The project began during my time at VCU as a thesis building block. I intended to create looping videos with simple shapes and colors and add corresponding audio based upon changes of movement and color. The basic idea was to create a more engaging viewer experience by aligning sight and sound.

After an initial viewing of ~10 Sonic Portraits, feedback indicated that people were drawn to the more meditative audiovisuals. I leaned into this feedback and refined the more peaceful and meditative Sonic Portraits into what is shown now.

Several years later, the NFT craze was raging and I wanted to see what it was all about. I couldn't mint the actual video files on the blockchain; in most NFT marketplaces, the typical NFT size limit was 100mb, and I didn't want to lose quality to video compression.

The solution was to host the high-resolution videos on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) via Pinata. When someone purchases the NFT on OpenSea, they are granted access and control over the video's IPFS URL.

A lower-quality version of the Sonic Portraits are self-hosted on the official website for posterity. The website was hand coded in HTML/CSS and some light jQuery.

The project was not only a great exercise in the generation of visuals and sound, but also provoked thought on ownership of art and perpetuity of data. There exists a point of friction between scarcity of art and redundancy of digital information. Which do you value more?