Why should artists use Art Blocks for hosting and creating interactive generative art, and what infrastructure does Art Blocks provide for this?

Interactive—you nailed it. 

I started Art Blocks for a lot of different reasons. One of them is that I was involved in what's called projection mapping, which is a technique where you project objects through a projector. 

I don't know if you've ever tried to line up a projector, but it's actually very difficult to do. You need to be able to modify the stream of video that's coming out to align with 3D objects on a wall. A typical gif would not enable you to do that. If you had an output that was meant to be projected onto the specific surface, you would have to move the projector up and down and forward and tilt it, and maybe you'd get it, but the chances are no.

The interactivity of Art Blocks spawned my desire to create an on-chain NFT asset that could be manipulated while still maintaining its original intended state. Our infrastructure is serving into your browser. We will eventually host Python and compiled C and Blender and all these other really cool things that can't be run in the browser. The beauty of what Art Blocks is doing right now, however, is that when you visit the live view of a piece, not when you open the stored image that's stored on S3, but when you view the live version of the piece, you're viewing the algorithm that's stored on the blockchain plus the hash string that's stored on the blockchain, served in your browser in real time.

You should make this distinction between, for example, we have Ringers, which is a totally static piece. People probably take it for granted, and that's fine. As a huge nerd of all these technological things coming together, I know that Ringers is actually being generated on demand even though it's static. It might as well be a JPEG brought in from S3 because they look exactly the same if they're the same size. We are serving you the moment in which the algorithm is being generated live on your screen, and that is the infrastructure that has been so hard to refine and to build up over time to be reliable because we're reliant on Web3 interactivity, we're reliant on service providers and all sorts of stuff. The result of that is that our infrastructure is enabling you as a collector and also as a spectator because what's beautiful about NFTs is anybody can view any NFT in the world. There's no gate-keeping there, and that's really special.

That enables you, as the collector, to experience your art in the way that it was meant to be experienced. For static pieces, reserve that for the super nerds like me that are like, "Oh man, these Ringers or this Credenza or whatever are actually being computed in the background, but all I see is the final output." 

The other ones, the ones that are interactive, or the ones that build up into their final state, those pieces really harness the technology because they enable you to be able to interact with a piece of art that is immutable and provable and deterministic for the first time in history, in our current technology. That's what our infrastructure does. We're enabling artists to have a place to put their algorithm, and we're enabling collectors to have a place to purchase mints that combine the algorithm in a mint on demand and is presented to them in a way that's running in their browser in real time.