Material Protocol Arts is a studio that makes art directly out of blockchain code, building artworks that keep running, changing and recording their own history on Ethereum long after they are minted.It was founded by the musician and programmer Matto, his brother Seaweed, and the smart contract engineer Neokry, who first connected with Matto through the Mathcastles Discord before meeting in person in Tokyo.
The studio calls its on-chain works “hypersculptures”, network-aware sculptures built as code that evolve permanently on a blockchain rather than existing as a single fixed image.Their first major work in this mode, Cycles, launched on Ethereum in January 2025 as an abstract kinetic sculpture made of 512 individual lenses, each running its own evolving simulation.Collectors can freeze a lens to fix its state, though unlocking it again depends on rules the studio has not fully disclosed.The piece was inspired partly by Terraforms by Mathcastles, the dynamically computed on-chain sculpture that had opened up this kind of dialogue for the studio.
In November 2024 the studio presented Modulation Studies at the “World Computer Sculpture Garden”, an exhibition curated by 0xfff. For the piece, Matto composed a daily generative music study by editing a text-controlled synthesizer, with every keystroke of the editing process recorded on a purpose-built rollup he called an “artchain”. He described the work as inspired by the durational performances of Tehching Hsieh and the date paintings of On Kawara.In July 2025 the studio released Absence, a system built to make ordinarily invisible processes of memory, care and digital preservation slow, visible and fallible. It was described as “an experiment in memory under pressure”, tracking how a person returns to it each day, or forgets to.
