code+wood is the working name of Matthijs Keuper, an artist and engineer based in the Netherlands, who combines generative code, AI-generated imagery, laser engraving, and hand-applied oil paint to make wood reliefs and engravings. His work moves between digital simulation and physical craft, translating algorithmic drawings and fluid or erosion simulations into engraved and printed wood.,
Keuper's first engagement with art and technology dates to 1990, during Applied Physics studies at Twente University in the Netherlands, when he joined The Art of Flying, an eighteen-month project pairing art-academy and engineering students to make flying objects. In 2012 he began experimenting with acrylic painting, placing dots on canvas and connecting them into images without a plan. In 2021, after a downturn in his lighting-technology work during the Covid-19 pandemic, Keuper and his wife started a business making laser-cut generative wooden puzzles, for which he learned JavaScript and GLSL to generate the designs. Requests for colored puzzles led him into fluid and erosion simulation, and later that year he minted his first NFTs on the Tezos network, including the Exoplanet Draugr series on Objkt.com.He released Linea (Non) Recta on fx(hash) in September 2022, a study combining quadtree subdivision and flow fields.,Kaboomlaser, the puzzle business, closed in the summer of 2023 after the puzzle market declined, and Keuper returned to generative and physical art alongside his work as a system architect for LED lighting.
Keuper's wood engravings begin with AI-generated portraits, which he converts into vector line drawings with his own generative code before engraving them into black wood with a self-built laser cutter.,He then hand-mixes linseed oil and pigment powders into an oil paint and fills it into the engraved grooves, producing images that read as tangled lines up close but resolve into recognizable portraits from a distance.The I See You series, from 2023, applies this technique to portraits of AI-generated people who do not exist.The Silent Streets series applies the same process to deserted nighttime cityscapes made in 3D game-development software, each centered on a single anonymous figure.,
In the Complicit series, Keuper laser-engraves purchase-related statements into birchwood blocks in negative, so the printed text reads as an absence whose claim only becomes true once a buyer pays for the print, hand-inked on a vintage Korrex proof press.He has also trained a six-axis robot he calls Vinny to apply brush, marker, and syringe strokes of paint, writing custom software that translates digital line drawings into brush-like gestures.
