Erick Calderon, also known as Snowfro, is a Houston-based artist making a case for legendary status within the generative art world. He is best known for creating the Chromie Squiggle generative art NFT project, though Snowfro is also the founder and CEO of Art Blocks, the world’s first platform dedicated to decentralized generative art.

During his years at college, Erick ran a snow cone stand called Snowfro Refreshments and the nickname Snowfro was born; an alias that he continues to use in the crypto community. Working across a wide range of media, such as LED art, ceramics, 3D blocks and digital art, Snowfro began by producing physical art in the physical world, however, a feeling of isolation and exclusion from the traditional artworld drove him towards the blockchain. Entering the cryptocurrency space in 2016, Snowfro found a platform where he could programme money and rules into art and processes, citing Ethereum as an avenue to create art.

From an early age, Snowfro dabbled in coding, which lead him to projection mapping installations at music events, but it was not until 2017 when he became a collector and participant in the blockchain generative art community that Snowfro coined the idea to create a space in which artist’s could write generative scripts on the blockchain that would in turn produce unique artworks using an algorithm based on randomized variables; enter Art Blocks.

Art Blocks is perhaps the most exciting generative art platform from a creative and conceptual standpoint, pushing the boundaries of creative experimentation in the generative art space. Art Blocks is a platform that hosts algorithmic art in a way that the buyer of the artwork does not know what they will own until they mint the work. In other words, Art Blocks is a generative art marketplace collaborating directly with the artists, in which anyone can purchase a set of random variables and those chance variables dictate the visuals. A characteristic of Art Blocks is thus that the art is created at the moment of purchase and does not exist prior to this transaction.

Conceptual art has long played with the concept of what the collector receives, yet the generative format, as developed by Art Blocks, plays with notions of chance and surprise in which the collector is purchasing an artwork with all its generative possibilities.

A technology that has existed since the 1960s, this groundbreaking movement within the NFT community gained momentum in 2017 when Snowfro entered the world of cryptocurrency. It was in the moment of claiming Cryptopunks that Snowfro felt it was unfair that collectors could choose the rarest artworks and instead ownership should be based on odds, or a randomized algorithm. Believing that the blockchain should provide the required information to generate an artwork, in 2018 Snowfro deployed the very first Art Blocks smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain. Snowfro subsequently launched Art Blocks on 27th November 2020 and, with the help of his brother DCA, Snowfro scripted Chromie Squiggles, also known as Project Zero. Celebrated for being the first project on Art Blocks, Chromie Squiggles demonstrated the ability of the platform, whereby an algorithm creates visually captivating outputs that are unlimited in number and totally individual and original with assigned provenance and ownership history.

Chromie Squiggles is the genesis collection of Art Blocks. Depicting a kaleidoscopic serpent existing in a digitalised form, the Chromie Squiggle is a psychedelically writhing motif, the variations of which are wholly unique and original. With all the iconic symbolism of any major pop art motif, the squiggle is a uniquely recognisable visual idiom. A gesture filled with the fun of creative experimentation that generative art enables, and the perfect suggestion of the artist’s hand as they craft their code. Also reminiscent of a signature, autograph or graffiti writer’s tag, the Chromie Squiggle collection has only ten thousand iterations possible, in which each Chromie Squiggle has different characteristics which makes some variations extremely rare. The randomized variables are what determine the value of the Chromie Squiggle, such as starting colour, end colour, ribbed colour, segments, height, colour spread, and colour direction.

Colour is an integral part of the project, as the artist has commented, ‘colour drives my life.’ Snowfro began his career in 2004 importing tiles from Spain and Italy, developing a preoccupation with colour theory and mixing gradients which informed his early experiments with 3D printing and spray painting. This exploration of a kaleidoscope of colours is similar to Cory Archangel’s works from the series titled Photoshop Gradient Demonstrations. Arcangel is an artist who’s work crosses a range of media, including computer-generated projects and this series consisted of unique prints showing fades between colors that have been created using Photoshop’s standard gradient tool.

Marrying his fascination with colour and a long standing interest in coding, the Pandemic gave Snowfro the space and time to learn how to code in order to launch Art Blocks and subsequently its inaugural project. In 2020 Snowfro enrolled at codecademy.com and took the Java Script coding course twice in order to accelerate his artistic endeavors. Since its invention, Snowfro has successfully gathered a strong community toward his project, making Chromie Squiggles one of the most celebrated and promising on-chain generative art projects to date.

The first Chromie Squiggle NFT was minted in November 2020. Demonstrating the ability and scope of Art Blocks, the Chromie Squiggle was the first generative script of its kind to show the potential of this platform and it has since come to represent the ethos of Art Blocks. Snowfro has continued to foster a loyal and dedicated community of followers to the extent that Chromie Squiggle has already created a legacy as a culturally historical on-chain generative art movement; making this collection one of the most exciting projects in the NFT market. An incredibly sought after series, an increasing number of players and taste makers in the NFT and art worlds alike seek to be associated with the project and part of the SquiggleDAO community, thus cementing the project’s value and history as one of the most important NFT endeavors to date.