Space and Time-Moments frozen from a system that never repeats

Space and Time blends AI imagery with hand-written code, creating shifting worlds that never repeat. From these fleeting moments, I craft fine art prints—fragments of a generative universe, stilled in time.

by

Kris Cirkuit

Space and Time

There’s always a question that lingers when new tools appear in the creative landscape. What is art, and who—or what—makes it?

Space and Time began with that very question.

I wanted to build new worlds—strange, impossible landscapes, planets suspended between imagination and possibility. To do so, I chose to combine AI-generated imagery with open-source computational art code (openFrameworks) and sound. The planets themselves were born from AI prompts—crafted carefully, deliberately—but the movement, the rhythm, the beating pulse of the piece came from elsewhere: from code written by hand, and from sound built the old way, without AI.

So is Space and Time “AI art”? Maybe. But maybe not. And that “maybe” is the point.

Writing and Rewriting Code

I learned to code long before AI became a part of everyday creative practice. Back then, it was about trial and error: I wrote things, they broke, I fixed them. Some of the code I wrote was elegant, almost like poetry. Other times, it was what programmers fondly call “smelly code”—the kind you look back on later and wonder how it ever managed to run.

Space and Time began with one of those messy, early pieces of code. It worked, but only just. Revisiting it now, I found myself rewriting it—cleaning it up, optimising it, making it more readable. That process felt almost like revisiting an old notebook: familiar but awkward, holding the marks of a younger version of myself.

And yet, it mattered. Because in refining the code, I was also refining the work itself.

How It Works

The code for Space and Time interprets both frequency and beat onset from an audio track. Those signals, in turn, affect the behaviour of 3D shapes within the visual system. The result is movement that feels alive—shapes that swell, pulse, and shift in direct response to sound.

For this, I used openFrameworks, an open-source toolkit for creative coding in C++. To handle the audio, I added the ofxMaxim addon, which provides powerful tools for analysis and synthesis. Together, these allowed me to build a generative system where sound doesn’t just accompany the visuals but drives them.

The result is never exactly the same twice. Each run of the code produces subtle variations—different timings, different interactions, different outcomes.

And that unpredictability is part of its beauty.

From Code to Fine Art Prints

One of the things I love most about working with generative art is how it can move between digital and physical form. On screen, the work is alive—always shifting. But I can also capture fragments of that movement, single frames held in time, and translate them into high-resolution stills.

This happens through a process called rendering to an FBO—a Frame Buffer Object—on the graphics card. Instead of being limited by the resolution of my monitor, I can draw to a virtual surface far larger than the screen itself. This allows me to export images with incredible detail, preserving the nuances of the work at a scale suitable for fine art prints.

Each print is unique, a frozen moment from a system that never repeats. Just as no two runs of the code are alike, no two images need ever be the same. Some become stand-alone pieces, others part of a series. And because they’re generated directly from the source code, I can offer bespoke variations, tailoring the size or palette for collectors who want something singular.

The prints are, in a sense, artefacts of time: the physical evidence of a fleeting, digital event.

The Question of AI

Working with AI in this piece brought me face-to-face with questions that feel impossible to resolve. What does it mean when machines contribute to the creative process? Does it dilute originality? Does it threaten our ability to think deeply, to make something truly our own?

There are also ecological concerns—the energy cost of training and running these systems—and ethical ones, particularly around ownership, bias, and labour. These are not small matters, and they weigh heavily on me.

And yet, the genie is out of the bottle. AI isn’t going away. It is already reshaping how we create, how we work, how we imagine. To ignore it would be to close my eyes to the world I live in. To use it blindly would be to give up my responsibility as an artist.

So instead, I try to hold the tension. I wanted to work with AI, not as a replacement for creativity, but as a provocation. A tool that raises questions even as it generates images. A collaborator I don’t fully trust—and perhaps never should.

Sharing the Work

For me, making art has always been less about answers than about presence. Space and Time isn’t a manifesto. It doesn’t try to resolve the question of whether AI art “counts.” Instead, it offers an experience: shifting forms, planetary landscapes, soundscapes that breathe and move.

The fine art prints I create from this work are another way of sharing that presence. Each one is a moment, stilled and transformed into something tangible. A fragment of the generative system, brought into the physical world.

Whether you’re here because you’re curious about computational art, interested in the debates around AI and creativity, or looking for fine art prints that speak to both beauty and uncertainty, I’m glad you’ve found your way here.

Each piece I make carries its own story: sometimes technical, sometimes personal, sometimes both. Space and Time carries a question. And maybe the value lies not in answering it, but in asking it—again and again—as the code runs, as the planets turn, as time itself keeps moving.