For me, the most fascinating thing about the unexpected and elegant “horizon(te)s” project between Iskra Velitchkova and Zach Lieberman is the nature of the collaboration and the confusion around it. Iskra wrote code to reflect Zach’s visual ideas and vice versa. Some visual work generated through their shared code feels like Zach and some feels like Iskra, but the code that generates those images was often written by the other artist. This is a beautiful and generous idea. The two met regularly during the process of creating the work and the conversations didn’t revolve around technique. They got to know each other, and then expressed themselves through code. The final artwork contains many ideas, a multitude of visual systems that express themselves clearly. The original artwork description clarifies the intent: “This framework allowed for speculation, ambiguity, and time to reflect on our own voice and the voice of our collaborator. The idea was not to mimic styles but rather use this framework to try to have a conversation and explore what we see in each other’s work.” In general, generative art is collaborative at its core. Everyone writes code on top of other people’s libraries — very few artists start from scratch. On top of that, artists frequently work together to complement each other. Zach has many long-term collaborators including Molmol Kuo and earlier with Golan Levin. Iskra is creating incredible projects with Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez. The fresh part of this collaboration is the lack of familiarity between the artists at the start and the wide range of diverse images produced by the “horizon(te)s” code. The visible “horizon” in each image is the single element that binds them together. “horizon(te)s” was released on fx(hash) in July 2022. It was a strong statement for these two artists to work together on the release. fx(hash) was a leader in advocating for collaborations like this and having the tools to make it possible. — Casey REAS