Marcin Ignac is a Polish artist, programmer and designer based in London who visualizes data and creates artificial life forms.He works as a generative artistwhose projects explore where natural and artificial forms meet.He is the founder of the data visualization and generative design studio Variable,and co-creator of the node-based visual programming tool Nodes.io.
Ignac's path into computational art started with a childhood Amiga 500 and pixel-art software in the early 1990s, later deepening through vector graphics, computer science study and Europe's demoscene culture of programmed animations.He holds a degree in computer science and studied Intelligent Decision Support Systems at Poznań University of Technology, Intermedia at Poznań's Academy of Fine Arts, and interaction design at CIID in Copenhagen.
After working as a creative coder and researcher in Copenhagen, he founded Variable in London in 2012.,His work has been shown at the Computational Aesthetics art show in Vancouver in 2011, Ars Electronica's Big Picture exhibition in Linz in 2012, and the Museum of Future Government Services in Dubai in 2014.The generative artist Bjørn Staal has named him as a direct influence on his own work after collaborating with Ignac on several occasions.
On Art Blocks, his Seadragons describes itself as a generative encyclopedia of imaginary sea creatures, continuing the imaginary-creature premise of his earlier project Cindermedusae, shown at the 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2011 and featured in the Written Images generative art book the same year.,His fxhash project Urban Flora (2022) generates hollow geometric structures using Nodes.io and Conway's polyhedron notation,which he describes on his own site as “An interplay of natural and artificial forms”.In 2024 he spoke about Urban Flora and Nodes.io at the KIKK Festival in Namur, Belgium.
