Mathias Isaksen is a generative artist and creative coder based in Oslo, Norway, working under the handle st4yhome.Guided by a do-it-yourself ethos, he explores the balance between opposing qualities and finds unconventional uses for common generative-art techniques such as domain warping, ray marching and fragment shaders.,,
Isaksen earned a master's degree in applied physics and mathematics from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in 2020, worked briefly in tech consulting, and then took a sabbatical to focus on his creative practice full time.,He began making generative art in the summer of 2020, shortly after finishing his thesis, after seeing a TikTok video of a string-art technique that he recreated using the statistical software R.Around the same time, applying his background in spatial statistics, he came across the technique of domain warping, which became central to his practice.
After going full-time in October 2021, Isaksen released Factura on gm.studio in July 2022, an edition of 999.,His 2023 debut on Art Blocks, Gumbo, an edition of 400, combines fragment shaders with a deliberately mis-used form of ray marching, limiting the technique's iteration steps to give its forms a looser, more stylized look.Isaksen has cited Cold War-era propaganda posters, Japanese ukiyo-e printmakers such as Utagawa Kuniyoshi and Yashima Gakutei, and the texture-driven work of Virgil Finlay and Bruce Conner as influences on the project.,
In 2026, Isaksen contributed to Please Respond, a sequential collaborative project organized by Tyler Hobbs in which participating artists build on each other's code in turn.,For his contribution, Please Respond 01.03, Isaksen combined the block-based subdivision technique from Factura with the ray marching of Gumbo, modifying a Kuwahara filter to produce soft, cloud-like patches of color.
