At Redlions, we recommend you do as the artists do. So to replicate her process, brew a cup of coffee, light a joint, and check out the ironic, retro, glitch art of Godmin.
The Brazilian artist, known for her GodObserver and GhostSoftware collections, spoke with us live on Twitter Spaces. Our funny and fascinating discussion started with Godmin’s early years. Her childhood interest in computers bloomed into advanced collegiate Computer Science studies. She literally studied to become an Astronaut! Then she made a career 180, quipping “it's probably easier to create art that makes you feel like you're in space, rather than actually going through the whole process!”
Combining her past and present led to https://heaven.computer/. This site serves as much more than just her collection and minting site. The Heaven Computer is a lovingly built recreation of Windows 98! To the artist, her Heaven Computer feels like “home.” She explains, “I never wanted to create anything for anyone else… just a place that I can call home. I go on my website and I feel good because the colors soothe me, the aesthetics remind me of a simpler, nicer time of my life.”
This dose of nostalgia is universal to visitors of a certain age. A Windows 98 desktop is faithfully recreated with a puffy cloudscape. Click on the Heaven Computer’s start bar and you can navigate your way to the games tab. Minesweeper and Solitaire, rebranded as Ghostsweeper and Soulitaire, are there for a lovely bit of wistful timewasting!
Part Scientist, part artist, Godmin’s work plays with themes of Mythology, Astronomy and the “ghost in the machine.” Her glitch art is made by creating an on-chain algorithm that intentionally corrupts the images of her NFTs. The resulting art collections have a randomized look–all depending on what the glitch algorithm does to the code. Given the Classical religious themes of pieces like those of GhostSoftware, the modern digital glitches feel like the result of old-fashioned divine providence. Is there a hidden force guiding the arc of the algorithm?
In reality, the invisible hand behind the glitches is not God but Godmin herself. Speaking of her process, “glitching is basically just taking the raw data of a file and then doing anything with it. The biggest challenge with glitch–because obviously you can break anything to any level–is to break it and make it still look like art.”
When it comes to the future, Redlion was given subtle hints that Godmin is up to something big. Elbow deep into a hardware project, she’s “building some prototypes with some cool stuff right now. Spent a lot of money on Raspberry pies and sensors. I'm going crazy reading a lot of stuff. I don't want to say exactly what yet because I'm paranoid of people stealing my ideas.” It’s clear that Godmin has a bright creative future ahead of her. It also seems clear that no one will be able to steal her ideas even if they tried!
