Alida Sun — glitch crystal monsters

2021

Artists: Alida Sun · Year: 2021 · Medium: Long-form generative art — fluid-dynamics and physics-based assemblages · Substrate: p5.js / JavaScript; physics-driven systems and fluid simulation; Ethereum via Art Blocks Curated · Place: New York / Berlin · Institution: Art Blocks Curated Alida Sun is a New York– and Berlin-based generative artist with a daily-practice discipline that pre-dates her on-chain career: she has produced one work per day for more than 777 consecutive days, treating the daily output as the unit of practice rather than the gallery release. Her formal background is in industrial design with a Bauhaus-foundation training; she is, by her own description, a complete autodidact in code. glitch crystal monsters, released on Art Blocks Curated in July 2021 as a 1,000-edition long-form work, is the synthesis of that daily-practice corpus into a single curated release. The algorithm builds physics-active assemblages — Sun describes them as "sky gardens of trustless techno-leviathans" — that crystallize and entangle across the canvas. Fluid dynamics, physics-based motion, and layered translucent forms produce outputs that read as living systems rather than as static compositions. The work was one of the early Art Blocks Curated releases that argued for generative art as an immersive, processual medium rather than only as a screen-flat picture-making practice. Sun's wider practice has consistently extended that argument across formats: AR, projection mapping, 3D motion, biometric sensors, machine-learning systems. Color :: Field at Vellum LA (2021–2022) and A.R.E. with Generative Hut and Vetro Editions (2021) framed her output for gallery contexts; Ars Electronica's Culture Lab (2021), CAFA's Neal Lab in Beijing (2021), and NFT.NYC at DorDor Gallery (2021) placed it inside institutional and field-specific programs. She has been one of the field's most articulate voices on the relationship between embodiment and computation — the Right Click Save interview The Art of Embodied Immersion is part of an ongoing argument she has made that generative art is not disembodied even when it is purely software, because the artist's daily-practice body is the system that produced the algorithm. Lore Sun's daily-practice rule — one work per day, no exceptions — produced the corpus from which glitch crystal monsters was algorithmically distilled; the curated release is in some sense an aggregate of more than two years of small daily experiments rather than a single new system designed for the launch. She has continued the daily practice past the Art Blocks release; the discipline pre-dates and outlasts the on-chain market. Sources • Art Blocks — glitch crystal monsters (Curated, project 114). • Art Blocks — In Conversation with Alida Sun. • Right Click Save — The Art of Embodied Immersion (Alida Sun interview). • Sun, Alida — Art Blocks Community Wiki entry. • Euronews Culture — Embodying Code (April 2026).