Protocell Labs

Protocell Labs is a digital art collective founded in 2021 by the artists Luka and Kane. Publishing as {protocell:labs}, they describe their activity as a digital laboratory that merges artistic practice with research. Their work investigates computational structures, mathematical forms and algorithms for design. Protocell Labs has published series on platforms dedicated to generative art, including fx(hash). This collection holds several outputs from their series O B S C V R V M, Monocell, and rtrdgtzr, which display their interest in artificial biology and emergent forms.

Their series O B S C V R V M, meaning darkness, provides a detailed example of their method. Each work is a spatial composition generated by code, layered like theatre scenography with a frame, a central element, and a background. The background contains star fields and celestial bodies, while the central lattice structures are formed through the iterative subdivision of Platonic primitives. The system explores concepts of distance and time, with different elements appearing to evolve at varying scales. While a script with over two hundred and fifty calls to a random function can produce a vast number of outputs, the artists selected a small subset for the final collection. The compositions are rendered in monochrome, using a single light source to articulate the intricate geometries through shadow.

The works carry inquiries into the fundamental laws of the universe. Protocell Labs attaches a quotation from the physicist Eugene Wigner, concerning the ‘miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics’, to the O B S C V R V M series. The compositions exist on an ambiguous scale, between the cosmic and the subatomic, and replace colour with a careful study of form, light and shadow. In this constructed universe, highly ordered lattice structures are shown in states of formation and disintegration, a process that can take eons before reaching an ultimate state of heat death. A quotation from Virgil, which translates as “Fortunate them, who were able to know the causes of things”, frames the work’s contemplative purpose.