Loren Bednar is a Michigan-based digital artist who has been producing generative work since 2006, fusing mathematics with color and shape to create abstract compositions charged with emotional intensity.,He gained recognition for Traversals, a collection exploring luminous colors in layered intersections, before turning to motion-based work.
Bednar has no traditional art training. As a teenager he used the LOGO programming language to draw spirals and geometric patterns, and as an adult he worked on Flash-based interactive websites before becoming a freelance game developer. In his free time he built programs generating grids of small geometric shapes and began sharing the resulting sprite sheets on Twitter so indie game developers could use them freely, gradually developing his own bright, geometric style. For the first fifteen years of his practice he worked largely alone, without following other artists' work, until he discovered the wider generative art community in early 2021. Since then he has added motion as a recurring ingredient in his work.
His animated Art Blocks Curated series phase (2021) was partly shaped by observing how social media algorithms compress and distort motion art when it's shared, an effect Bednar built into the piece so that each share behaves uniquely, like a live performance.The generative artist Tyler Hobbs has called phase “the first long-form animated work that I thought was really successful.”In Resonate, fragmented shapes move across a geometric grid, their collisions and color blends symbolizing the visual distortions of sound waves.Divergence (2023) is a never-ending, audio- and touch-reactive motion work that extends ideas from his earlier series, including the color approach of phase and the interlacing lines of Kaleidoscope.Pressed Pause, released through Unit London's Art Blocks Engine program, lets collectors press and hold to shift the piece between a static and a slowly changing state.
His 2023 work Efflorescence was shown in the exhibition “GEN/GEN” at Gazelli Art House.Bednar's work has also been shown at “Unblock Gaudi: Digital Art via Blockchain” at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt, and as part of “The Berlin Collection” at Bright Moments in Berlin.Without direct collaboration, Bednar has noted that Divergence shares visual qualities with Sarah Zucker's analog video piece Temporale, and with motion-based Art Blocks works by Kim Asendorf, Galo, and Eric De Giuli.
