Jess Hewitt - Divergent Convergence and Noise Factor's creator tools

2022

Artists: Jess Hewitt · Year: 2022 · Medium: Long-form generative art, Perlin noise, domain distortion, and signed-distance-function shapes processed through palette and texture passes · Substrate: WebGL, JavaScript, GLSL; Tezos and Ethereum · Place: United States · Institution: fx(hash); Art Blocks Presents; Noise Factor (tool development) Jess Hewitt is a generative artist (pronouns they/she) and a co-founder of Noise Factor, formerly Generative Toys, a creator-tools project building progressive web-app modules for noise generation, blending, and post-processing aimed at lowering the threshold for new practitioners. Their work sits in the specific corner of the field where artistic practice and tool development run as a single project rather than as separate disciplines. Divergent Convergence, released on fx(hash) in 2022 as a long-form work, exemplifies their formal vocabulary. The algorithm composes shapes built from signed-distance-function primitives, distorts the domain via Perlin-noise fields, and post-processes the result through palette mappings, frame structures and textural overlays. Each output is a single-frame composition, but the system that produces it is closer to a small synthesizer than to a drawing routine, a stack of modules, each independently parameterized, each contributing a layer to the final image. Two outputs from the project, #20 and #43, were selected for State of the Art at Paris+ par Art Basel in October 2022, the Tezos-presented exhibition that gave the platform's generative-art cohort high-profile visibility at one of the year's most-watched fairs. Haywire Café, released earlier in 2022 on Art Blocks Factory as a 256-edition piece, applies a different formal grammar, distorted patterns and dramatic shadow rendering inspired by mid-century cartoon visual languages, to the same shader-based pipeline. It was displayed at Samsung 837 during NFT NYC in June 2022. The Noise Factor tools (formerly Generative Toys), the Noisedeck progressive web app in particular, are part of why Hewitt's practice matters at the field level. Where most generative artists develop private toolchains, Hewitt's work has run in parallel with a public-tools project aimed at making the same kind of compositions available to artists who do not write GLSL. That double-track practice is itself part of the on-chain field's broader infrastructure-building moment. Lore The Generative Toys / Noise Factor renaming followed a wider field move in 2022–23 toward more deliberate, less playful naming for creator-tool projects as the tools matured into infrastructure. Hewitt has been one of the practitioners willing to publish their working pipelines as tools rather than guarding them as competitive advantage, a stance in part shaped by the field's open-source p5.js and Processing inheritance. Sources • Hewitt, Jess, jesshewitt.art (artist site). • Hewitt, Jess, Divergent Convergence project overview. • Noise Factor (formerly Generative Toys), generative.toys. • Art Blocks, Haywire Café. • Outland, Jess Hewitt artist page.