paths. Anchor points used for Bézier curves also inform a convex hull that produces the colored form behind the strings. This relationship gives each output a doubled structure: line and ground are visually distinct, yet both arise from related coordinates.⁵ Variations in palette, the number of strings, and their spatial behavior establish difference across the 384 editions without dissolving the project’s recognizable grammar.

The series is especially attentive to iteration. Superblob records that the earliest forms were called “Crypto Knots,” and that the design passed through sound-based experiments, sparse curves, color tests, test-network mints, and later revisions using multiple parallel lines.⁵ Constraints repeatedly narrowed the field. Sound was removed because it introduced too many variables, while color palettes were tested as combination tables to preserve contrast. The eventual multiplication of lines strengthened both chromatic range and the impression of tangled material.

Live on Art Blocks: tangled-by-superblob ↗

Motion as a condition

Animation changes the knots from static emblems into systems caught in recurrence. The strings and underlying blobs subtly move as though attempting to separate, only to return and begin again.⁵ This loop supplies the project’s central tension. The compositions appear soft and playful, but their motion remains structurally unresolved. Untangling is proposed as an action rather than delivered as an outcome.

That interest in continuous systems extends beyond Tangled. Pixel Music converts image data into sequencers and can transmit MIDI to software or hardware instruments.² Simulated Horizons combines generated landscape imagery, pixel sorting, human curation, and machine-written haiku.¹ During the Musical Web program at the School for Poetic Computation, Superblob developed browser-based works using tools including RNBO, Three.js, GLSL, Max, and p5.js.⁶ The later Particle Music was presented as both a concert screening and an installation during the 2024 Web Audio Conference at Purdue University.⁷

These projects clarify Tangled as part of a wider concern with translation between media. The hash becomes position, position becomes line and hull, and code becomes rhythmic visual behavior. Earlier installation work similarly translated a participant’s head movement into traces drawn by a light source on a phosphorescent surface.³ Even the compact iOS game Four Seconds turns a minimal timing rule into repeated embodied attention.⁸ In this context, Tangled is not simply an assortment of colorful outputs. It is a precisely bounded interface between deterministic data, authored decisions, and the variable encounter of each generated edition.

Bibliography

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