Mandy Brigwell is a generative artist and programmer who renders mathematics into code-based visual and sound works, primarily released on fxhash, Teia, and Versum.She studied mathematics and computer programming at university, and traces her fascination with turning mathematics into graphical form back to programming a Mandelbrot set renderer on a Casio graphics calculator in 1992.
She names Bridget Riley, M.C. Escher, Salvador Dalí, Giacomo Balla, H.R. Giger, and Zdzisław Beksiński as touchstones, with Escher and Riley standing as direct influences on her work. Among contemporary artists, she has singled out Dave Whyte, known as Bees and Bombs, for his looped animations, and Roni Kaufman's generative work.In March 2021 she read a tutorial on minting on the Tezos platform hic et nunc, written by the blog Gorilla Sun, and later minted her first generative works there.She is colourblind, and has adapted by thinking of colour programmatically, in terms of specific hue angles within the HSB colour model.
In 2022 she contributed to BRIDGE, a collaborative generative art project in which the artist Camille Roux invited more than 25 generative artists to build their own styles inside a single shared code repository. Working with Git for the first time, she debugged the project entirely from the command line.Her Expanse pairs a noise-based alien landscape, inspired by the salt marshes near her home, with a generative soundtrack she composed using Logic Pro.Visions of Escher, released on fxhash as an edition of 256, reworks M.C. Escher's 1946 mezzotint Eye into a generative piece whose skull, iris, and eyelids are built from probability-driven code.Her multimedia piece The Last Days of Fire and Steel pairs generative visuals with titles, quotes, and an original soundtrack,and connects to a piece of fiction she had written decades earlier as part of a wider mythos she continues to build across her abstract work.,