SPACE\TIME

The Garden is pleased to present SPACE\TIME, a culminating series in loackme’s decade‑long engagement with motion‑based dithering, 2D signed distance functions, Voronoï diagrams, and code.

Where loackme typically works in short impulsive bursts, SPACE\TIME unfolded over three months beginning on 10 May 2023 — the longest‑running project of his practice to date. Pixelated, monochromatic, and looped, the works distill his longstanding preoccupations with geometry and animation. Dithering opens an illusory tonal range within the strict black‑and‑white palette, summoning shades of grey from binary inputs.

SPACE\TIME sits between two paradigms in generative art: it neither produces an open algorithmic edition nor relies on the post‑hoc curation of mass‑generated outputs. The series began as a response to the work of François Vogel, refracted through dithering.

Looping is central to loackme’s practice — a fixation he frames as both obsessive and meditative. Each work returns precisely to its starting position, the seam invisible; for the artist, achieving that seamlessness was the work’s principal reward.

Code typically permits unlimited revision; loackme imposed a counter‑rule. Each piece was hand‑tuned to completion, with no return to earlier states — a deliberate fragility he regards as essential to the series. The codebase itself grew untidy across iterations, an analogue to a painter’s studio that left room for accident. The works can be explored at the artist’s dedicated gallery‑website, here.

An early iteration omitted the white frame and pixels strayed beyond the GIF’s edge; the works share a fixed digital resolution, a constraint loackme treated as generative. Diagonal motion, paired with the dithering algorithms, produced the most pronounced patterns, and he settled on a top‑left‑to‑bottom‑right axis. Reconciling the components into a single fluid composition was, in his words, a mathematical challenge he sets himself.

Monochrome has been part of loackme’s practice from the outset. The high‑contrast palette pairs structurally with pixel art’s blocky logic and — more crucially for him — removes a paralyzing degree of choice. Constraint is what permits him to work.