“And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiled in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like a film compiled of random frames.”
William Gibson, “Neuromancer”, 1984


rtrdgtzr (/ˈɹɛ.tɹoʊ ˈdɪdʒɪtaɪzə(ɹ)/, pronounced same as retro digitizer) is a long-form collaborative collection celebrating pixel and glitch art, graphics from the '80s and '90s, and techno-dystopian aesthetics of William Gibson's novels. What you see when you open the minting interface is an editor which takes an input image provided by the minter, applies generative post-processing to it, and finally outputs an animated composition. The input image itself is compressed and stored on-chain through params mechanic as a signal in string format, retrieved every time the artwork is regenerated. Minters are in fact authors of minted tokens, implicit collaborators, who are appropriately entitled to half the royalties. To facilitate co-creation, minting process provides an intuitive interface as well as WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) for full control of the output. Effect stacks in rtrdgtzr were originally developed for the ǥᵍłˡŧᵗȼᶜħʰvᵛɍʳsˢ collection released on GlitchForge in 2023 and feature customized diffusion dithering and aberrated pixel sorting. In terms of narrative and aesthetics, these two collections form an artistic continuum.

Minting interface is designed to guide the minter through the whole process in a user-friendly way. Quick visual guide as well as technical aspects of the collection are described in detail in the accompanying fx(text) article “rtrdgtzr – Minter’s Guide”. Please read it before proceeding with the mint. For more info on the curation process, please follow us on social media. If you want to contribute as an artist, reach out!

The collaborative minting process was greatly inspired by “Universal Rayhatcher” from Piter Pasma and “Pensado a mano” collections from Alejandro Campos, both innovative at the time in their use of params mechanics. As we see our support for open generative tools as a mission every generative artist should partake in, rtrdgtzr is also an official entry to the fxhackathon 2023: co-creation interfaces. We hope its openness and experimental character will serve as inspiration to others. But primarily, we hope it will inspire artists who don’t work with code to contribute to it.


Key controls:
g: export gif animation (current output scale)
s: export png image (current output scale)
left + right arrow: change output scale (1x-10x)
b: toggle page background color
p: pause / run animation

NOTE: Minting should be done from a desktop device as the interface does not support mobile browsers (unless you find a way to drag-and-drop the image onto the canvas, in which case you’re good to go).

Created with p5.js in 2023 by {protocell:labs}.

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Minting Instructions
1. Start screen: press any key to start.

2. Era screen: select an era for the effects by clicking on the screen ('80s or '90s).

3. Drop screen: drop an image onto the screen (drop area also selects the output format - square, portrait or landscape). Image will be automatically cropped, resized and centered to the maximum available dimension for that format.

4. Image editing: use keyboard keys to adjust compression quality, quantization level and image border. Click on the image to add / remove pixel squares which will later be filled with an animated pattern. The goal is to reduce characters in the signal close to the maximum allowed (2000), but this is not a requirement (experiment and see!). When done, click Refresh in the minting UI to proceed.

5. Effect editing: set seed number to select an effect stack (unique set of 1000 seeds is provided for every minter wallet address). Set brightness, contrast, light and dark threshold in the minting UI to adjust the original input image and influence the output. Click Refresh again to update the output. Resize your browser window to get a larger or a smaller output (makes cycling through seed numbers faster). This is just a preview and will not affect your artwork in any other way as all output scales are always accessible later. NOTE: generating an output in full resolution can take a while, please be patient.

6. When you are happy with the output, write the title in the UI field (will appear as a token feature) and press Mint. Your wallet address will appear under the author feature.