Melissa Rodriguez — Lunar — Tezos generative practice on Objkt

2021

Artists: Melissa Rodriguez · Year: 2021 · Medium: Generative art — Processing- and p5.js-based compositions · Substrate: Processing and p5.js; Tezos blockchain via the hicetnunc / Objkt ecosystem · Place: United States · Institution: Objkt / Tezos Melissa Rodriguez is a creative coder who came to generative practice in 2018 through p5.js and migrated her primary working environment to Processing as the practice deepened. She describes her work as living at the intersection of engineering / science and art / design, and her Tezos-platform output across 2021–22 made her one of the artists who shaped the specific formal vocabulary of the early hicetnunc and Objkt scenes. Lunar, released on the Tezos NFT ecosystem in 2021, is the work most often cited as her signature on the platform. The Tezos generative-art moment of 2021 — built around hicetnunc's launch and its near-immediate succession by Objkt as the dominant secondary-market venue — was characterized by smaller editions, lower mint prices, and a much wider population of practicing artists than the contemporaneous Art Blocks scene on Ethereum. Rodriguez's work was part of how that scene defined itself in formal terms: small, disciplined Processing pieces with a craft sensibility rather than the flow-field maximalism that dominated Art Blocks. Rodriguez has subsequently collaborated with the abstract artist Amber Vittoria on a Generative Flow short-form release and has been included in field-press coverage that surveys the under-documented corners of the Tezos scene, including kaloh.xyz's 6 Tezos Artists Flying Under The Radar. The relative thinness of public documentation around her practice is itself part of the historical record: the Tezos scene, especially in its Objkt-secondary-market incarnation, has been comprehensively under-archived relative to its Ethereum counterpart, and recovering the specific practitioners who shaped its early formal language is a live archival problem rather than a settled one. Lore Rodriguez's Twitter and portfolio practice has remained quieter than her work's stylistic influence on the Tezos scene would suggest. This is consistent with a wider pattern in the early hicetnunc and Objkt periods — many of the artists who defined the scene's formal sensibility worked at smaller scales and lower public profiles than their Art Blocks counterparts. Sources • Rodriguez, Melissa — melissamarierodriguez.com (artist portfolio). • Rodriguez, Melissa — @hellomelissarod on X. • Kaloh.xyz — 6 Tezos Artists Flying Under The Radar.