Mandelsage is a generative artist working primarily with fractal geometry, a practice they have pursued for over ten years.Using code to generate patterns they don't fully control, they treat the resulting complexity as a way to search for meaning and beauty in an otherwise meaningless universe.Their work spans on-chain generative collections,collaborative pieces,and AI-assisted image series.
Ars Fractalia is an on-chain generative fractal series that grew out of a decade-long question for Mandelsage: whether mathematics is discovered or invented.The completed pieces were minted through prohibition.art onto the Ethereum layer-2 network Arbitrum, a platform that has since shut down, leaving the collection without an active home.In mindprints, released on fxhash in January 2025, Mandelsage built eight visual Perspectives named after schools of thought in epistemology, from Idealism and Empiricism to Stoicism and Cynicism, using a deliberately minimal set of coded functions.,The 256-piece edition launched on Tezos at a price of 2 tez.
A Shadow of Infinity, made with Arbo Vonderwald, renders a tunnel of 42 circles, each showing a generative effect meant to evoke a different symbol of eternity, from an ouroboros to an Apollonian gasket of nested circles. The circles can also lock into sequence to display the first 42 digits of an irrational number such as pi or the golden ratio.In the Down the Rabbit Hole series, begun in 2023 with the piece Alice the Rabbit, Mandelsage used AI image generation to create scenes they could not otherwise have painted, and credited ChatGPT with helping them return to coding after years away from it.
