Mark Webster is a generative artist who writes custom software to create typographic and abstract works exploring language, memory, and artificial intelligence.,,,Born in Canada and raised in England, he moved to France to work in animation, sound design, and journalism before turning to code as a creative medium in 2005, after interviewing John Maeda.,
He has taught creative coding and generative graphic design at ESAD d'Amiens since 2012.In 2010 he set up a series of workshops and events for creative coders using Processing, which grew into Processing Paris and the Processing Cities project.The artist Julien Gachadoat has said Webster's organising of Processing Paris, alongside the wider Processing community, helped generative art take hold in France.Since 2020 he has focused on a personal body of work made using custom software and computational and generative strategies.
His 2021 series Neural Drawings, inspired by Santiago Ramón Cajal's illustrations of neurons, combines his own generative code with a generative adversarial network before each finished image is laser cut and printed on an etching press.The same year, Shunsuke Takawo praised Webster's series Searching for Hiroshige as meticulous and beautiful.In 2022 he released Cosmic Type on fxhash, the first work in his ongoing Cosmic series exploring typographic signs and symbols.That year he also exhibited Hypertype at Verse, a generative work that turns AI emotion-recognition and sentiment-analysis data into typographic compositions.,In 2023 Webster took part in “GENERATIVE”, Fakewhale's curated multi-edition release by ten generative artists, shown with an installation at Valuart gallery in Lugano, Switzerland, contributing animations from his Cosmic series.His series distraKted, an artist curation of 24 unique pieces made with custom software written in Processing, was released with Verse Works in December 2024.It evolved in 2025 into Language is Broken, shown in the group exhibition “Syntax Error” at Galerie Data in Paris alongside Daturascore, loackme, and Spøgelsesmaskinen.,That year Vetro Editions published Hyper & Cosmic, a book documenting his typographic work.His work has also been shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in 2017.
