Joshua Davis (American, b. 1971) is an artist, technologist and author working in algorithmic image making and animation.,Since 1994 he has made art on the web by writing his own code to generate images through rule-based, randomized processes.,He studied illustration and art history at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn before dropping out in his junior year to work in the emerging field of web design.
In 1998 he launched PrayStation, a website combining interface design and animation that offered its Flash source files openly to the public, hybrid work that could be taken offline rather than fitting the stricter net.art model of the time.,The project won the Prix Ars Electronica's Golden Nica for Net Vision/Net Excellence in 2001.,In 2011 he designed the visualization for IBM's Watson, the computer system built to play Jeopardy. His work has been exhibited at Tate Modern, the Design Museum in London, the Centre Pompidou, the ICA London, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, MoMA PS1, the Whitney, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and Christie's.
Davis has also worked in music, performing as Bit Shafter with 8bitpeoples, a chiptune netlabel founded in the late 1990s by Nullsleep and Mike Hanlon that released low-bit computer music and staged the Blip Festival.In 2024 he collaborated with the artist LIA on CORONATION, a project that fused physical and digital art through token-gated prints. It was shown in “Awaken, Metamagical Hands” at Gazelli Art House alongside work by LIA, Golan Levin and John Maeda, artists who, like Davis, began making generative art in the 1990s. He has described his career as “screaming from the mountaintop about the unique opportunity that generative (code-based) art has as an art form”.
