“How hands can create the vision that germinates in my mind? And what if the vision directly sprouts from the hands instead of the mind”, the artist asks.
“Is the vision thrown through the shadow of the hands, or is the shadow hands the vision itself?”, the magician responds.
As an attempt to add a line to this whimsical dialogue, I dropped shadows to cast visions. To my great surprise, the artist and the magician blent into each other…

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“Ombromanie” refers to the art of creating images made by hand shadows. The word and the art (also called “shadowgraphy”) was popularized by french magician Félicien Trewey in the XIXth century. Sure the shadow art is not so popular nowadays, but it still shares with generative art part of the same mystery and magic. The code projects shapes and colors on a screen to create images; the hands project a shadow on a curtain to create figures.

“Ombromanie” was conceived as a curtain where articulated hands (or better, shadow of hands) throw a firework of shapes, creating a wide range of random compositions. I heard the magician words and I did implement five features for this magical trick:
- the curtain can be entire or hemmed,
- the image oriented the right way up or upside-down,
- one or two hands can be used for the invocation,
- the phatasmagoria reveals itself as syzygy or chaos,
- and climax is reached through twelve ways.
Hands are always present, but in extremely rare cases they could vanish behind the curtain…

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This project uses twelve custom color palettes – the climaxes.
Ten are inspired after works or body of works by well known generative artists. A kind of tribute for the constant inspiration and creativity of the magicians-artists.
- “Hollow” by @jMarkusiewicz
- “Garden, Monoliths” by @zancan
- “Uninhabitable” by @pointline_
- “Mimizu” by @qubibien
- “aether:Astral Loom” by @lisaorthstudio
- “gestalt” by @Yazid
- “Perpendicular Inhabitation” (night) by @StudioYorktown
- “Anaverse” by @anaglyph_ic
- “Take wing” by @mwiederrecht
- “contrapuntos” by @msoriaro
The eleventh palette is named “fakewhale”(@fakewhale_xyz), who, months ago, encouraged me to learn and try code to create generative works. Special thanks to them for the support and dialogue.
The twelfth palette refers to my first long form generative project called ”thébaïde”.

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A small word about the “phatasmagoria” part, which tells about the invisible thread that sews my artistic approach. This part is a modified and extended code I used to create a set of six pieces titled “Sketches for unreliable structure” (Objkt, December 2022). And those were already an echo from a selection of digital (but not coded) works from “The Queue Structure” project (Objkt, since May 2022). Finally, The Queue Structure itself was a visual laboratory nourished by my previous practice of abstraction in the tangible world (drawing, collage, monotype, engraving).

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Made with p5js | 2023
Png | 2000 × 2000 px | 72 ppi

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