Lars Wander is a German-born, New York City-based artist and programmer who creates work entirely through code, exploring how computation shapes perception of color, form and light.His practice includes paint-mixing algorithms built on color science and long-form generative series, each developed by implementing a single system and exploring it in depth over months.,
Wander studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and then worked as a software engineer at Google for seven and a half years, including time on a visualization team modeling global-scale storage systems.,,He began treating code as an artistic medium in 2020, after seeing data visualizations made by his manager at the time, Wim De Pauw. Around the same period he took up a pen plotter and produced hundreds of drawings during the COVID-19 shelter-in-place, some of which were shown in his first solo exhibition, “Perry, Mary, and Lars”, at Verse.
His first long-form generative series, Gossamer, 2021, grew out of a technique he had developed for the plotter, using thousands of overlapping fine lines to build fields that shimmer between drawing and textile. Unfolded, also 2021, records the creasing of an imagined sheet as binary mountain-or-valley data and colors the resulting shapes by their shared histories. how you see me, 2022, a series of nineteen generative gestural works, explores pareidolia, the tendency to see faces or figures in ambiguous visual information.The series developed from his earlier paint-mixing studies SPLAT and Gentle Dissolution 1/N, in which he worked to replicate the behavior of physical paint through generative systems. Because the piece relied on proprietary spectral data from Golden Heavy Body Acrylics computed by the lab of Roy Berns, the curated series was released off-chain. Rhythm & the Machine, a set of 400 generative works, narrowed the same paint-mixing algorithm to a limited palette that could be pre-computed and minted on chain, becoming Wander's first color-mixing algorithm to live on a blockchain.
In 2023 he contributed 7 Factorial to “Evolving Pixels”, a show curated by Emily Xie for PROOF and Art Blocks at Venus Over Manhattan's Soho gallery, building the piece around a single random parameter to keep its outputs enumerable rather than heavily randomized.In 2024 he released while true on Art Blocks Curated, a series exploring infinity through evolving digital pieces paired with fabric panels, and took part in ARTXCODE's presentation at the Paris Photo Fair with Nguyen Wahed.
