Jess Hewitt — Divergent Convergence and Noise Factor's creator tools

2022

Artists: Jess Hewitt · Year: 2022 · Medium: Long-form generative art — Perlin noise, domain distortion, and signed-distance-function shapes processed through palette and texture passes · Substrate: WebGL, JavaScript, GLSL; Tezos and Ethereum · Place: United States · Institution: fx(hash); Art Blocks Presents; Noise Factor (tool development) Jess Hewitt is a generative artist (pronouns they/she) and a co-founder of Noise Factor, formerly Generative Toys — a creator-tools project building progressive web-app modules for noise generation, blending, and post-processing aimed at lowering the threshold for new practitioners. Their work sits in the specific corner of the field where artistic practice and tool development run as a single project rather than as separate disciplines. Divergent Convergence, released on fx(hash) in 2022 as a long-form work, exemplifies their formal vocabulary. The algorithm composes shapes built from signed-distance-function primitives, distorts the domain via Perlin-noise fields, and post-processes the result through palette mappings, frame structures and textural overlays. Each output is a single-frame composition, but the system that produces it is closer to a small synthesizer than to a drawing routine — a stack of modules, each independently parameterized, each contributing a layer to the final image. Two outputs from the project, #20 and #43, were selected for State of the Art at Paris+ par Art Basel in October 2022, the Tezos-presented exhibition that gave the platform's generative-art cohort high-profile visibility at one of the year's most-watched fairs. Haywire Café, released earlier in 2022 on Art Blocks Factory as a 256-edition piece, applies a different formal grammar — distorted patterns and dramatic shadow rendering inspired by mid-century cartoon visual languages — to the same shader-based pipeline. It was displayed at Samsung 837 during NFT NYC in June 2022. The Noise Factor tools (formerly Generative Toys) — the Noisedeck progressive web app in particular — are part of why Hewitt's practice matters at the field level. Where most generative artists develop private toolchains, Hewitt's work has run in parallel with a public-tools project aimed at making the same kind of compositions available to artists who do not write GLSL. That double-track practice is itself part of the on-chain field's broader infrastructure-building moment. Lore The Generative Toys / Noise Factor renaming followed a wider field move in 2022–23 toward more deliberate, less playful naming for creator-tool projects as the tools matured into infrastructure. Hewitt has been one of the practitioners willing to publish their working pipelines as tools rather than guarding them as competitive advantage — a stance in part shaped by the field's open-source p5.js and Processing inheritance. Sources • Hewitt, Jess — jesshewitt.art (artist site). • Hewitt, Jess — Divergent Convergence project overview. • Noise Factor (formerly Generative Toys) — generative.toys. • Art Blocks — Haywire Café. • Outland — Jess Hewitt artist page.