MARFA LIVING PORTRAITS

The first piece. A silver headed figure with glowing pink eyes sits over a desert town built into its own chest. A crown of small monitors circles its head, and the town below is full of screens. Every screen now plays its own channel.

I wrote eighteen original Three.js animations for this piece: Waveform, Lissajous, Contours, Radar, Silver Star Lattice, Golden Swarm, Cyan Vortex, Rose Rosette, Crystal Wireframe, Violet Interference, Solar Iris, Signal Columns, Orbital Glyph, Digital Rain, Copper Tunnel, Pearl Ripples, Binary Sun, and Woven Field. Each one was rendered in the browser and pinned into the painted screens in After Effects, corner by corner.

This is where the method began. Write the art in code, then let the portrait carry it. The figure is a receiver in the desert, picking up every signal at once.

The piece that ties the series together. A figure in a silver helmet ringed with small green monitors, with a glass dome on top and a chest full of rainbow bubbles. Behind her is the desert horizon, and in the plaza below stands the New Star Grocery Art Museum.

This piece uses the most code of the five. Ten head screens each run their own Three.js shader art. A p5.js organic mesh moves inside the ear. The painted wire shape in the dome was replaced with a turning gold icosahedron built in Three.js. A gold disc of sacred geometry turns in the chest. Six Marfa lights dart in the low sky. A glint runs down the light streaks from the white car toward the plaza.

And the plastic cactus from piece 2 is back, standing on the sidewalk just right of the New Star door. The signal went out across the desert, and it came home.

A giant pale figure rises from the desert floor with a whole city in her crown. Mesas stretch out on both sides. String lights glow across the plaza at her feet.

Here I went past the screens. I pulled light out of the original image itself and set it moving. The flower of life on her chest splits into two rings that turn against each other. A halo of sacred geometry revolves behind her head. Blue wireframe waves roll through the mesas. The four corner rosettes turn like clockwork. Eleven monitors at her base each show a different sacred geometry build made in Three.js. One painted bird was replaced with a coded bird that flies a slow loop. The two perched birds were left alone.

She is a monument in a town known for monuments to space and light. She does not move. Her light does.