Bjørn Staal, known by the handle nonfigurativ, is a Norwegian generative artist who writes code that produces technically precise, browser-based works spanning animation, interactive installation and physical sculpture.,Raised in a small working-class town in Norway, he taught himself programming in the early 2000s during the Flash era and later co-founded the design studio Void before turning to art full time in 2023.,
He discovered generative art through Flash-era creators such as Joshua Davis and Robert Hodgin, and counts the Norwegian artist Marius Watz, who became a close friend, and Karsten Schmidt among his lasting influences.In 2015 he co-founded the design studio Void, working at the intersection of architecture, art and technology, where he built large-scale interactive installations such as Delta (2022) at Tullinløkka in Oslo.,He minted his first work on Art Blocks, The Liths of Sisyphus, in August 2021 under the name nonfigurativ, initially treating it as an experiment rather than art.
In late 2023 his work-in-progress preview for Entangled, a cross-chain project pairing Ethereum and Tezos NFTs that communicate with each other across browser instances, went viral, drawing more than eleven million views on Instagram. Faced with requests to open-source the code, he instead printed it on paper and auctioned it as “bro here are the codes”, directing the proceeds to the open-source Three.js project.In September 2024 he staged his first solo exhibition at Wintercircus in Ghent, Belgium, presenting Entangled with a robotic arm that moved the work's screens through the gallery space.,
Immaterial (2024), a 280-piece long-form series released on Art Blocks, uses algorithms modeled on recursion, growth and fractal noise, originally inspired by the structure of fungi gills, to generate speculative organic forms where digital and biological systems merge.,Deep Blue v Kasparov (2026) reimagines the twelve games of the 1997 chess rematch between Garry Kasparov and IBM's Deep Blue as browser-based, three-dimensional data sculptures that map each move in space and time.For Losing Oneself (2025), made for the Cure³ exhibition supporting Parkinson's research, he paired 128 generative outputs with physical plotter drawings on meditation and the fragility of the self, drawing on nearly fifteen years of Zen Buddhist practice.,
