Anna Carreras — Trossets — multiscale Truchet tiles and Mediterranean palettes

2021

Artists: Anna Carreras · Year: 2021 · Medium: Long-form generative art — modular pattern systems built from interlocking Truchet-tile primitives · Substrate: p5.js / JavaScript; Ethereum via Art Blocks Curated · Place: Barcelona, Spain · Institution: Art Blocks Curated Anna Carreras is a Barcelona-born creative coder (b. 1979) trained in engineering and audiovisual technologies — MSc Engineering at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, MSc Audiovisual Technologies at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She has taught creative coding in Barcelona's design schools and has been making interactive generative work for more than fifteen years; her on-chain practice grew out of an existing installation and interactive-design career rather than emerging fresh in the NFT period. Trossets, released on Art Blocks Curated on 3 September 2021 as a 1,000-edition long-form work, was her commercial breakthrough on Ethereum. The algorithm uses twelve modular construction blocks based on multiscale Truchet tiles — a venerable pattern primitive from late-twentieth-century mathematical aesthetics — to produce interlocking compositional fields. The color palettes name and reference Mediterranean places (Ibiza, Mallorca, Beget) and Catalan and Spanish cuisine (paella, tortilla); the formal-mathematical inheritance from Truchet is fused with a specifically located Catalan visual culture. Carreras directed 10% of profits to the Marilles Foundation for marine conservation and 15% of minting profits to OpenArms, the Spanish refugee-rescue organization. Trossets was followed by inclusion in the Decentral Art Pavilion's Singularity exhibition at Venice Biennale 2022 and by participation in Casey Reas's Feral File inaugural exhibitions during the 2021 lockdown period (alongside Manoloide, Dmitri, and LIA). Carreras's wider exhibition record — Medialab Prado in Madrid, Sónar Festival in Barcelona, Abandon Normal Devices in Liverpool, Ignite in San Francisco — predates the on-chain work and continues alongside it. The piece argues for a specific geographic-aesthetic position inside generative art: that Mediterranean-Catalan visual culture is a first-class source of formal vocabulary for the medium, not a regional decoration applied to algorithms whose sensibility is elsewhere. Lore Carreras has been clear in interviews that Trossets's profit-sharing with Marilles and OpenArms was a structural commitment rather than a marketing gesture — the donation percentages were written into the project's documentation before release. The Mediterranean-cuisine palette names started as an internal joke between Carreras and the friends who tested the algorithm's outputs, and were kept in the public release because the names made the palettes legible to a Catalan audience in a way that abstract palette numbers would not. Sources • Carreras, Anna — annacarreras.com (artist site). • Art Blocks — Trossets (Curated). • Art Blocks — In Conversation with Anna Carreras. • annacarreras.com — Trossets project page. • Decentral Art Pavilion — Singularity (Venice Biennale 2022).