Ben Kovach is a generative artist who began making procedurally generated artwork in 2017 and lives in Burlington, Vermont.Working mostly in code, including a large personal library of techniques written in Haskell, he builds systems that let him explore a vast space of possible outputs and save the results that match his taste.,
His technique of rectangular subdivision, cutting a rectangle repeatedly into smaller rectangles, first appeared in Cluster Bubbles (2017), combined there with circle packing. In Growth and Wire (2018) he used Poisson disc sampling to give stippled textures a natural, hand-drawn feel, and in Wire and Good Night (2018) he began placing physics-simulated repulsor and attractor orbs within his compositions.That physics-based approach reached its fullest expression in Edifice (2021), a 976-piece generative collection released on Art Blocks, which Kovach has said took months and was the most difficult project he had completed to that point.Tyler Hobbs later named Edifice among the Art Blocks releases he found notable.
Starting in November 2021 he made 100 PRINT, a 100-piece Art Blocks Playground series inspired by M.C. Escher's sketches that layers multiple three-point perspectives into disorienting, nonfigurative scenes. For the drop, instead of a standard randomized mint, he ran a Dutch auction that let higher bidders choose their piece earlier from the full set, and worked with Bright Moments to display the complete series as framed prints at its New York gallery in May 2022.His 2023 series Function Compositions, made for Unit London's exhibition “Building Blocks”, builds varied compositions out of a single square grid, drawing on his study of set and group theory and Markov chains.
